Last year also saw the press ridicule the Oakland California School Board's "ebonics" policy, treating their actions as the demented ravings of foolish African people. In newspapers, news weeklies, and on the electronic web, cartoons and jokes swept across the country. These not only were designed to ridicule the Oakland school board, but also incorporated verbal stereotypes and visual images that we thought had died out in polite company 50 years ago. We had to turn to the academic journals to learn something about the rationale for the proposed policy, the reasonable pedagogical principles that were being promoted through the boards' policy, and the linguistically solid grounds for declaring Black English Vernacular a language. These arguments were not usually found in the popular press. In general, an unsympathetic press was more interested in a good blood letting than they were in uncovering any trace of reasonableness in the decision of the Oakland board. The ridiculing, of course, provided more ammunition for those who assert that public education has failed.

Please note that we are not here defending the school boards' or administrators' actions in my of these three instances. In our estimation they were each examples of bungled and embarrassing attempts at implementing or developing public policy. These were all public relations nightmares and we cringe when we think about the silliness of some of the school people involved. But schools are about something bigger than the public relations nightmares that inevitably occur. Public schooling is really about ordinary people trying to make reasonable decisions in the best interests of their communities—decisions that will help their young people grow to be knowledgeable, economically productive, and decent citizens. In all three cases that was the intention of the school policy, and those noble intentions were commonly ignored in the derision and the blood-letting. Missing from the reporting of all three cases was a modicum of caring, of sympathy, of understanding about what the schools were trying to accomplish, even though in each case they appeared to have bungled it.

Because no quarter was given by the press, those who criticize the schools were given more ammunition; particularly helped were those who claim the public schools are run by inept bureaucrats. For some, the proposed solution to the allegations of ineptitude is the privatization of our public education system. But in our view the most pernicious immediate effects of this kind of reporting was that school children learned that their school leaders were chumps—people of low prestige, the butt of Jay Leno and David Letterman jokes, people whose words and actions can be easily dismissed. Public perceptions, particularly student perceptions, are shaped by the media through the respect and ridicule they display for different groups. Can the routine and undiscriminating ridicule of school teachers and administrators be good for the nation? Instead, couldn't our press find the absurdities of individual educators newsworthy—subject to criticism, laughter, or outrage—and also find ways to preserve the dignity of a few million other professional educators who work so hard for the good of the nation?

Deficiencies Galore: Our Rebuke of the Press

In our opinion, on educational issues, the press:

• is biased and covers the negative side of news stories much more diligently than the positive side;

• presents too simplistic and incomplete a view of the educational problems and issues that they are reporting;

• is more critical of the schools in their editorial policies than they are complimentary;

• has editorial policies that are biased against public schools, biased against school change, and in particular, biased against the schools that serve the poor;

• displays a lack of understanding of the complexity of school life in contemporary America;

• shows an appalling lack of understanding of statistics and social science research, without which reporters cannot properly interpret the huge amount of data the educational system produces;

• shows an ignorance of the role of poverty as a root cause of many of the difficulties in our schools.

Over the past few years we have kept some files about the news reports that have shaped our perceptions. We will use one major recent news event to illustrate why we feel as we do. Then we note some further problems with the coverage of educational stories.

The Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS)

Let us start out with the recent reporting of the TIMSS—the Third International Mathematics and Science Study—which first released data to the public in November 1996 (Beaton, Mullis et al., 1996; Beaton, Martin et al., 1996). We read over one hundred news stories to get a feel for how the press handles a contemporary and important educational story. The objective facts are clear and not in dispute. In a well-run forty-one nation study of seventh and eighth graders the United States ranked about average, with Singapore a runaway winner and other Asian nations, in particular, outscoring us. The data on achievement in math and science was presented so that there were three statistically homogenous groups of nations—those ahead of us, those tied with us, and those behind us. More interesting to the education profession was the data about curriculum and instruction for each nation. But as expected, more press coverage went to the multi-nation horse race in science and mathematics, a search for winners and losers.

