Making molehills out of molehills: Reply to Lawrence Stedman's review of The Manufactured Crisis

Berliner and Biddle answer Lawrence Stedman's review of their book The Manufactured Crisis, which was published in the Education Policy Analysis Archives as Volume 4, Number 1, 1996. Throughout his term as founding editor of "Contemporary Psychology," Edwin G. Boring insisted that the basic tasks of the responsible reviewer are to portray with honesty the intentions of authors and to assess carefully whether those intentions are realized in their writings. Unfortunately, Lawrence Stedman (1996) does not honor such laudable tenets in his so-called "review" of our book, THE MANUFACTURED CRISIS, appearing in Education Policy Analysis Archives, 4(1). Instead, Stedman chooses to ignore both the intentions that we stated clearly in our book and the vast bulk of what we actually wrote about in its eight chapters. Worse, he asserts falsely that our book was based on four "sweeping claims" and then attacks us because the analyses with which we supposedly supported these claims were "deeply flawed and misleading." In fact, these so-called "sweeping claims" referred to materials covered in but a portion of our second chapter. Further, two of Stedman's concerns about our "sweeping claims" misrepresented what we had written, and the other two state positions with which Stedman agrees and are abundantly supported by the evidence he himself cites. In short, Stedman has written a review that is uninformative, disingenuous, and as will soon become clear, trivial. Stedman has not succeeded in even making a mountain out of a molehill-all that was accomplished was to make molehills out of molehills.