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The 2002 Rotten Apple awards

By Gerald W. Bracey

Beginning with the “Seventh Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education” in the October, 1997 issue of Phi Delta Kappan, the critiques and kudos that had been part of the text in early reports were set off in boxes as separate Rotten Apples and Golden Apples, respectively. The Golden Apples remain part of the report. However, in 1999, the Phi Delta Kappa Board of Directors (not the Kappan editors) decided that the Rotten Apples were inappropriate on the pages of their house organ. No doubt it was coincidental that this decision was reached just after a Rotten Apple recipient, Willard Daggett, had threatened to sue. Mr. Daggett is a sort of civilian Baron Von Munchausen who regales his audiences (for large fees) with assorted facts that exist nowhere but in Mr. Daggett’s mind. The Golden Apples remain, but now the Rotten Apples are first posted to various lists and then archived at the Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency (www.America-tomorrow. com/bracey). Herewith the miasmatic treasury of decaying fruit for 2002:

THE “CRAWFORD BEST DANG TROJAN HORSE SINCE ANCIENT TIMES” AWARD:

TO: George W. Bush

Who would have thought that a mere two years would be sufficient to eclipse such dis-achievement champions as Bill Bennett for lifetime honors, but the 5-4 Prez has done it with his No Child Left Behind legislation (he did have, we should note, a few warm-up years in Texas).

This is truly a weapon of mass destruction, a bunker-buster of mammoth proportions. Some of the lunacy is inherent in the legislation. Other gobs of goofiness fall from the work of the National Institute for Doctrinal Uniformity, previously known as the U. S. Department of Education. In its first pass at labeling schools as failures, the Department uncovered startling facts: Michigan has the greatest number of failing schools (1500) and Arkansas is home to the smallest (zero) (has anyone observed convoys of prairie schooners heading South on I69 out of Lansing?). Obviously, Bill Clinton was a better education governor of the Razorback State than anyone, Clinton included, previously realized.

The National Council of State Legislatures projects that 70% of all public schools will be labeled failing (or, “needs improvement” under the obfuscation code derived from another George, George Orwell). According to Department regulations, all children in failing schools must be offered the option of transferring to a better one. Crowding is not acceptable as an excuse (except, and I am not kidding here, where it might violate fire codes or other safety regulations). Schools with large numbers of students wanting in must have larger classes, buy mobile trailers or build more classrooms (how’s that for an unfunded mandate?). We thus face the possible prospect in a few years of having 100% of our children attending schools currently occupied by only 30% of our children (no one has yet dealt with what those transferring students will do to the test scores of the “successful,” receiving schools). I say, old chums, is there a bit of irrationality in all of this?

Chris Whittle is no doubt standing by ready to accept in Edison Schools kids arriving with the vouchers that Bush will without doubt resurrect.

The NCLB trap has already received additional attention and deconstruction in “The Twelfth Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education” (Phi Delta Kappan, October, 2002, posted at www.America-tomorrow. com/bracey/EDDRA/EDDRA26.pdf and in “No Child Left Behind: Just Say No.” Although many have been offered the latter, only the Minnesota School Boards Association has had to courage to publish it. It’s been posted, and will be soon, if not already, archived at EDDRA.

THE “SWIFTEST REPUDIATION OF ‘SCIENTIFICALLY BASED RESEARCH’” AWARD:
TO: The United States Department of Education

As this is written the Department apparently still plans to remove all data from its web site that was posted prior to Bush’s inauguration that does not accord with Mr. Bush’s agenda for education.

THE “SWIFTEST MISINTERPRETATION OF ‘NON-SCIENTIFICALLY BASED RESEARCH’ AWARD
TO: Reid Lyon, Bush’s resident reading czar

An ASCD Update quoted Lyon saying, “an affluent three-year-old child has a larger working vocabulary than the welfare mother of a three-year-old.” On several listservs I called this statement “idiotic.” Via email, Lyon chastised me for my scholarly characterization: “Hey Gerald. You might want to take a look at Hart and Risley’s ‘Meaningful Differences.’ It might help you get out of the bush league.”

I have no idea what that last sentence is supposed to mean, but I do know this: Lyon completely misinterpreted Hart and Risley’s study. Hart and Risley observed interactions between mothers and children and recorded some of the verbalizations. They found that three-year-olds of “professional” mothers (they didn’t use the word “affluent”) in fact used more words than mothers of three-year-olds on welfare used while talking to their children.

For neither mothers nor children, does this constitute anything like “working vocabulary,” which is a pretty fuzzy concept in any case. If you did take it as working vocabulary you would be stuck with the ludicrous conclusion that professional mothers have a working vocabulary of only two thousand words. That’s how many they used in the interactions Hart and Risley taped.