The New York Times' Peter Appleborne, along with many other reporters and papers, provided perfectly sensible stories based on the release of the data. The Times story was thorough, and in our estimation its headline was accurate and descriptive: "Americans straddle the average mark in math and science" (November 21,1996).

But others had different approaches to reporting the same data, provided at the same press conference called to announce the results of the study. For example, the San Diego Union-Tribune (November 21, 1996) actually found cause to celebrate by announcing: "Global test of pupils shows U. S. Improving." This interpretation was an accurate one, but apparently not worth featuring in any other report we could find. The St. Petersburg Times article was less positive, but thought-provoking, nevertheless (November 21, 1996). They proclaimed: "Science, Math study renews calls for reform." And that is true too. There is much of interest in the study that can guide our school improvement efforts. The Chicago Sun-Times, however, created a much harsher and unsubstantiated headline to report the same story (November 22, 1996): "U.S. schools in crisis; so what else is new?" Most of the reporting was closer to the negativism expressed by the Chicago Sun-Times, rather than to the single positive and the few thoughtful responses to the study generated by the press.

As we read these stories we noticed quickly that nobody liked to be average, including Secretary Riley, who was quoted as saying that "For U. S. students, average is just not good enough" (Orange County Register, November 21, 1996). No reporter nor any government official seemed to note the inevitability of some nations having to be about average. Moreover, that position in an international comparison of educational achievement will almost always go to one of the more heterogeneous nations, say a country like the United States which provides for the study a sample from 15,700 designed-to-be-different school systems. These school systems operate independently; receive support through vastly different funding formulas that yield great disparities in per-pupil support; have created different curricular; use different texts; and serve families heavily segregated by social class and ethnicity. Under conditions like these, if a fair sample is drawn, it should be obvious that it will combine both the excellent performance of children in superb school districts and the abysmal performance of children in awful school districts. A nation like ours will inevitably be described by its central characteristics—losing its ability to showcase its pockets of excellence, although hiding, as well, its genuine disasters.

The Tampa Tribune (December 1, 1996), however, was not dealing with this subtlety, apparently not even understanding the basic meaning of average, since it proclaimed in a headline: "U.S. eighth-graders far back in math." The San Francisco Chronicle (December 28, 1996) said that: "American eighth-graders are average, at best." They added the little zinger at the end to be sure a negative tone was attached to the headline. The San Diego Union-Tribune (December 22, 1996) carried an article by a state legislator noting that such terribly low scores on tests like these are old news. All this negativism was associated with being average in mathematics—a position that statistically tied us with such equally inadequate and equally average countries as Thailand, Israel, Germany, New Zealand, England, Norway, Denmark, Scotland, Spain, and Iceland.

In science, being about average statistically tied us with the inadequate likes of England, Flemish Belgium, Australia, Sweden, Germany, Canada, Norway, New Zealand, Thailand, Israel, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Scotland. It also tied us with the Russian Federation. That was the awesome economic and military competitor that, 40 years ago, Admiral Rickover predicted would bury us because Russian schools taught rigorous science courses while our schools were too lenient. No reports we saw noted the remarkably good company that we were in with "merely" an average score. Apparently it is the dream of the American press and the American people to have children like those in the Lake Woebegone schools—all above average!

On ranks and percent right.
Ranks were used by most reporters to describe the TIMSS data. But none of the reporters seemed to see any analogy to an Olympic running competition. That is, no one thought that you can be a very competitive racer at the Olympics, come in a few seconds behind the winner of the 10 kilometer race, and rank 24th, though perhaps only a few seconds off a world record. So another way the data from TIMSS might have been looked at was to ask how we actually scored, not how we ranked in the race to mathematics and science gold medals.

When that is done in mathematics for the 28th ranked United States eighth-graders, they are seen to have succeeded in getting 53 percent of the math items right, and 30 other nations had scores that were within 10 percent of ours! Only six nations achieved scores that were higher than ours by 10 percent or more. Newsweek reported this as finishing "way out of the money" in an article describing the mediocrity of the American educational system (December 2, 1996).

