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From: jlks@u.washington.edu (Jordan Schwartz)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: History of a Hoax (NYT Article)
Date: 10 Mar 1994 22:15:53 GMT

Here it is, in its entirety. Terry: Can we can this archived somewhere? It was kind of a bitch to enter, and I'd hate for it to just disappear after a few people glance at it, if you know what I mean...

Typos are mine, words pushed together are my word processors inability to communicate with my telecom software...

The following is reprinted here totally without the permission of any of the involved parties, and I sure as heck hope they don't mind.

New York Times Magazine Section, March 6, 1994, pp. 46-49 The History of a Hoax
By Barry O'Neill

_Those famous lists of school troubles may not exactly be a hoax. But they sure have been stretched by people eager to decry America's ills._

We often define ourselves more by our misdeeds than by our accomplishments. Twenty years after my father died, I leafed through his school diaries and found a side of him that I hadn't known. The events he considered worth recording weren't his successes but the trouble he got into: "fought with Jimmy Egan," "running in the hall, broke statue of Virgin Mary," "teacher took my slingshot."

For many worried adults, the offenses of young people have become a measure of America's well-being. Last April someone tacked a survey on a Yale bulletin board comparing the top problems of public schools in the 1940's and 1980's. In the 40's the problems were: 1. talking; 2. chewing gum; 3. making noise; 4. running in the halls; 5. getting out of turn in line; 6. wearing improper clothing; 7. not putting paper in wastebaskets.

The top problems in the 80's had become: 1. drug abuse; 2. alcohol abuse; 3. pregnancy; 4. suicide; 5. rape; 6. robbery; 7. assault.

Something stopped me. The old-time problems seemed too trivial, the contrast between then and now too tidy. My father could have bested the 1940 list any day, and in my own school years I worried about bullies starting fistfights or stealing my lunch, not kids cutting in line at the drinking fountain. A 1984 Gallup poll asking teachers to name the biggest school problems recorded the top two as parent apathy and lack of financial support, but drugs were near the bottom. In 1991 the National Center for Education Statistics asked specifically about discipline and safety issues, and educators' prime complaints were tardiness, absenteeism and fighting. Again drugs feel near the bottom, well below tobacco.

Puzzled by these inconsistencies, I tried to locate the source of the list of school problems. The list on the bulletin board had been taken from a book published by the Young and Rubicam Foundation, and arm of the ad agency that created the slogan "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." But it attributed the research to the California Dept. of Ed. I scoured computer bibliographies and data bases, but could find no specific title or date or author. I began to suspect that the lists were folklore, like the famous alligators crawling through New York's sewers.

If so, they were a rare variety, folklore of the eminent and powerful. William Bennett, a former Sec. of Ed., used them in television talks, editorials and speeches to promote "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators," his 1993 book on America's moral decay. The lists were not just the oratory of conservatives: Anna Quindlen, Herb Caen and Carl Rowan included them in their columns. A former Harvard president, Derek Bok, recounts the lists to the Harvard Club of Chicago. Joseph Fernandez, former chancellor of New York City's schools, used them to argue for his curriculum reforms, and the publisher Mortimer Zuckerman saw them as an out-growth of television violence. Dr. Joycelyn Elders, then the Surgeon General nominee, said they showed the need for social-service and health programs.

Senators, mayors, state education officials, university professors, dean - these were notables who would never stand up to announce the discovery of alligators underneath New York, but they accepted the lists as factual. They were reported in all the major news magazines. In addition the Quindlen column, The New York Times printed them five times (not as fact but in quotes of various people), and they became commonplace in grass-roots America, popping up in Dear Abby, Ann Landers and countless letters to the editor. They have become the most quoted "results" of educational research, and possibly the most influential.

We will never know who first said "let's do lunch," but this was a different case - an item from popular culture that had circulated widely through the news media, leaving a traceable record. I was determined to find its origin.

I wrote letters to users asking them where they found their versions, and paged through education journals looking for the originator. After several months I found him. As I had suspected, his lists were not scientifically valid, but neither were they hoaxes. He had offered them simply as his opinion, never meaning to hoodwink the experts. It was later users who added background details, like William Bennett's elaboration about an "ongoing" survey asking teachers "the same question" over the years.

Some felt free to modify the lists. Rush Limbaugh, for example, cited the authority of Bennett but added a few school offenses of his won. Others advanced the date, making the results sound more current; in November 1992, when The Wall Street Journal reprinted the lists from the CQ Researcher, the modern survey's date jumped from 1980 to 1990. If there was any hoaxing, it was users hoaxing themselves.

Their originator was T. Cullen Davis of Fort Worth, a born-again Christian who devised the lists as a fundamentalist attack on public schools. Davis was born again through a remarkable course of events. He and his brother Ken had built the family business in oil equipment into a billion-dollar conglomerate, but in 1976 Cullen was arrested for a double murder, accused of shooting his stepdaughter and the lover of his estranged wife. The sensational trials, which featured lurid tales of his wife's drug and sex parties and his mansion, became the talk of bridge tables and barrooms across Texas.

