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Brookings Papers on Education Policy 2001 (2001) 102-109



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Comment by Alex Molnar

[Why Business Backs Education Standards]

Milton Goldberg and Susan L. Traiman's analysis harks back to the 1980s and is largely consistent with the line of reasoning advanced in A Nation at Risk.83 Essentially, A Nation at Risk explained the American economic woes of the 1970s and 1980s as the outgrowth of the failure of public schools to adequately educate children for the emerging global economy. Time has not been kind to this point of view. I find, for example, the critique offered by David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle in The Manufactured Crisis persuasive.84 On an everyday level, the surging economy of the 1990s suggests either that American public education improved dramatically during the 1990s or that the link between schooling and the economy described in A Nation at Risk is spurious.

In the face of the economic successes of the 1990s, the almost two-decade-old argument favored by Goldberg and Traiman has about it the musty quality of ideas not refreshed by better information or guided by a healthy [End Page 102] skepticism. One wonders why they cling to a view of the relationship among education, business, and the needs of the work force so divorced from real-world experience. Can they have studied very closely where the greatest number of new jobs are being created, what skills those jobs call for, and what pay they command? The esoteric charts, graphs, and erudite incantations of the new econometric clergy perhaps befog them. Whatever their reasons, Goldberg and Traiman have pledged allegiance to a movement that is, in my view, more about public relations and political ideology than substantive education reform. This movement is reinforced by publications such as the transparently political scorecard of state efforts to implement academic standards issued by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation every year.85

A Glib View of Standards

In considering the public relations aspects of the standards debate, I have been instructed by the work of Edward Bernays, considered the father of American public relations. Bernays, for example, organized the Light's Golden Jubilee to promote the sale of light bulbs (his client was General Electric). The jubilee, ostensibly celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Thomas Edison's invention, became an international media event. In an interview with Bill Moyers decades later, Bernays recounted his public relations triumph: "Light"--who could be against light and in favor of darkness?; "Golden"--who would be in favor of lead?; and "Jubilee"--who could be in favor of an unhappy gathering? The title, Light's Golden Jubilee, thus provided what Bernays described as "rhetorical hegemony."86

The current standards movement has similarly succeeded in establishing rhetorical hegemony. The basic principles underlying the idea of standards are unassailable. Without a doubt, most people would agree that adults should think seriously about what children are to be taught. Adults should figure out whether or not children have learned it. And adults should help children learn those things if they do not do well. Diane Ravitch, in National Standards in American Education: A Citizen's Guide, expressed each of these adult responsibilities as a different type of educational standard.87 According to Ravitch, content standards refer to what is to be taught and learned. Performance standards establish the degree of attainment expected (that is, answering the question, "How good is good enough?"). Opportunity-to-learn standards govern the resources made available to students to allow them to accomplish what is expected of them. As Ravitch accurately notes, the three types of standards [End Page 103] are interrelated. While the impulse to have standards appears commonsensical, nearly every aspect of the implementation of standards (from content development to who enforces them) remains controversial.

The battle over content standards has been going on for a long time in the United States. Much of the argument today over content standards seems to revisit the cultural struggles of the sixties, positioning advocates of fact-filled standards against proponents of concept-based standards. The result of the struggle between the two sides is often...

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