Actually, "mediocrity" was a word used a lot the week the TIMSS eighth grade data report was released, and it was technically used correctly, since "mediocre" has the same root as "median." But we think this adjective was chosen less for its technical appropriateness and more for its connotation of failure, which is easier to attach to the rankings, but much less convincing if anyone chose to look at the actual scores achieved by the various nations.

The science test showed a similar pattern. Students in the United States averaged 58 percent of the items correct. Thirty-three other nations had scores within 10 percent of what we were able to attain, and only one scored more than 10 percent above us. In rank we were 17th, a long way out of the money. Nevertheless, only one nation exceeded our average science score by more than 10 percent, suggesting that we ran a pretty good race after all. These kinds of interpretation were lacking in the reports we read.

A plethora of solutions to perceived problems.
All that mediocrity on the TIMSS tests naturally led citizens and news reporters to propose solutions. The editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (December 9, 1996) suggested that students should use rulers to make every mathematical problem neat, and to use rulers also so that all the equal signs were lined up perfectly. Their logic was that if you had the students use the rulers in this way, you could slow them down, and then they could think about the mathematics problems they were doing. On the other hand, the Los Angeles Times( December 15, 1996)reported that our students needed to be speeded up, developing the automaticity to do simple multiplication problems in their heads in 8/10ths of a second or less. Then there is the Orange County Register (January 8, 1997) reporting that the TIMSS study provides empirical evidence that the new math standards and teaching methods are a total failure. But the St. Petersburg Times (November 21, 1996), correctly we think, reported that the TIMSS data supported the use of the new mathematics standards and teaching methods.

,dd .Slowing them down or speeding them up, throwing out the standards or putting them in, seems to be a sad kind of search for magic bullets and Holy Grails, a search to assure parents that their children's test scores will be high and competitive with other nations. But a little study of the previous international mathematics survey, reported less than a decade ago, reveals most of what we need to know about the causes of high and low mathematics performance in the United States.

The lack of discussion about wealth and poverty.
There is dramatic evidence to support the importance of poverty and wealth in explaining the differences within and between countries, some of it coming from a sub-study of the TIMSS. A group of 20 public school districts, made up of 32 elementary schools, 17 middle schools, and six high schools, primarily on the North Shore of Chicago, formed the First in the World Consortium (Kroeze & Johnson, 1997). They were responding, in part, to comparative psychologist Harold Stevenson of the University of Michigan. Some time ago Stevenson made the ridiculous claim that none of the classrooms he studied in the Chicago area was anywhere near as good as the Japanese classrooms that he studied (see Stevenson and Stigler, 1992; Stevenson, Yee and Stigler, 1986). The First in the World Consortium bravely set out to prove that American public schools with the resources to do their job can, indeed, do their job quite well. These schools serve a wealthy and predominantly white community and that, unfortunately, has meaning for understanding schooling in contemporary America. These were communities where middle- and upper-income families had jobs that paid well and therefore they provided health care for their children; where parents insured that their children had the physical space and learning tools that were needed to achieve in school; where parents communicated strong educational values and helped create a home environment that was compatible with the school achievement; where parental values and income combine to provide their local schools with adequate funding, resulting in competent teachers, working for decent rates of pay, in well maintained physical plants. These conditions are typical of the public schools in communities all over this nation where it is possible for people to pursue and realize the American dream. These conditions are prevalent in the multitude of communities where families have some stability and dignity in their lives, and therefore raise children that have some vision of themselves as competent, useful, and well-remunerated adults. In communities such as these, teachers talk about standards, set high expectations, receive good training, and are given the chance to implement a rigorous and successful curriculum.

