[Net-Gold] Re: David Berliner on 'A Nation at Risk': Three Decades of Lies #2 - ADDENDUM #2

[David P. Dillard]

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Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 23:46:03 -0700
From: Richard Hake <rrh...@earthlink.net>
Reply-To: Net-...@yahoogroups.com
To: AER...@listserv.aera.net
Cc: Net-...@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Net-Gold] Re: David Berliner on 'A Nation at Risk': Three Decades of
Lies #2 - ADDENDUM #2

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ABSTRACT: As a sequel to previous posts "David Berliner on 'A Nation
at Risk': Three Decades of Lies #2" [Hake (2013a)] at
<http://yhoo.it/10dPm4V> and David Berliner on 'A Nation at Risk':
Three Decades of Lies #2 - ADDENDUM" [Hake (2013b)] at
<http://yhoo.it/10g1iTV>, I'm compelled to point out that today, 26
April 2013, the Fordham Institute <http://bit.ly/15WNcPn> and
American Enterprise Institute <http://bit.ly/ZpCkGc>, both
conservative think tanks, have placed on YouTube at
<http://bit.ly/10hDbUW> a video "A Nation At Risk: 30 Years Later,"
featuring such "reformers" as Lamar Alexander, William Bennett, Arne
Duncan, Chester Finn, and Michelle Rhee. The only speaker not heaping
effusive praise on "A Nation at Risk" is ex-conservative renegade
Diane Ravitch. She says (paraphrasing) "What the writers of A Nation
at Risk had in mind was higher standards, better schools, and a
stellar public education system. But over the past 30 years the
report has become the founding document of the privatization movement
- the basis for privatization of the school system and the
enrichment of a small number of entrepreneurs."

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As a sequel to previous posts "David Berliner on 'A Nation at Risk':
Three Decades of Lies #2" [Hake (2013b)] and David Berliner on 'A
Nation at Risk': Three Decades of Lies #2 - ADDENDUM" [Hake (2013c)],
I'm compelled to point out that today, 26 April 2013, the Fordham
Institute <http://bit.ly/15WNcPn> and American Enterprise Institute
<http://bit.ly/ZpCkGc>, both conservative think tanks, have placed on
YouTube at <http://bit.ly/10hDbUW> a video "A Nation At Risk: 30
Years Later" [Education Next (2013)].

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The all-star cast includes (in alphabetical order): Lamar Alexander,
William J. Bennett, Arne Duncan, David Driscoll, Chester E. Finn,
Milton Goldberg, Fredrick M. Hess, Michael J. Petrilli, Diane Ravitch
(what's *she* doing here?), Michelle Rhee, Andrew Rotherham, and
Margaret Spellings. Clips of Ronald Reagan introducing "A Nation At
Risk" are also shown. Of course, there's no mention of the
"Manufactured Crisis" [Berliner & Biddle (1995/1996)].

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Below the video platform appears this information: "Thirty years ago,
A Nation at Risk was released to a surprised country. Suddenly,
Americans woke up to learn that SAT scores were plummeting and
children were learning a lot less than before. This report became a
turning point in modern U.S. education history and marked the
beginning of a new focus on excellence, achievement, and results.
__Due in large part to this report, we now judge a school by whether
its students are learning rather than how much money is going into
it, what its programs look like, or its earnest intentions. Education
reform today is serious about standards, quality, assessment,
accountability and benchmarking-by school, district, state and
nation. This is new since 1983 and it's very important. Yet we still
have many miles to traverse before we sleep. Our students still need
to learn far more and our schools need to become far more effective.
To recall the impact of A Nation at Risk these past three decades and
to reflect on what lies ahead, watch this short retrospective
developed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American
Enterprise Institute: A Nation at Risk: 30 Years Later."

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The only speaker in the Fordam/AEI video not heaping effusive praise
on "A Nation at Risk" is ex-conservative renegade Diane Ravitch.
Most of her comments are orthogonal to those of the other speakers.
Here are my attempts to understand the rather poor video recording of
her contributions, starting at the indicated minutes on the tape:

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2:54 min: "The significance of A Nation at Risk is that it set in
motion a false narrative. It set in motion the idea that American
education is failing. The great irony of this is that American
society, by every measure you can think of is the strongest and most
powerful in the world."

