REPLY TO GERALD W. BRACEY
BY ANDREW J. COULSON
APRIL, 1999
Read Gerald Bracey's critique of Market Education
Dear Jerry,
Your concern with the facts is laudable, but your critique does a poor job of manifesting it. The chief objection you raised is due to a misunderstanding, your supporting evidence is selective and unrepresentative, and your conclusions are therefore erroneous.
You balk at the contention that the best schools in our entire nation are worse than the worst Asian schools. Rightly so. Neither I nor Harold Stevenson made such an assertion. Stevenson simply pointed out that the best American schools in his study were worse than the worst Asian schools in his study. There is nothing "face foolish" about that finding, and you have done nothing to refute it in your letter.
In the study in question, Stevenson compared student achievement and parental attitudes in several US cities with those in three Asian nations. He found that the American parents had the highest opinions of their children's achievement, while their children had the worst overall performance. This demonstrates a possible explanation for why Americans rate their own local schools as better than those of the nation as a whole: They simply don't know that their own children and their neighbors' children perform poorly when compared to kids in other countries. Their schools provide them with no evidence on which to make an informed assessment.
You state in your letter that you have shown Stevenson's work to be "without merit." Based on the insufficiency of the evidence and arguments you have presented to critique my own work, I doubt that that is the case. Nevertheless, I will have a look at your paper on the subject. I must point out, however, that my observation about the lack of evidence parents have to judge how well their own children are doing compared to students in other countries is patently obvious, and does not rely on the research of Stevenson or anyone else. The vast majority of parents receive no test data comparing their own children's performance to the performance of the average child in Asian or other countries.
Next, you attempted to refute the contention that U.S. students perform poorly compared to those in other nations. To support that claim you cite some nationally representative 4th grade test results, and also the results of 4th and 8th grade students from a non-representative subset of the total population.
It is bizarre that you seem believe this is compelling evidence. Your non-representative sample is entirely irrelevant to the overall performance of U.S. schools and students. In a nation of 53 million children, it is obviously possible to find a few who do well by international standards. This proves nothing at all.
As for the nationally representative 4th grade results, I cite them as well, but they are meager consolation to American parents. While U.S. students sometimes do well and usually do adequately at the 4th grade, their performance deteriorates significantly by the 8th grade, and they hit rock bottom by the 12th grade. American 16-25 year olds are among the most illiterate in the world, with nearly a quarter scoring at the lowest possible level measured by the International Adult Literacy Survey. Since most Americans are chiefly concerned with how well their children are prepared for adult life at the end of their education, the appalling performance of U.S. high-school seniors and recent graduates represents a genuine and not a manufactured crisis as you seem to believe. Furthermore, all of this evidence is discussed at length in Chapter 6 of Market Education, and yet you chose to ignore it in your critique.
You also ignore the fact that the relative performance of the U.S. versus other nations is raised only in passing in Market Education, and is not a central theme of the book. My principle concern is to identify performance trends over time in this and other countries under state-run school systems versus free market school systems. The history of academic performance in this country over the past 100 years has been one of stagnation and decline. Competitive markets, on the other hand, are associated with excellent service to families and societies, constant innovation, and progress in educational outcomes.
Your final observation is that if other nations are doing better than us, we should have more state involvement because they have more state involvement. Please don’t take offense, but I think you haven’t thought this argument through. Many of the nations that do worse than the US (of which there are several at the 4th and a few at the 8th grade levels) also have more state involvement. Conversely, several of the nations that do better than the U.S. have only as much or even less central government control over education. Consider the following quote from Chapter 10 of Market Education:
Dismayed by the lack of evidence mustered by supporters of government curriculum guidelines, Columbia University researcher Richard M. Wolf decided to compare the results of the nations participating the Third International Mathematics and Science Test to determine whether or not national [government] standards were correlated with higher achievement. They weren’t. Though most of the participating countries did “have a national curriculum or syllabus,” Wolf wrote, there was “virtually no relationship between student performance and having a national curriculum or syllabus."
The fact that there is variation in the performance of modern state-run school systems is largely irrelevant to the thesis of my book: that free and competitive markets are superior to state-run school systems in meeting the public’s goals.
All this said, I do not see how your letter in any way undermines the book’s thesis. You note that your objections could be "multiplied many times." Many times zero is still zero.
I don’t doubt that you have other objections not mentioned in the letter. Perhaps I will find some of them more substantial than the ones you have already presented. I will certainly give them my careful attention. [Editor's note: Mr. Bracey has made no further attempt to defend his opinions.]
As a final note, I would like to say how much I appreciate your interest in facts, and your willingness to discuss them with someone who has reached conclusions inconsistent with your own. Too many of the participants on all sides of the education reform debate have succumbed to the temptations of ignoring those who disagree with them or resorting to personal attacks. We too often look like an episode of the Jerry Springer show rather than an excerpt from the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. It is in the spirit of the latter debate that I publish our exchange on this website.
Yours in respectful confutation,
Andrew
Andrew J. Coulson
Editor, www.schoolchoices.org
Senior Research Associate,
The Social Philosophy and Policy Center (BGSU)
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