ABSTRACT
Crisis in education? What crisis? Recent media reportage on schooling in Britain, and elsewhere, is characterized by panics over a litany of alleged failures in state schooling:
• falling standards of student achievement compared with the suggested performance of British students of past generations and against the performance of their international peers in Western Europe and Pacificrim nations;
• the failure of urban comprehensive schools; • teacher incompetence; • ‘out of control’ student behaviour; • inadequate teacher training in basic skills instruction in English and
mathematics; • irrelevant educational research in higher education.