So what happened to these exemplary American public schools when they said to the TIMSS directorate "test us if you dare, we'll pay the bill?" They got their way and entered the study. Students of theirs were randomly selected to be tested in the same way that a national sample would have been tested in any of the other participating countries. When their mathematics test results were announced they ranked fifth overall, but their score was exceeded statistically by only one other nation! And in science, the First in the World Consortium ranked second in the world, but statistically no nation scored any higher than they did! Not bad, we think, for a set of public schools that is said by its critics to be unable to deliver.

But did the press rejoice about this? No. Was there much attention given to this fabulous public school performance? No. Did this study generate anywhere near as much press as the overall TIMSS where our nation's eighth graders were described as behind the pack, mediocre, or just giving one more poor performance? No.

The press provided limited coverage of this event even though the President of the United States, the Secretary of Education and the head of the House Committee overseeing education all traveled to Illinois to proudly announce the significant and completely unambiguous good news about the performance of some of our public school students. Teachers we meet all over the nation have never heard of these heartening results. Moreover, in the stories we read,. the spin that was put on these results was that it was okay for these schools to do well, after all, they were predominantly "rich and white." But implicit in this view is a terrible form of racism and classism, implying by the very same logic that it is also okay for schools not to do well because they are populated by the black and the poor. Color and income are not indicators of ability, but of resources available. "White and rich" means first rate schools not first rate genes. The dismissal of the achievements of the First in the World Consortium as, somehow, "expected," implies that for some Americans quality education is a right. Implied, as well, is that this right need not be extended to all.

The modest performance of American students on the TIMSS led to hypotheses about the causes for our failure to achieve as high as some other nations. The Secretary of Education and the various professional education groups in the United States suggested that our problems were caused by: poor preparation of our teachers; teaching procedures to do mathematics, rather than the conceptual knowledge needed to understand mathematics; a national lack of standards; the lack of a focused curriculum; the lack of high expectations for performance; a lack of time to prepare lessons by teachers; a lack of an apprenticeship in teaching that helps novice teachers learn their craft; and some others. All of these probably contribute to our modest level of performance in the international competition. But history and the data from the First in the World Consortium tells us that one whopping big factor is also affecting the performance of American kids, namely, the economics of family, neighborhood and school district. Poverty in school district budgets, in the neighborhoods and among the families of our urban ethnic minorities and our rural poor, is strongly related to test performance. And the United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty among all the industrialized democracies—21.5 percent. No other industrialized nation is even close, and many nations (e.g. Sweden, Finland, Switzerland) have a rate of children in poverty of around 3 percent (Rainwater and Smeedling, 1995). These statistics—not our rank in math or science—are more likely the cause of America's educational problems, but these statistics do not receive much attention.

Lessons from the reporting of the TIMSS.
So what can we conclude from the recent TIMSS reporting? Certainly some of it was fair and reasoned. But we think there were some problems too. There was bias against suggesting that relative wealth and poverty is a causal factor in achievement; there was a lack of historical understanding of the international tests; there was a widespread misunderstanding about the difference between ranks and scores and the difference in interpretations that accompany each of these ways of presenting the same data; there was ignorance about the concept of standard error of measurement and the nature of social science data in general; there was confusion, or bias, in interpreting the meaning of the average performance of the United States; there was bias in the lack of space given to the extremely high performance of the students in the well-supported public schools of the First in the World Consortium.

This lack of reporting on the good news, we might add, is not new. In July 1992, the parent organization of the TIMSS study, the International Association for the Assessment of Educational Achievement (EEA) released the news about a 31-nation study of reading. In that study our 9-year-olds ranked second, while our 14-year-olds ranked ninth but were tied, statistically, with the second place finisher. Essentially we placed second behind tiny, homogenous, family friendly, medically well-covered, Finland. The press conference to announce the excellent achievement of the remarkably heterogeneous United States drew zero reporters. No one showed. Nobody. If Europeans hadn't carried the story and made so much out of it, the American press would never have heard of it. But the European stories soon drifted over, and USA Today finally broke this story of high academic achievement to the public, though months after the original press conference had been called and failed to attract reporters (Bracey, 1994). Most newspapers had nothing to say about this noteworthy and positive accomplishment by our public school students.

