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The debates swirling around education never stray too far from the forefront of key concerns for Americans. In South Carolina, for example, education grew to be a central issue of the 1998 governor's race-the arguments centering on the lottery and video poker versus vouchers and high standards for teachers and students. Concurrent with the political season, The Atlantic ran a feature artide on education-Nicholas Lemann's " `Ready Read!'" applauding Robert E. Slavin's Success for All reading program. Both the South Carolina governor's race and the Lemann article epitomize a central aspect of the current educational debate-- dishonesty. That dishonesty runs through almost all the educational discourse within political arenas; such dishonesty grows from the clash inherent in the power of positivist measurements-primarily through standardized testing-within a culture that is concurrently influenced by post-modern perspectives.
Since the rise of Taylorism at the turn of the century, education has been driven by a belief in empirical data, the belief that we can objectively generate data from standardized tests to assess both individual students and entire educational systems (Kliebard, 1995, pp. 81-82). Within the last few decades, academics have simultaneously developed a somewhat cynical post-modern attitude that such objectivity is false, or at least misleading and oversimplified. The result has been that educators function under a Jekyll and Hyde personality-- both gathering and displaying huge amounts of empirical data on educational performance while often discounting much of that data as biased or only relatively true; we often explain that the findings are far too complicated for mere journalists and parents to understand while we bash journalists for displaying the same data in overly simplistic formats, thus misleading that unaware public. In short, the majority of Americans still embrace the objective truth of empirical data while the intellectual elite harbor a cynicism toward objectivity-- though they still produce large amounts of statistical studies.
To move beyond this problematic duality, educators speaking with a unified though not monolithic voice must demand educational honesty. We must be honest about textbooks and curriculum programs, we must be honest about standardized testing, we must be honest about the nature of educating, and we must be honest with our students in the classroom. In the face of dilemmas grounded in both positivistic and...