ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 5, 1997 TAG: 9701030060
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: GEOFF SEAMANS
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS
HERE'S A pop quiz for the new year. True or false:
1. High-school students' standardized-test scores are lower today than 20 years ago.
2. The school-dropout rate has risen over the past 25 years.
3. Abuse of illegal drugs has skyrocketed in the past quarter-century.
4. The rate of violent crime has grown steadily over the past 10 years.
5. Black Americans are no longer making the economic and educational gains of the 1950s and '60s, and in fact may now be worse off than before the civil-rights revolution.
If you answered "true" to each question, you have plenty of company. Judging from public-opinion polls, media news coverage and political debates of the day, most Americans would agree.
But in fact, as was noted in an article last month in U.S. News & World Report, each of the above statements is false.
Student test scores are no worse than, and indeed may recently have become slightly better than, the scores of the mid-'70s.
In 1970, only 55 percent of adult Americans had finished high school; by 1994, that figure had risen to 81 percent.
Illegal drugs peaked in 1979, when some 25 million Americans abused them. Today, about 13 million Americans do.
The violent-crime rate has declined in each of the past three years, and is at its lowest level since 1989.
Black Americans' median family income, adjusted for inflation, has continued to climb into the mid-1990s. So has educational attainment: Median years of schooling and the college-completion rate for black Americans are now higher than for most Western Europeans.
This discontinuity between perception and reality is part of what the magazine, in the lead article of the package, called an attitude of "I'm OK, you're not" - a tendency among Americans to be satisfied with the conditions of their own lives and those of their communities, but to believe the country as a whole is on the fast track to perdition.
To explain this attitude, the article cites a TV-saturated nation. In an earlier era, people generalized about the state of the nation from their own experience. Nowadays, they perceive the nation as television portrays it, even when it contradicts their own local experience.
I don't dispute the point, especially if television (and related media) is taken to include the mayhem depicted on "entertainment" as well as "news" programming. But I'd like to offer a couple of additional possibilities.
For one, maybe it just takes time for reality to sink in. It's not as if education, drug-abuse, crime or race-relations problems don't exist. But our understanding of them may lag behind the actual state of affairs.
This past spring, I attended an economics conference for journalists where the central question was why Americans seemed so worried about an economy that by most objective yardsticks was doing so well. Six months later, the question had become moot. By then, polls showed majorities of Americans to have confidence in the economy.
Another possibility: Our perceptions are influenced by those who have a vested interest in influencing them.
The altered economic perception, for instance, was hastened not only by the reality of improved economic performance but also by the election-year desire of presidential and congressional incumbents to foster it. On the other hand, an army of consultants and gurus are in the business of selling us solutions to whatever ails us. Their interest is the opposite: To drum up business, they first must convince us that we have ailments serious enough to require their ministrations.
Sometimes, of course, we do. But the same skepticism we reserve for the bearers of glad tidings might well be applied also to the pureyors of doom and gloom.
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB