David C. Berliner

David C. Berliner is a professor of education at Arizona State University in Tempe and coauthor of The Manufactured Crisis: Myth, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. In the following viewpoint, Berliner maintains that the quality of public education has not deteriorated over the past few decades. The drop in SAT scores is actually small, considering that today’s students—including many underprivileged minorities and working-class people—are being compared to wealthy, Ivy League–bound students who took the SAT in 1941. Moreover, the author asserts, other standardized tests reveal gains in reading, writing, math, and science. Berliner grants that schools serving disadvantaged students in poor districts often lack educational quality; on the whole, however, U.S. public education has enhanced academic achievement since...