Obama's Ed Speech: Misinformed, or Disinforming?
In his first major education speech last week, President Obama misinformed the public with major claims that simply weren't true. The cumulative effect of these untruths was to paint a picture of public education that is much gloomier than it really is. Before turning to FactCheck.org and other sources to set the record straight, a larger question needs asking: Why did Obama make these false claims? Logically, the possible answers seem to be either: a) Obama himself was misinformed by his advisors and/or speech-writers, and was unaware that he was misrepresenting the truth; or b) the president knew about the distortions, but found it expedient to spread them anyway. (If I'm missing other possibilities, fill me in.)
Both answers are disturbing. If Obama innocently passed his talking points along from Arne Duncan's team at the DoE, then we have cause to worry that our Secretary of Education lacks either knowledge or intellectual integrity, and neither explanation is encouraging. If Obama did know about the distortions, then we have to ask what his motives were for spreading them.
To say that he was selling his education agenda with this speech doesn't satisfy, because it had already been enacted as law before the speech was given. The net result is that the American public walked away from the speech thinking its public education system was doing worse than it really is, with less faith in that system. What's the benefit in that? School me.
Here's FactCheck.org:
We certainly wouldn't argue that education can't be improved, but some of the figures Obama used painted a bleaker picture than actually exists:
- The high school dropout rate hasn't "tripled in the past 30 years," as Obama claimed. According to the Department of Education, it has actually declined by a third.
- Eighth-grade math scores haven't "fallen" to ninth place compared with other countries. U.S. scores have climbed to that ranking from as low as 28th place in 1995.
- Obama also set a goal "of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" by 2020. But in terms of bachelor's degrees, we're nearly there. The U.S. is already second only to Norway in the percentage of adults age 25 to 64 with a four-year degree, and trails by just 1 percentage point.
The Daily Howler has much more to say about the errors in the Obama speech, and Gerald Bracey gives a must-read 1998 analysis of the flaws inherent in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) test upon which so much of these reports of America's international rankings are based. The bottom line, as Bracey puts it:
The official TIMSS story is an exercise in political rhetoric
and comes very close to being a hoax perpetrated on the whole world.
(If any of you can address whether the TIMMS test has improved in the decade since, please do.)
Again, though, my question: how do we explain all this misinformation?
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