Foreword

An extensive recent survey suggested that, despite a decline in reported crime, most Americans believed that crime was continuing to increase. At the same time, the researchers found that more and more television news time was devoted to stories about crime. While the relationship between these findings is only suggestive, the possibility that the facts about crime were lost in the perceptions fostered by coverage may be significant.

In a sense, in the pages that follow, Richard Rothstein makes a similar argument about public education—but one with even more force. He presents important evidence that the nation’s public schools are performing as well as or better than ever (and even that most parents are happy with their children’s schools), yet the public debate about education is largely framed in terms of failure and decline. Such public lamentation, in fact, has been heard about American education for generations. If one collected the typical comments made about public education in the United States over the course of the past century, and knew nothing else about U.S. history, one could quite logically conclude that the nation must have failed dismally in its attempts to become part of the modern world.

Recent criticism has taken two forms: the first emphasizes the shortcomings of urban public schools, especially in poor neighborhoods, and the second stresses "declines" in scores on Scholastic Assessment Tests (SATs). Both are combined with ample anecdotal evidence of teacher incompetence, administrative resistance to change, and districtwide financial mismanagement. But do such cases prove much more than that any system employing about 3.5 million human beings is sure to have a fair number of incompetents and bad apples? The answer to this question, as you might expect, depends not just upon whom you ask but also on what data and anecdotes you choose to believe.

Rothstein has sifted the information carefully, with a wary eye for the dangers of too glib a reading of this tea leaf or that. He is well aware of the difficulty of gathering data about educational achievement, particularly when measuring student performance over time. He provides an overview of the statistical methods currently in use, detailing their strengths and weaknesses. He cautions, for example, against simply comparing the SAT scores of a small self-selected group of largely upper-class, Ivy League-bound students—who comprised the great majority of test takers in the early postwar years—to those of the current, much more broadly based set of test takers from very diverse socioeconomic groups.

Rothstein also offers insights into some of the hot topics in education such as social promotion, the teaching of phonics, and the continuing debate about bilingual education, controversies that have been around for a long time. Although many critics of today’s educational establishment yearn for some past golden age and call for a return to basics, there is no hard evidence to support their belief that the past was golden and no proof that current practices are harmful. Indeed, the various adaptations in educational practice over the years are a reflection of pragmatic adaptations by schools to the conditions of their time and place and to the demands of parents and teachers. The critics of modern teaching methods ignore the progress that has been made in this area while providing few ideas about how minority achievement could be enhanced. In sum, Rothstein constructs an impressive argument for his conclusion that schools are providing our children with increasingly good educations. He believes that, rather than radical reform, we need steady, consistent, and historically informed critiques of what we are doing married to a program of gradual change.

The Century Foundation is the new name of the Twentieth Century Fund, an institution that has examined many aspects of American education, in such works as Warren Bennis’s The Leaning Ivory Tower; Making the Grade, the report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Federal Elementary and Secondary Education Policy; and Hard Lessons: Public Schools and Privatization by Carol Ascher, Norm Fruchter, and Robert Berne. With this report, Richard Rothstein continues our tradition of looking with fresh eyes at public issues. On behalf of our Trustees, I thank him for this effort.

Richard C. Leone, President
The Century Foundation
August 1998