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4:39 min: "They were wrong. Their predictions were all wrong. And I
think it would be almost better to regard it as just a wake-up call.
It's a way of using language that was overheated to kind of get
attention. But it had a real-world effect because for one thing it
began the wrong march to destroy public education which is now in
full flower."

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9:44 min: "One of the things that The Nation at Risk did was to put
into the atmosphere this absolutely ridiculous idea that schools
alone can change society and that we can ignore poverty, ignore all
the factors that affect children and their ability to learn and to
say that the schools alone can bring everybody up to high levels of
proficiency. It's never happened in any other country, it hasn't
happened here. We now have a status quo of testing, accountability,
and choice. The charter movement after 20 years has nothing to show
for it. It has some good schools, some horrible schools, a lot of
corruption, a lot of fraud, a lot of misfeasance, a lot of
accountability."

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12:24 min.: "What the writers of A Nation at Risk had in mind was we
want higher standards, we want better schools, we want a stellar
public education system. It has become however, over time, over 30
years, the founding document of the privatization movement. So in
that sense it was very powerful for school reform in a positive
sense, it has become very powerful in a negative sense as the basis
for privatization and the enrichment of a small number of
entrepreneurs.

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18:29 min. "What I'm looking for, for whatever years I have left in
my life, is to save public education and to make public education
what it ought to be which is a good high quality school in every
neighborhood. Schools that have small class sizes, places that meet
the needs of children, schools that have a social worker, a guidance
counselor, a psychologist, a librarian, a library, schools that have
a full curriculum with history and civics and foreign languages,
physical education every day, a vibrant program in the arts. Schools
that strive to give to every child the same advantages that people
get if they pay for a private school education."

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Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
Links to Articles: <http://bit.ly/a6M5y0>
Links to Socratic Dialogue Inducing (SDI) Labs: <http://bit.ly/9nGd3M>
Academia: <http://bit.ly/a8ixxm>
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Facebook: <http://on.fb.me/XI7EKm>

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REFERENCES [URL's shortened by <http://bit.ly/> and accessed on 26 April 2013.]

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Berliner, D.C. & B.J. Biddle. 1996. "Manufactured Crisis: Myths,
Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools" Basic Books, 2nd
edition, publisher's information at <http://bit.ly/O5M0wm>.
Amazon.com information at <http://amzn.to/PGOfcT>, note the
searchable "Look Inside" feature. See also Berliner (2005, 2006,
2013).

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Berliner, D.C. 2005. "Our Impoverished View of Educational
Reform,"Teachers College Record, August 02, online as an 872 kB pdf
at<http://bit.ly/ff8BVj>. Berliner argues that: "poverty places
severe limits on what can be accomplished through school reform
efforts,particularly those associated with the federal No Child Left
Behindlaw. The data presented in this study suggest that the most
powerful policy for improving our nations' school achievement is a
reduction in family and youth poverty."

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Berliner, D.C. 2009. "Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors
and School Success." Education and Public Interest Center (Univ.
ofColorado) and Education Policy Research Unit, (Arizona
StateUniversity); online as a 729 kB pdf at <http://bit.ly/fqiCUA>.
In his abstract Berliner states: "This brief details six Out of
School Factors (OSFs) common among the poor that significantly affect
the health and learning opportunities of children, and accordingly
limit what schools can accomplish *on their own*: (1) low
birth-weight and non-genetic prenatal influences on children; (2)
inadequate medical, dental, and vision care, often a result of
inadequate or no medical insurance; (3) food insecurity; (4)
environmental pollutants; (5)family relations and family stress; and
(6) neighborhood characteristics. These OSFs are related to a host of
poverty-induced physical, sociological, and psychological problems
that children
often bring to school, ranging from neurological damage and attention
disorders to excessive absenteeism, linguistic underdevelopment, and
oppositional behavior."