The National Adult Literacy Study (NALS).

Now let us look briefly at literacy in the United States through the reporting of the well regarded National Adult Literacy Study (NALS) (Kirsch, Jungeblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993). This study was conducted by the Educational Testing Service for the National Center for Education Statistics. The press conference accompanying the release of this report resulted in a front page story in the New York Times (September 9, 1993) with a headline that read: "Half of adults in US lack reading and mathematics ability." The Washington Post also reported the story. Its headline was: "Literacy of 90 million is deficient." (September 9, 1993).

The nation's weekly newsmagazines joined with hundreds of newspapers to decry the awful state of literacy in America and the obvious failure of public education. The reporting suggested the nation was imperiled. We will always remain puzzled, however, about why these periodicals all chose to publish written versions of this terrible news, when it was apparent from the research that so few in the nation could read their reports!

Putting the study in context. Let us look closer at the study than did the press. First, the tests of prose, document and quantitative literacy were just that, formal tests, and therefore not part of the daily lives of the people involved. The literacy skills of this sample were not evaluated in the contexts of their everyday lives. Except for academics, who have come to value literacy for itself, literacy is best thought of as instrumental and cannot be understood when it is removed and abstracted from the environments in which it operates.

Second, the test from which we deduce the different literacy skills of the nation was 15 minutes in length. Short tests can be used to profile the performance of groups of people, but a 15-minute test cannot provide an accurate assessment of the literacy skills of an individual who is unaccustomed to formal testing. And most of this sample were not accustomed to testing. We hypothesize that the combination of a 15-minute formal test and the lack of a measure of literacy in context leads to a large underestimation of the true level of literacy of the individuals that comprised the sample. But no reporter brought up this likelihood.

In each area of literacy assessed, five levels of ability were created. Level I and Level 2, scoring low, were deemed inadequate by the test developers and were labeled the illiterates by the press. By extrapolation from the sample to the general population, almost 50 percent of the population of American adults were then declared to be illiterate. This was the basis for the broad assertions made by the media. Obviously, any nation with 50 percent of its people so terribly handicapped in reading is a nation in peril.

According to the study, we are a nation comprised of half dunces and half functional literates, with hardly anybody highly proficient at understanding complex prose. The report claimed that around 97 percent of the adults in America are unable to "interpret a brief phrase from a lengthy news article" (Kirsch et al, 1993, p 11). So the press wrote unhesitatingly and uncritically about a study that concluded their reading audience was severely handicapped. Didn't reporters wonder who was reading their newspapers and magazines? Couldn't they smell that something was fishy?

What did we learn that reporters did not from reading the full report about the NALS sample performing at Level I and 2—those dubbed the "illiterates"? The persons at Level I and 2 are much more frequently poor minorities, though almost half the white population were found "illiterate" too (Kirsch et al., 1993, p. 113). It looks like prose literacy scores are related to family incomes, ethnicity, level of parental education, and so forth. Hardly a surprise. Scores on the test also revealed that around half the 16- to 54-year-olds are fully literate, scoring at Level 3 or over. But the 55- to 64-year-olds in the nation, the age of most of our leaders in government and industry, scored on average much lower. Fifty-seven percent of these poor folks scored at Level I or 2. This means, according to the researchers, that only slightly more than 40 percent of the 55- to 64-year-olds in the nation have the ability to make sense of the documents they read. According to the researchers, however, they are not America's worst problem: fully 76 percent of those over 65 years of age were classified as illiterate as well (Kirsch et al., 1993, p. 116). We might infer that because of their severe inability to function as readers most in this age group should not bother with books and magazines, but counseled instead into TV viewing. Since this age group contains a high proportion of American voters, perhaps they should also be barred from voting until we re-institute poll testing!