After his acquittals, Davis turned from the fast life to Christianity. One night at his home, he and James Robison, a television evangelist, took hammers to Davis's million-dollar collection of jade and ivory statues, smashing them as false religion. He plunged into a reading program on public schools, fought plans for sex education and lobbied for the teaching of creationism.

Sometime around 1982, Davis constructed the lists and passed them around to other fundamentalists. His 1940 offenses were close to the seven on the Yale bulletin board: 1. talking 2. Chewing gum; 3. running in the halls; 4. wearing improper clothing; 5. making noise; 6. not putting paper in wastebaskets; 7. getting out of turn in line. But he listed 20 modern problems: 1. rape; 2. robbery; 3. assault; 4. personal theft; 5. burglary; 6. drug abuse; 7. arson; 8. bombings; 9. alcohol abuse; 10. carrying weapons; 11. absenteeism; 12. vandalism; 13. murder; 14. extortion; 15. gang warfare; 16. pregnancies; 17. abortions; 18. suicide; 19. venereal disease; 20. lying and cheating.

I asked him how he had arrived at his items. "They weren't done from a scientific survey," he told me. "How did I know what the offenses in the schools were in 1940? I was there. How do I know what they are now? I read the newspapers."

His recollections that he formed the lists entirely from scratch must be faulty. His first 10 modern offenses are almost identical in wording to items on a questionnaire from a survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, which asked principals whether they had reported certain _crimes_ in their schools during a five-month period in 1974-1975. This survey was published in the Safe School study of 1977-78, which was widely distributed. Rape, robbery and assault held the top places not because they were the top problems, but because the researchers used a standard ordering in crime reports: first crimes against people, then crimes against property, then others. Curiously, murder does not appear among the serious items at the head of Davis's modern list. It shows up only after playing hooky and vandalizing. The reason is that the survey relied upon a list of crimes for which researchers could interview the victims, so murder obviously was left off.

Thus, Davis's modern list is made up not of survey answers but of the questions. His list of 1940 problems, however, seems genuinely to date from that time. It is close to the wording of a 1943 list in a Texas teachers' magazine and fits with dozens of old research reports collecting teachers' most common classroom problems. Talking usually ranked high and gum-chewing close behind.

Davis's 1940 list may be based on real data, but it cannot in any event be compared with his 1980's list. It gave the answers to a discipline, while the new list was an inventory of crimes. You can't learn how times have changed if you change your question.

In the early 1980's some of Davis's conservative colleagues took up his creation. The Rev. Tim LaHaye put the lists in a book promoting family values, and the anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly used the idea in an essay about her schooldays. The lists gained wide circulation in the fundamentalist community when they appeared in a newsletter published by Mel and Norma Gabler. These were the education activists who gained national fame for pressuring the Texas state textbook committee to purchase books that promote creationism, patriotism and a Christian life style. In their newsletter they reordered the old problems and shrank the new list to 17, knocking out lying and cheating, personal theft and weapons.

In 1984 David Balsiger, then of Costa Mesa, CA, picked up the Gablers' version for the Presidential Biblical Scoreboard, a glossy magazine that rated presidential candidates on how closely their platforms followed biblical teachings. Although the print run for the Scoreboard was around two million, the lists had little visibility outside conservative religious circles. TO gain wider circulation, they needed the imprimatur of a credible publication. That came, in a backhanded way, in March 1985, when Harper's printed the Scoreboard's version as a curious piece of Americana. Harper's slipped in clues that the lists were unscientific, noting that the Scoreboard wanted readers to "vote conscientiously for godly rule." Nevertheless, in April the Gov. of California, George Deukmajian, included the lists in an address warmly received by the California Sheriff's Association.

Mary Weaver, a program administrator at the California Department of Education, circulated the table from Harper's in a March memo to her guidance and counseling staff, and used it for workshops on discipline and safety. The department had set up a liaison group with the police across the state, and a police officer from Fullerton began presenting the lists in talk in his home community.

Simply by quoting the lists the Fullerton police and the CA Dept. of Education put their stamp on them, and many would later claim that they were the originators. This is the best-source-yet rule: The most credible party to date to recite or publish the lists becomes their source. Following the best-source-yet rule, various later users would say that the survey was compiled by CBS News, the CQ Researcher or the Heritage Foundation, whose staff, according to John McCaslin of The Washington Times, found the 1940 offenses in an old survey.

During their time in Fullerton the lists underwent a crucial change - the drug shift. The public was alarmed about teen-age drug use, which a Gallup poll rated the public No. 1 worry about schools. The modern list could ride this concern if drugs were moved to the top. Most users had not explicitly claimed that the items were in order of worst first, so shifting them around seemed permissible. The four self-destructive offenses - drugs, alcohol, pregnancy and suicide - got promoted as a block, and rape, robbery and assault fell to fifth, sixth and seventh. My earliest record of the new ranking comes from a January 1986 meeting in a Fullerton junior high school. Most recent lists feature the drug shift, a clue that they descended from the Fullerton version.

