Big Daddy and Brick confront the power of mendacity in a key scene from Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, swept into popular culture by the 1958 film starring Elizabeth Taylor (Maggie), Paul Newman (Brick), and Burl Ives (Big Daddy).

In the play, Big Daddy replies to Brick’s question, “Have you ever heard the word ‘mendacity’?”:

Sure. Mendacity is one of them five dollar words that politicians throw back and forth at each other….

Don’t it mean lying and liars?…

I’ve lived with mendacity!—Why can’t you live with it? Hell, you got to live with it, there’s nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?

The scene in the film is iconic:

• • •

I cannot shake the profound feeling that Big Daddy’s speech is not some remnant of the distant past, even the distant stain of Southern heritage on the soul of the United States of America. I cannot shake the profound feeling that Big Daddy could be talking about the education reform movement that began with a lie, A Nation at Risk, that grew out of a manufactured crisis—as David Berliner explains in “Three Decades of Lies.”

What we need is a good old fashioned confrontation of how public education is being consumed by advocacy in the marketplace of mendacity.

About two years ago, I warned that think tank advocacy parading as scholarship was at the core of all sorts of school choice ventures. Much in the intervening months has shown that warning underestimated both the mendacity of school choice advocates and the gullibility of the public.

The mendacity? Let me offer a few:

• Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, both during her tenure and again in the Huffington Post in 2011, demonstrates either a disqualifying incompetence with statistics or more likely a key qualification for political appointees—mendacity. NCLB, you see, caused a rise in test scores, before it was implemented.
• Like Spellings’s rush to prove NCLB a success, Baltimore already believes that Common Core State Standards are behind a rise in test scores, except Stephen Krashen (as he did with the Spellings claim) explains, not so fast.
• Maintaining the tradition of mendacity, the Obama administration, headed by current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has simultaneously criticized standardized testing while blackmailing nearly all states to increase the amount and stakes associated with new tests coming on the heels of Common Core State Standards (yet another heaping pile of corporate mendacity). In Orwellian fashion, Duncan has cloaked his speeches in civil rights discourse to lament the failures of the standards and high-stakes testing movement in order to call for better standards and better high-stakes testing.
• If you read the media or listen to politicians, Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charters are the most amazing thing since sliced bread. But as we should know by now, the claims offered in much of the current research masking advocacy are misrepresentations, exaggerations, or essentially mendacity. As Camilli explains about the often cited Mathematica report on KIPP:

The benefits, however, appear to be overstated in the evaluation study for two reasons. First, translating educational outcomes into “months” of additional learning is an inexact science and can lead to absurd results if taken literally. Second, reported measures of effectiveness that take attrition into account are smaller than the estimates used to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of KIPP. In addition, the effect of KIPP on higher-order reasoning is less certain than is portrayed in the report. The latter topic requires additional empirical work to provide greater clarity.

• And Florida is home of more home-grown mendacity, as exposed by John Romano:

No matter the explanation, supporters of a parent trigger law went one step too far when they produced a petition riddled with inconsistencies and doubt.

The petition was supposed to prove this pro-charter school legislation had grass roots support among parents, but instead it highlighted what critics have been saying all along:

This law is about pushing Jeb Bush’s education agenda, and little else.

The petition with 1,400 or so signatures appears to have duplicate names. And people from outside of Florida. And signatures from people who said they never signed it.

It was like pulling the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz, except nobody in this tale has any interest in courage, brains or heart.

• All of these are in the wakes of Teach for American (TFA) propaganda and self-promotion (and see Gary Rubinstein’s three biggest TFA lies), Michelle Rhee’s “gravy train” of hypocrisy, media misrepresenting “three high-quality teachers in a row,” media misrepresenting the Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff (CFR) numbers game about life-time earning value added by teachers, and at least 150 years of demonizing public education as a failure, as an institution always in crisis, as Deleuze recognized two decades ago:

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure—prison, hospital, factory, school, family….The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. (pp. 3-4)

As I highlighted in my warning about advocacy, when the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) confronted research they commissioned about school choice, when that research contradicted their school choice advocacy, George Lightbourne offered the following contradictory comments:

The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find…. [Dodenhoff] discovered that there are realistic limits on the degree to which parental involvement can drive market-based reform in Milwaukee…. The message from the study is that educational leaders and policy makers must continue to strive to increase parental choice and parental involvement.

And thus the culture of mendacity that is the current education reform movement.

Is Big Daddy right? Must we “live with it, there’s nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?”