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Berliner, D.C. 2013. "Three Decades of Lies," Education Week's
OpEducation Blog, 23 April; online at <http://bit.ly/17ihWIM>.
Berliner wrote: "We have endured 30 years of lies, half-truths, and
myths. Bruce Biddle and I debunked many of these untruths in our
book, The Manufactured Crisis, in 1995. But more falsehoods continue
to surface all the time. The most recent nonsense was "U. S.
Education Reform and National Security". . . . .[[Klein, Rice, & Levy
(2012)]]. . . . a report presented to us last year by Joel Klein and
Condoleezza Rice. "A Nation at Risk" had us losing the political and
economic races to the Soviet Union and Japan. Did we? No. Our economy
took off, the Soviet political system collapsed, and Japan's economy
has retreated for two decades. So much for the predictions of A
Nation at Risk." See also Berliner (2005, 2009).

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Education Next. 2013. "A Nation At Risk: 30 Years Later," You-Tube
video online at <http://bit.ly/10hDbUW> (46 views as of 26 April 2013
08:45-0700). It's stated that "The Fordham Institute and the AEI
(American Educational Institute) created this video to recall the
impact of 'A Nation at Risk' and to reflect on what lies ahead."

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Hake, R.R. 2011. "The Overriding Influence of Poverty on Children's
Educational Achievement" online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at
<http://bit.ly/tUU65W>. Post of 14 Dec 2011 09:56:02 -0800 to AERA-L
and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post were
transmitted to several discussion lists and are also on my blog
"Hake'sEdStuff" at <http://bit.ly/tBZEY4> with a provision for
comments. This post was stimulated by Diane Ravitch's (2013) "David
Berliner on 'A Nation at Risk': Three Decades of Lies."

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Hake, R.R. 2013a. "The Overriding Influence of Poverty on Children's
Educational Achievement - Redux," online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives
at <http://bit.ly/XHnEzS>. Post of 4 Mar 2013 15:38:45-0800 to AERA-L
and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being
transmitted to several discussion lists and are also on my blog
"Hake'sEdStuff" at <http://bit.ly/ZjbgoZ> with a provision for
comments. Other blog entries on the influence of poverty on U.S. K-12
education are at <http://bit.ly/UW8Xpg>.

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Hake, R.R. 2013b. "Re: David Berliner on 'A Nation at Risk': Three
Decades of Lies #2" online on the OPEN Net-Gold archives at
<http://yhoo.it/10dPm4V>. Post of 24 Apr 2013 13:27:11-0700 to AERA-L
and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being
transmitted to several discussion lists and are on my blog
"Hake'sEdStuff" at <http://bit.ly/15MvLB0>. This post was stimulated
by "David Berliner on 'A Nation at Risk': Three Decades of Lies"
[Ravitch (2013)]

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Hake, R.R. 2013c. "Re: David Berliner on 'A Nation at Risk': Three
Decades of Lies" #2 - ADDENDUM," online on the OPEN Net-Gold archives
at <http://yhoo.it/10g1iTV>. Post of 25 Apr 2013 13:09:11-0700 to
AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are
being transmitted to several discussion lists and are on my blog
"Hake'sEdStuff" at <http://bit.ly/Y7xZbT> with a provision for
comments.

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Klein, J.I., C. Rice, & J. Levy. 2012. "U.S. Educational Reform and
National Security," Council on Foreign Relations, Independent Task
Force Report No. 68, online at <http://on.cfr.org/15N5DpX>. According
to the "Overview": "The United States' failure to educate its
students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the
country's ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its
leadership role, finds a new Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR)-sponsored Independent Task Force report on U.S. Education
Reform and National Security. Educational failure puts the United
States' future economic prosperity, global position, and physical
safety at risk, warns the Task Force, chaired by Joel I. Klein,
former head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice,
former U.S. secretary of state." The country "will not be able to
keep pace-much less lead-globally unless it moves to fix the problems
it has allowed to fester for too long," argues the Task Force.

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Ravitch, D. 2010, 2011. "The Death and Life of the Great American
School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education."
Basic Books, publisher's information at <http://bit.ly/pN1NJo>.
Amazon.com information at <http://amzn.to/pAjeZU>, note the
searchable "Look Inside" feature.

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Ravitch, D. 2013. "David Berliner on 'A Nation at Risk': Three
Decades of Lies," blog entry of 24 April; online at
<http://bit.ly/13uNGbs>. See also Ravitch (2010, 2011):



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