Beyond that, Lyon’s grand, wrong generalization reading is based on a grand total of 38 people living in Kansas: Hart and Risley taped 13 professional parents and their children and six welfare parents and their children. Whew.

Betty Hart and Todd Risley published their study in 1995 as, “Meaningful Differences,” Paul H. Brookes Publishing. It’s a good book and worthy of anyone’s perusal.

Stanford linguist, Geoffrey Nunberg also raked Lyon over the coals for his statement in one of his frequent commentaries on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” Nunberg’s essay, “ A Loss for Words,” can be found at http://www.csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/vocabulary.html.

THE “MOST INCENDIARY POST 9/11 EDUCATIONAL LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL BASED ON RIGOROUS SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH” AWARD
TO: Reid Lyon, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

At a November 18, 2002, symposium, sponsored by the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy (an off-shoot of the Council for Excellence in Government), “Rigorous Evidence: The Key to Progress in Education?”, Lyon commented that “If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass it would be to blow up colleges of education.” He said of those issuing forth from such colleges, “they do not know what they do not know” and attacked colleges of education as some of the “most resistant and recalcitrant” institutions around.

He allowed as how his comments were probably not politically correct, but no one objected or questioned him about them even though a number of other presenters and, no doubt, audience members as well, held college of education appointments.

THE “PEDAGOGICAL ROBOTICS” AWARD
TO: Susan Neuman, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education

In a speech in Stockton, Neuman declared that the No Child Left Behind law would “stifle and hopefully eliminate” creative teaching in the classroom. “Our children are not laboratory rats,” she said. Well, of course, but what is NCLB other than a massive untried experiment?

In Chicago a few days later, Neuman said she was misquoted. Stockton Record reporter, Victor Balta insists she was not. In any case, Neuman then proceeded to say essentially the same thing:

“ I was misquoted,” Newuman said. “I said very specifically that we should end experimental teaching. I said that our children are better than experiments, that we needed to focus on scientifically based evidence in our reading instruction. We have over 100,000 studies [that number again!] which give evidence of how we should teach reading. We need to empasize phonics, vocabulary and comprehension so that all of our children can achieve.”

Chicago CBS radio reporter, John Cody then asked her, “Can you specify some of the experiments that you found wanting?”

Neuman’s reply: “I can only speak for myself, from my own experience. I remember many teachers. They would go to a conference and they would see a great, very charismatic teacher. And then they’d go home and say, ‘I’m going to try this.’”

Your own experience? But Susan, I thought all policy should flow from “scientifically based evidence.”

The quotes come from tapes of the briefing.

THE “TAKING CRONY CAPITALISM TO THE CRADLE” AWARD
TO: Jack Grubman

Superstar Salomon Smith Barney telecom analyst Grubman earned $20 million a year managing stocks worth more than $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion). After years of treating AT&T like a loser, Grubman suddenly upgraded his recommendation for the stock from “hold” to “buy.” Why, people wanted to know. Grubman changed his rating shortly after his boss, Citigroup Chairman Sandy Weill donated $1 million in company funds to help Grubman get his twins into an exclusive Manhattan nursery school.

In a curious coincidence, shortly after Grubman decided AT&T was an OK stock to buy, AT&T chose Grubman’s outfit to handle the IPO of the company’s wireless division. The IPO was worth $10.6 billion; Grubman and Weill’s firm walked away with a mere $45 million. And shortly after the IPO, Grubman once again downgraded AT&T. Grubman currently faces a lifetime ban from Wall Street.

I have not been able to determine if Jack Grubman is related to Lizzie Grubman. Lizzie, recall, was the “PR Princess” (clients include Britney Spears) who slammed her father’s (Allen, not Jack) $70,000 Mercedes SUV into reverse and mowed down 16 people outside a night club in East Hampton. She called broken-boned victims “white trash” and sped off into the night. In court, she claims the vehicle accidentally slipped into the wrong gear. She couda got eight years, but apparently beat the DWI charge and got away with 60 days.

THE “QUALITY CONTROL, SCHMALITY CONTROL, IT’S PROFITS THAT COUNT” AWARD
TO: National Computer Systems (NCS)

When Marty Swaden learned that his daughter had flunked the Minnesota Basic Skills Test, he set out to help her. He decided that his best course of action was to look at the test to see what kinds of questions had caused her problems. The State of Minnesota refused to let him see the test. He persisted. The state resisted. He persisted. It resisted. He threatened litigation. He’s a lawyer. He finally got to sit down in a room with a state official to peruse the test and his daughter’s answer sheet.

