When I served in the George H.W. Bush administration, I was Assistant Secretary for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.
OERI, as it was then called, had almost no discretionary money. There was very little opportunity for any initiatives, which may have been a good thing at that time. I became very involved in advocacy for national standards, which I now regret. I also spoke up for the national goals (remember them?), most of which were out of reach (like, we will be first in the world in math and science by the year 2000). OERI has since been pretentiously renamed the “Institute for Education Sciences.”
However, there is one thing that I am very proud of. I initiated a statistical review of the history of American education and the best brains in the Office of Research gathered the data to show the progress of education. It was published in 1992.
It is called 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait.
I still refer to it when writing essays that require historical information about education.
It should have been updated by now, but it has not been.
It is a wonderful resource for scholars and others engaged in research about education.
This is the introduction that I wrote in 1992:
Diane Ravitch Assistant Secretary
As an historian of education, I have been a regular consumer of education statistics from the U.S. Department of Education. For many years, I kept the Department’s telephone number in my address book and computer directory. It did not take long to discover there was one person to whom I should address all my queries: Vance Grant. In my many telephone calls for information, I discovered he is the man who knows what data and statistics have been gathered over the years by the Department of Education. No matter how exotic my question, Dr. Grant could always tell me, without delay, whether the information existed; usually, he produced it himself. When I asked a statistical question, I could often hear the whir of an adding machine in the back- ground, even after the advent of the electronic calculator.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, to find myself in the position of Assistant Secretary of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), the very home of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The latter agency is headed by Emerson Elliott, the first presidentially appointed Commissioner of Education Statistics. And imagine my delight when I encountered Vance Grant, face to face, for the first time. The voice on the telephone, always cheerful and confident, belonged to a man employed by the Department or Office of Education since 1955.
Vance Grant, a Senior Education Program Specialist, and Tom Snyder, NCES’ Chief of the Compilations and Special Studies Branch in the Data Development Division, prepared 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait. They did so enthusiastically, because—like me—they knew it was needed. Historians of education customarily must consult multiple, often disparate, sources to find and collect the information in this one volume. They can never be sure if the data they locate are consistent and reliable. This compilation aggregates all relevant statistics about the history of our educational system in one convenient book. It will, I believe, become a classic, an indispensable volume in every library and on every education scholar’s bookshelf, one that will be periodically updated. Vance Grant’s and Tom Snyder’s careful preparation of this report substantially enriches our knowledge of American education. But collecting these historical data in one volume not only benefits professional historians. As a Nation, we need to develop an historical perspective in analyzing change. Too often, newspapers report important political, economic, or social events without supplying the necessary historical context. We are all now accustomed to reading headlines about the latest test scores. Whether up or down, they invariably overstate the meaning of a single year’s change. And the same short-sightedness often flaws journalistic reports of other major educational trends.
Historical Context
One does not need to be an historian to recognize the tremendous importance of historical context. Each of us should be able to assess events, ideas, and trends with reliable knowledge of what has hap- pened in the past. If we cannot, our ability to understand and make sense of events will be distorted. This volume would become a reference for all who wish to make informed judgments about American education. We must struggle mightily against the contemporary tendency towards presentism, the idea inspired by television journalism that today’s news has no precedent. As we struggle to preserve history, we preserve our human capacity to construct meaning and to reach independent judgment.
In an age when we are awash with information and instantaneous news, it is meaning, understanding, and judgment that are in short supply. This collection of historical statistics about American education provides its readers with the perspective they need to understand how far we have come in our national commitment to education and how far we must still go in pursuit of our ideals.
I especially thank Vance Grant and Tom Snyder for their untiring efforts in assembling this book. Without their dedication, and without Emerson Elliott’s support for the importance of this work, it would never have happened.
Emerson was the career civil servant who directed the National Center for Educational Statistics, which was the heart of the original Department of Education, created in 1867. As I mentioned, in the thirty years since this publication was issued, it has not been updated. What a shame.
