NEWTON'S LAW: ARE U.S. SCHOOL SHORTCOMINGS A SELF-FULFILLED PROPHECY?

A colleague was scanning the day's headlines earlier this week and shook his head sadly.

"I guess they're never going to come out with a report that says American education is great," he said.

It was meant, I suppose, as a wry observation, but it sounded almost wistful. His point came through: once a bad rap begins, it's hard to stop it.

Some news stories have the novelty of a steak house menu. A seat belt or smoke detector goes unused and a tragedy results. Soviets say they'll study an issue and skeptics say not to trust their deliberations. A Democrat begins his campaign for president by criticizing the incumbent.

These are the meat and potatoes of journalism, as predictable as if articles marveled about the sun's daily ascent in the east.

We are no more surprised now by the predictability of government reports saying that the American education system is second-rate, isn't preparing young people for the lives they face and is falling short of achievements reached in other nations.

There was a time a couple of decades ago when we wondered why Johnny couldn't read. Even if we knew no one named Johnny, we were collectively concerned about his academic troubles. In the 1980s, we discovered that Johnny was dragging the whole country down with him; the nation was "at risk" because education wasn't what it should be.

Every few years (or maybe it's every few months), a commission of well-meaning public servants comes forth to a bank of microphones and announces that, darn it, American schools again haven't made the grade and that dumbness is gaining ground like Satan at a strip joint.

The latest word came this week when the Education Department and the National Education Goals Panel (an agency constructed for doomsaying if ever there was one) proclaimed that if we knew 20 years ago what we know now, we would have been pretty bright. As it stands, we're still behind.

America has a number of pro~blems that are much easier to quantify. When the nation's budget is out of balance, mathematics can tell us that. Educational progress is more difficult to fit into a formula.

By being "behind," it is usually perceived that Japanese students thump American kids in math, science and days in the classroom. People of Japan indeed seem to have something going for them. Less than 50 years after their country was decimated by war, the Japanese host eight of the world's 10 largest banks. All of this is accomplished in a nation the size of California and with negligible natural resources.

There is also a growing concern in that nation about karoshi, which is the death of Japanese workers from overexertion. If the Japanese are rich and smart and accomplished, shouldn't they be figuring out a way not to work themselves to death?

Americans, trailing in the classroom, might just be pacing themselves.

While these incidents of karoshi are probably overblown in news reports, they are likely as frequent as cases of American college graduates suing their alma maters because they can't read, which also gets plenty of play in the media.

The arguments involved here are sometimes political and, therefore, convoluted. For example, America can't be competitive in the world economy because of its deficiencies in education, some claim. Others say that America is not competitive because there are too many lawyers. Becoming a lawyer requires a significant amount of education. Hence, to be competitive, we can't be too dumb or too smart. You figure it out; it's beyond me.

My degree is in education and I taught high school a long time ago. One thing I remember from my training is the danger inherent in self-fulfilling prophecies; in other words, if you label a certain student as a slow learner, your actions concerning that student make known your expectations. Thus, if a student has only to live up to this ~expectation, you are proven right, though not pleasantly so.

America at this point might be fulfilling a forecast we wished on ourselves. The nation thought Johnny couldn't read and now he's having more trouble than ever. The stories of our educational failures have become so ingrained in our national psyche that recovery now seems an insurmountable task.

While the country can't pretend educational problems don't exist, neither should it continue to lambaste educators over what has been a fundamentally sound system. The quandary is not just in the schools but in us all.