Is this starting to sound ludicrous? We hope so. We think a little common sense would have gone a long way to dismissing the charges of widespread illiteracy in the U. S.

If any one had looked closely at the report they would have discovered in the appendix that among those classified as illiterate—the level 1 and level 2 respondents—were: seventy-six percent of all those in the entire sample who were physically or mentally impaired; eighty percent of those in the entire sample who were visually impaired; sixty-six percent of those in the entire sample who had hearing difficulties; eighty percent of those in the entire sample who had learning disabilities; seventy-two percent of those in the entire sample who had a mental or emotional condition; ninety percent of those in the entire sample who were mentally retarded; seventy-nine percent of those in the entire sample who had speech disabilities; seventy-four percent of those in the entire sample who had physical disabilities; seventy percent of all those in the sample who had long-term illnesses of six months or more (Kirsch et al., 1993, p. 135).

And finally we learn that 25 percent of those who scored at the lowest level of prose literacy were not born in this country, presumably not native speakers of English (Kirsch et al., 1993, p. 119). The upshot of all this is that the two lowest levels of tested prose literacy, particularly those in Level 1, were composed of people that have overwhelming health problems and contain a disproportionate number of recent immigrants. While the health of these people should be a concern for the nation, their prose literacy performance should not be used to judge how well public schools are doing, nor how our economy will fare in the future.

The NALS sample and immigration. An inference about how American public schools are really doing could have been obtained by comparing recent immigrants in the sample with those of similar background who were born in the United States. When that is done we found that those American citizens born in Central or South America scored very low. But we also found that those with Central or South American parentage who were born in the United States scored at level 3, demonstrating adequate levels of literacy in English, at least according to the researchers. This difference in scores between generations provides a markedly different picture of literacy and schooling in America than that suggested by the news media and some of our government officials. Obviously, the larger the number of recent immigrants, the larger the number of people that are likely not to do well in a formal test of English literacy. In recent years this country has had a large surge of immigration, and therefore it now has a larger than usual non-English speaking population. Pooled data containing such individuals are likely, therefore, to underestimate the literacy levels of others in the pool, particularly those that were born and educated in the United States. The possibility that under-estimations of American literacy might have taken place was not usually reported.

Habits and characteristics of the "illiterates." The illiterates had many interesting characteristics—some of them shared by the reporters themselves. The tables included with the report tell us, for example, that 54 percent of those at Level I —the real dunces—read a newspaper every day or a few times a week! Eighty-three percent of those at Level 2—the other group of illiterates—read a newspaper every day or a few times a week. Apparently the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia was right when he once muttered "Nowadays, even the illiterates read and write.' We now have empirical proof that this is so!

The first meaning of literacy in virtually any dictionary is "the ability to read and write." Thus one should suspect a problem when illiterates are reading newspapers on a regular basis. Is it possible that the Level I and 2 individuals had read about how illiterate they were? Probably, since 93 percent of those who did read regularly attended to the editorials. Moreover, while the researchers declared these people to be greatly impaired, more than two-thirds of those at Level I and more than 95 percent of those at Level 2 reported that they believe they read and write well or very well. In our business we call this a validity problem. The researchers declared this sub-group of the sample to be incompetent, but the individuals in the sample feel quite competent. One of them—the researchers or participants in the study—must be wrong. But not one news reporter thought to ask why these poor illiterates felt so comfortable with their literacy skills or would read the newspapers on a daily basis. It seems clear to us that if the reporters had possessed a higher level of prose, document and quantitative literacy, or at least had been curious enough to read the report itself, they might have inferred that something was amiss.