He found not one but a bunch of items that NCS had mis-scored, enough to put his daughter over the top. And not only his daughter, but also another 8,000 Minnesota high school students. The students filed a class action suit.

NCS claimed the error was a one-time affair, found and fired a scapegoat, and argued that things were now fine. The depositions from NCS officials showed otherwise. At first the judge bought NCS’ one-time-error story and refused to permit the class to sue for punitive damages.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs then argued that “NCS has a corporate culture of hiding and ignoring testing errors and problems. Stunning deposition, newspaper articles and e-mail show an appalling corporate culture than not only tolerated errors, but refused to fix errors unless caught by someone else.”

The judge found merit in these arguments. He declared that “the error [in Minnesota] was preceded by years of quality control problems at NCS. NCS had committed scoring errors on standardized tests dating as far back as 1997 in as many as eight different states. In 1999, the State of Michigan threatened to cancel NCS’ contract because of NCS’ ‘failure to deliver services as promised, specifically, the absence of communication, oversight and quality control.’”

Numerous NCS officers had pleaded for more staff and for more training for existing staff—some responsible for quality control and processing of test answer keys and answer sheets had never worked with tests before — but to no avail. CEO Russ Gulotti schemed to keep costs low, thereby making rendering high and thereby making NCS an attractive takeover target. In 1999 he told his staff, “NCS is in a good position to leverage the very large investments we have made over the past few years. It’s time to get paid back for these investments. Be very firm on expenses; say no to hiring; stop the unnecessary travel; and show me significant improvement [in profits for fiscal 2000].”

Gullotti’s strategy worked and the Pearson Empire swallowed NCS. Gullotti is rumored to have taken $50 million from the deal to his retirement estate in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Students didn’t fare quite so well. Once the judge permitted the plaintiffs to sue for punitive damages, NCS settled. Some seniors denied diplomas received as much as $16,000. Most awards to underclassmen ranged from a few hundred to $1000.

Full Disclosure: I was hired as a witness for the plaintiffs, but didn’t testify since the case did not go to trial. I was privy to the confidential depositions, but all quotes above come from public documents.

THE “CONDUCT SCHOLARSHIP AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO” AWARD
TO: Herbert J. Walberg

Walberg has received several “apples,” none of them golden. In a chapter of a book edited by Terry Moe, Walberg struck back:

“ Despite the huge amount of evidence, three writers have dismissed the validity of the unrelenting findings [that American schools are no good]. Gerald Bracey often takes this view in his monthly column for Phi Delta Kappan, a widely circulated education journal. David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle wrote ‘The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and the Attack on America’s Public Schools’ … Neither Bracey’s work nor Berliner and Biddle’s book has gone through scholarly peer reviewing as would be required in journal publication in education, psychology and the social sciences.” Thereafter, Walberg refers to us collectively as BBB. Some scholarship.

In fact, I do not take “this view” in my monthly column. For the 19 years that the column has existed, it has almost invariably summarized research of other people, not my own analyses and the column often reports problems in public schools. And, that column and the annual Bracey Reports receive substantially more peer review than do manuscripts submitted to peer reviewed journal. The editors know that people like Walberg (or Checker Finn or Diane Ravitch) lie in wait hoping to find an error that will permit them to discredit and dismiss the reports and so the editors scrutinize every word, check every fact. (For the record, I review manuscripts for Educational Assessment, the American Educational Research Journal and Educational Researcher. The last publication honored me in 2002 as an exceptional reviewer). And, contrary to Walberg’s assertions, two of my articles on international comparisons have appeared in the peer-reviewed house organ of the American Educational Research Association, Educational Researcher.

In a footnote, Walberg says, “Bracey doesn’t hesitate to employ ad hominem argumentation. He, for example, has been allowed to give “Rotten Apple Awards” to presidents from both political parties [inanity is non-partisan, Herb], reporters from nationally circulated newspapers, and prominent scholars for criticizing education. Because Bracey is given first, last and regular word in the journal [Phi Delta Kappan], few people correct his faulty arguments.”

Wrong again, Herb. This is the second time Herb has shown that he simply doesn’t understand “ad hominem” arguments. The Rotten Apples simply point at dumb, wrongheaded or erroneous things that people have done or said in the 12 months since the previous Apples. That is not ad hominem argumentation. That is calling attention to stupidity.

An ad hominem attack attempts to discredit a person or an argument using material that is logically irrelevant to the assertion. Thus, if I said, “Walberg’s research is not to be trusted because his wife is a thespian,” I would be making an ad hominem argument. Walberg’s wife’s skills as an actress are logically irrelevant to the quality of his research.

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