Education Politics: The Right's Data-Proof Ideologues
Most of my colleagues and I work in some sector of educational research. We research-ers deal with data. We try to be disinterested with regard to what the data say, letting them guide us wherever possible. This neutralist stance puts us at quite a disadvantage when dealing with people whose ideologies make them data-proof. This weakness is now of great import because we're up against a group of ideologically driven, right-wing public school critics with an agenda for changing, perhaps eliminating, American public schools. Their ideologies act as prisms, blocking or at best distorting what the data on American education actually say.
They are at war with the rest of those in education. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have both issued declarations of war against the larger society. "This is an intellectual, conceptual, and ideological war," the Hudson Institute's Chester E. Finn Jr. said recently in The Washington Times . Since this exact quote also appears in a Hudson Institute publication, we may safely assume it is not a misattribution. The Times article also declared that the Hudson Institute was gearing up for war and called Mr. Finn a "bomb thrower," apparently with approbation. Bomb throwers, in any case, are not generally thought to be seeking facts that contradict their beliefs.
I first noticed the right's data-proof stance when I debated Diane Ravitch, then assistant U.S. secretary of education, at the 1992 Education Writers Association meeting. We were given the question "Are American schools as bad as they say?" I had recently published a long article, with mountains of data that compelled the answer "no." I spoke first and presented as many facts as I could in the 20 minutes allotted. Ms. Ravitch then began her "side" of the "debate" with, "That's not really an interesting question," and proceeded to deliver a tangent on the history of American education. The back and forth that followed the opening statements...
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