According to a U. of Michigan study, drug use by high-school seniors dropped by about one-half between 1980 and 1990. But the public thought just the opposite was true. In Gallup polls over the decade, the proportion of respondents naming drugs as an important school problem rose from 14 percent to 38 percent. In other words, when drug use was most severe, the school lists were sounding the klaxon about rape, robbery and assault, and they focused on drugs just as students were using them less. The experts and reporters repeating the lists were not providing the public with real information, just reflecting public opinion back to the public.

In 1986, with pseudo-credentials from California educators and the Fullerton police, and a new look from the drug shift, the lists of school problems spread across the country. They popped up frequently in the literature of the anti-drug movement, which became another crucial conduit from the religious right to the mainstream.

The first national writer to publish the lists as factual was George Will, in his Newsweek column of Jan. 5, 1987. He gave no source. A month later a CBS News reporter, Bernard Goldberg, featured them in a story about child criminals. Will's and Goldberg's modern lists were cut to seven: drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, assault. Fundamentalists wanted to leave no sin unmentioned, but trimming the list gave it wider appeal. Seven elements seem to be the approximate limit of people's apprehension, according to George Miller, a psychologist[cf. my earlier posts on this subject - jlks]. There are seven colors in the rainbow, seven deadly sins and seven wonders of the world, among many other examples. Seven versus seven gave a balanced comparison of old and new, and let some public speakers go sideways across the columns, contrasting yesterday's abuse of chewing gum against today's drugs and alcohol abuse.

CBS News changed the wording slightly, and this became the preferred form among the elite, like Sen. John Glenn, whose speech was picked up by the CQ Researcher for an article later copied by The Wall Street Journal and The International Herald Tribune. In a 1989 syndicated documentary on youth morals, Tom Selleck delivered the CBS News version of the list :like a punch in the solar plexus," according to one reviewer, and he also changed the wording slightly, generating another family of the lists.

Time magazine's 10-item version in 1988 included "bombings as a top problem. FBI data for 1987 show that the total reported damage done by bombs to all the schools and universities across America was only $30,000, just a drop in the budget. So many in the news media had seen the lists so often that they assumed they were valid.

After collecting close to 250 versions of the lists, I tackled a harder question: Why have Americans found them so attractive? Once clue is the way they change, like a folk song or folk tale, as they are passed on. When people hear an item of folklore they remember its core emotional meaning, not its exact words, so when they want to reproduce it they reconstruct it around that meaning. The elements of a folklore item that are not essential to this meaning change or fall away. Those that endure through successive versions often reveal its emotional significance for the group.

The items on the original 1940 list have hardly changed at all. Constant also is the location in the public schools. The date of the old list is semi-stable, usually 1940, although it has been put as anywhere from "the Depression" (Ross Perot) to "five years ago." The modern problems usually stay in the recent past, so their date moves forward as time passes.

The feature that varies widely, sometimes even slips away, is just what the inventory represents. If it is the answer, what is the question? Sometimes the lists are "top" problems, sometimes discipline problems, offenses or worries. None of these categories fit all the items, but no one seems to mind calling suicide a discipline problem. Logically an answer should be judged against its question, but at its core the list is an emotional expression, not a logical assertion.

If fact, the school lists are remarkably close to the Puritan jeremiads of 300 years ago, and what made them the rage then may be working for the school lists now. Jermiads were formulaic political sermons. First the preacher reminded the congregation of its covenant with God and God's blessings on their ancestors; next he catalogued the afflictions of the day, like Indian wars, fires or caterpillar plagues, or, in later versions, the congregation's evil habits. These were God's punishment for breaking the covenant and his warning to them to reform. Finally, he called for a renewal, after which God would grant them fulfillment.

In their nostalgic contrast of then and now, the school lists constitute jeremiad. On their face they are criticizing schools but their real target, like the jeremiad, is society in general. They place drugs, pregnancy, rape or suicide as problems in the public schools. But is a typical school more hazardous or immoral than its surrounding area? Blaming the schools is illogical, but is rhetorically right, since responsibility for schools falls on all Americans.

The second and third generations of Puritans felt a tension, for which the jeremiad provided a release. Their religion had sanctioned ambition for the good of the community, but now that virtue was promoting greed, worldliness and sin. Springing from a "grief and a sickness of soul," says Perry Miller, the great scholar of Puritan intellectual history, the Puritans' sermons were "professions of a society that knew it was doing wrong, but could not help itself, because the wrong thing was also the right thing." Through public lamentations, they paid tribute to their sense of guilt over betraying their ancestors ideals.

Americans today regard their country as the richest, freest and fairest, with the best social system, but cannot square this with the social problems of America's youth. And what does this disorder promise for the future? The tension felt by modern Americans, like that of the Puritans, demands release. The school lists are a collective moan of anxiety over the gap between ideals and reality. When Puritans or modern Americans enumerate their faults, they are declaring their dedication to their ideals, reassuring each other that at least their goals remain high.

The spread of the school lists proves that jermiads, at least, are not in decline. The lists are not facts but a fundamental expression of attitudes and emotions. They overlook the successes of American public education, its great expansion since 190 and its high quality despite taxpayer resistance. The lists' broad sweep ignores that some public schools are devastated by violence and substance abuse and others hardly touched at all. They should not guide our choices on education policy.