It's de rigueur to blame public schools for a country's domestic economic problems and for its projected inability to compete in the global economy of the future. Yet a closer look at the evidence, at least in the United States, over the past three decades reveals a completely different picture of the causes.

The campaign to undermine confidence in public schools began in 1983 with the report "A Nation at Risk," written by a prestigious committee under Secretary of Education Terrel Bell. Endorsed in a speech by President Ronald Reagan, it contained the now-familiar warning: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

Then, in 1990, a bipartisan group calling itself the National Center on Education and the Economy issued "America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages." It charged that public schools had failed to teach essential knowledge and skills, thus slowing industrial production "to a crawl." Taken together, the two scathing indictments of public schools seemed to doom the U.S.