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Gerald Bracey, a psychologist with a gift for polemic, has made a second career out of (in his words) “debunk[ing] the notion that schools were better in the past than they are today.” In Education Week (registration required) he rolls out the guns once more to claim that the Soviets’ launch of the first orbiting satellite 50 years ago “wounded” the reputation of US schools. According to him, they didn’t deserve the criticism they got then — and didn’t deserve the criticisms they got in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s either.
“This image of a lost Golden Age in American education helped fuel a movement to make schools more academically demanding. But as a picture of the world it is so incomplete as to be false. At the turn of the century, when American schools focused on traditional academic pursuits, they educated only a minority of American children.” Only 20 percent of WWI veterans had finished eighth grade; 70 percent of WWII veterans had. “No wonder American schools and textbooks changed. For the first time they had to teach the children of all socio-economic classes for more than a few months. To do so, they followed the path of least resistance in a nation that had never been friendly to intellectual endeavor — and made a virtue of this makeshift. American schools have not deteriorated — they’ve never been good enough.”