A simple problem with statistical inference. Although Secretary Riley commented that illiteracy causes poverty, more than two-thirds of those at Level I and 2 were not poor by the government's own standards. In fact, more than two-thirds of the illiterates received interest from their own savings accounts, and around 85 percent received no food stamps. Secretary Riley actually would do better to think of the causal flow in this correlation as going in the other direction. That is, it is quite likely that poverty causes illiteracy more frequently than illiteracy causes poverty. And if this is true, vastly different social policies are needed. For example, if illiteracy causes poverty, as claimed by the Secretary and accepted by those reporting this story, then more aid to schools is needed and greater efforts by school people are required to reduce or eliminate the scourge of illiteracy from the nation. But if poverty is more often the cause of illiteracy, as we believe, then the agenda to reduce illiteracy is necessarily outside and not inside the schoolhouse door. In neighborhoods and communities with high levels of poverty the pernicious effects of that poverty seep into the local culture, distorting values and giving rise to lethargy, despair, drug use, crime, and violence. Literacy cannot be expected to be valued or high in subcultures characterized by despair.

Summarizing the NALS. This analysis of the nation's biggest contemporary study of literacy and illiteracy leads us to several conclusions. We think Secretary Riley's interpretation of the NALS data is wrong and therefore misdirects our attention from the real problems of America. The news stories that carried the Secretary's interpretation were negligent in not pointing out the obvious alternative, namely, that poverty probably causes illiteracy at least as often as illiteracy causes poverty—although the high correlation between the two is not in doubt.

We also think the NALS data demonstrates that the individuals that score at Level 2 are really quite competent to perform any employment task if they were familiar with or trained in the task, and motivated to learn. In fact, if the researchers and Secretary Riley had thought more about it, they might have concluded that the many craftspeople and trades people who were in Level 2 were not earning a great deal, nor working all year long, because of something other than the level of literacy that they displayed. These men and women are also overwhelmingly non-unionized. We would hypothesize that this accounts more for their lower incomes and reduced time in the work force each year than does their literacy skill, but the press never seems to interpret the data that way. The skills of the level 2 people are vastly underestimated, we think, and they should be reclassified as literate enough for the needs they and their employers have.

The danger in studies like this one is the implicit suggestion that measures of literacy represent a fixed trait. Of course this is not the case. A measure of literacy tells us where a person is on a continuum between decoding with minimum comprehension, and the critical literacy expected of those who successfully live in a world dominated by prose literacy—college professors, lawyers, scientists, and so forth. A measure of literacy is a measure of a developing skill, not a measure of a relatively fixed characteristic. We think many people at Level I and 2 seem quite capable of demonstrating higher level skills should their life circumstances require it.

We must remember that this is a nation where the economy has become service oriented. About two-thirds of the workforce is in service, and this sector of the economy is growing while the manufacturing sector is declining. In the service sector the hospitality industry employs more people than any other industry in that sector. And Wal-Mart, in retail sales, has become one of the nation's largest employers. In the current economy there is a great need for more home care aides and janitors and there is no overall shortage of mathematicians, scientists and engineers (see Rifkin, 1995). So this is not a nation that requires the highest levels of critical literacy from all its citizens as they perform their daily work. Rather, we seem to require increasing amounts of domain and job specific prose, document, quantitative and technological literacy, the kind of literacy that is taught on the job and not in schools.

Finally, our interpretation of the NALS reporting suggests that many in the American media are in desperate need of literacy training programs. They failed the prose, document and quantitative test that NALS provided them.

Additional Concerns with the Press.

We have some additional concerns about educational reporting in our nation. These include concerns about: bias in the coverage of rich and poor schools, who speaks to the press, school-business linkages, and the demonization of youth.

Who speaks for education? We will not explore in depth the problems of who speaks for education to the press. We note only that Chester Finn often does so, and is often rightly identified as a former Assistant Secretary of Education and a Policy analyst for the Hudson Institute. Certainly he is bright, articulate and experienced. But it is true, as well, that Dr. Finn is a founding member of the Edison Project, Christopher Whittle's group of entrepreneurs that had planned to open a thousand private schools by the turn of the century. This group could make millions of dollars if voucher plans are approved. It serves each member of the Edison Project well to promote the belief that public education is a failure and that privatization is the only sensible solution. Former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander also has received a great deal of money from Whittle, and shares his views that vouchers are good for the nation (J. Friedman, 1992). Why, when Finn or Alexander write or talk, aren't they identified as individuals who may be compromised with regard to their objectivity? Others who criticize the public schools hold strong fundamentalist religious beliefs that lead them to want their children segregated from those in secular schools (Berliner, 1997). They seek vouchers to fund such schools, and by attacking the public schools they come a little closer to achieving their goals. Critics with such strong segregationist views or with pecuniary interests should be identified by the press when their comments are reported, just as are the NEA and AFT representatives.