There is nothing wrong with data as long as it is used to inform and guide. My husband works part-time for the Census Bureau that does a lot more than the ten year survey. They collect non-identifiable information on the population including health and well-being and other topics as well.
If the US updated the study on American Education, perhaps we would learn more about the impact of privatization. It would force our government to take an objective look at the impact of privatization on budgets and public schools. Such as study would be a useful tool for policymakers. I find it shocking that privatization has been chiseling away at public budgets for decades, but nobody has taken a good hard look at its impact, successes and failures. An independent study could be useful. Privatization is a radical departure from the concept of a democratic community based public school. We are long overdue in collecting information to discern whether it is worth the disruption, and does it provide real value to students.
Re “I became very involved in advocacy for national standards, which I now regret.”
I am still an advocate for national standards, but not standards enforced or created from the top, a la Common Core. I think 60% of the school curriculum could be common, leaving 40% under local control, per se. The creation of the 60% would necessarily involve the participation of teachers, parents, students, and education “experts.” Regular reviews of the content of this core should be provided for, maybe every ten years.
The benefits are that student performances could be comparable, a feature that would allow the more effective teaching methods to be identified and then shared. Currently, the only commonality is enforced through testing, which is an absolutely bogus way of designing curriculum.
Agreed. “standards” should be a discussion, not a directive. There are things we all should know. There are things we should know relative to the place where we live. I like the 60 -40 idea. Enforcement of these things, however, should be through education of the tachers, not through high stakes testing.
Your comment prompted me to dig out my copy of the National Standards on Civic Education–which Diane helped draft and promote–out of a box hidden deeply in my attic. I haven’t looked at it for about 25 years. As I perused it and read in depth it confirmed my initial thought about your comment above. I agree with it wholeheartedly.
Hello Diane I will pass this link on to several people who, I know, will want to see this information. Also as an aside, I think Steve Ruis (above note) is right about the need for standards RIGHTLY integrated into a broader local-school ethos. Also, standards and methods of testing are vastly different issues. In my view, if children aren’t regularly writing and speaking-listening in a well-thought-out environment with a qualified and caring, finger-on-the-pulse teacher, little education is occurring.
The strange thing about charter and privatization reformer schtick is that they don’t want regulations, third-party oversight, or teachers who are formally qualified; and yet continue to claim how public schools fail according to third-party oversight, regulations, and teacher quality.
But the main long-term problem is the privatization of education. It’s education as broken away from the principles of public inclusion that are embedded in the U.S. Constitution. CBK
What a wonderful resource. Great to see this in one volume. I have been a consumer of stats from the NCES for many, many years. Always something to learn from these.
When I began my investigation into the education system (brought on by a need to understand why my son’s district was closing schools), I was presented with two narratives about what was going on in public education. I took both sides at face value regarding their position. I was determined to remain unbiased.
I remember being dismayed at the sheer volume of information I needed to dig through to find credible data points for fact checking. When I came to fact check the information supporting ‘schools were failing’, this gem came up in my search results.
It showed me that the narrative schools were failing at the time it was initially presented to be, at best, inaccurate. While there was clearly areas to improve upon, the conclusions I made from the data: we were making progress in the right direction and, overall, public education was doing a respectable job in the 120 year period covered. Especially given the complexity of educating children from such a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences.
These conclusions created the question, “If schools were not failing as claimed, what is the purpose of school reform?”.
This ultimately revealed outcomes were not matching stated intentions of the reformers. The implication derived from that, given the individuals involved and their ‘data-driven’ methodologies, the goals of their reforms were not the ones they stated. Had they been using the outcomes to drive their decision making, it would have been clear that serious course corrections were necessary and their vision for reform was not working.
It forced me to consider what their actual intent might be from the outcomes being produced. Your recent discussion with Mr. Siler confirmed some of the most disturbing of my conclusions as accurate..
In a way, I credit the information in this book, and the responsible presentation of the data it contains, as the point at which I started to understand the reform movement was something other than it was presented to be.
I posted this at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/My-Signal-Contribution-to-in-General_News-Diane-Ravitch_Education_Education-For-All_For-profit-Education-210628-456.html