School-business linkages. We also will not explore in depth the increasing and problematic view of schools as a market, an idea promoted by business and aided and abetted by a market-driven, and we believe, a complacent press (see Molnar, 1996). Typically the abuses that occur go unreported as the schools become indistinguishable from other locations where Nike, McDonalds, the Dairy council, Disney and IBM compete for consumers. In our estimation this is partly due to the incorporation of the press into the same conglomerates that sell to youth through the schools, and because newspapers need the money from the ads these merchandisers buy. From an educational standpoint there are deep philosophical problems involved with combining merchandising and schooling. What we regard as both a conflict of interest and unseemly behavior are not even recognized as problematic in much educational reporting. 

Demonizing youth. We also will not explore the problems that occur when an uncritical press promotes myths that serve to demonize youth (Males, 1996). Examples of this include the distortions about sexual activity of teen-agers and their high pregnancy rate. Almost all of the early sexual activity and ensuing pregnancies of young females is the result of predatory, fully adult males, often family members. It is not necessarily female teen-age sexual morals that are our national problem, it is adult male morality to which we need to attend. But one would never know it from the newspapers. Moreover, the well-publicized violence of youth is almost fully explained by the poverty of youth in the United States. America is the undisputed leader in the industrialized world in percent of youth in poverty (Rainwater and Smeeding, 1995). It is the pernicious effects of this poverty and the easy availability of weapons, not the uncontrollable hormones of puberty, that results in youth violence. But one would never know it from the newspapers because not many reporters know how correlations and other statistics really work. The great youth drug culture is still another myth that is promulgated. But 99 percent of the illegal-drug deaths recorded in the United States in 1993 were adults; only one percent of the deaths were teens. All of these deaths are tragic, to be sure, but it is hardly a teen drug problem that the nation faces.

What harm is there in demonizing youth? After all, it's just done to sell papers. We think it does more than that. Either by implication, or sometimes quite directly, the schools are held to blame for our youths' alleged licentiousness, violence, and drug use. Therefore, those schools are deemed unworthy of support. Demonizing our teens though lurid headlines and vivid prose, therefore, results in a loss of confidence in the public schools and aides those that promote privatization.

Conclusion

We think it is inappropriate to expect a democratic free press to be anything but highly critical of the society in which it lives. That is one of its functions. But it is not inappropriate to ask for balance. And we do not think we have that.

It seems to us that our democracy depends just as much on a free and efficient public school system as it does on a free press. It would be ironic, as well as tragic, if the imbalance in the reporting that exists were to lead to the abandonment of our public schools and a dramatic rise in private school rates of attendance. We are sure this would result in greater privilege for a few and less of a chance for success in life for the many. And when those circumstances occur, the press is always captured by the power of the few, and no longer can claim to be totally free. We may be well on the way to that sad state now, as recent critics contend.

By continuing the unfair, unremitting negative characterization of our schools and our youth, by searching for the blood and too often avoiding the more reasonable interpretations that are possible, and by failing to describe the magnificent achievements that also characterize public education, our free press may ultimately become less free. The natural alliance between the media and public school critics could destroy both the free press and the free public educational system that we now enjoy in this nation. It may be in the interest of our press to ponder this line of reasoning, and think about providing more balance in educational reporting—

Stevenson, H. W., Yee, S. Y., & Stigler, J. W. (1986). Mathematics achievement of Chinese, Japanese, and American Children. Science, 231, 693-699.