David Berliner's Legacy-Loss of a Friend: David Charles Berliner (1938-2025)

David Berliner's Legacy-Loss of a Friend: David Charles Berliner (1938-2025) Gene V Glass Professor Emeritus Arizona State University I first met David on the street in Los Angeles in February 1969. He had only recently joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts after finishing his degree at Stanford. I had sent him my finest graduate student to join the UMass faculty. We shook hands, he thanked me, we went on. I scarcely saw him again until he joined the Arizona State University faculty in 1987; I had joined a year earlier. Later in life, David told me that he thought of me as the Infant Terrible, on account of my habit of criticizing everyone’s research as both wrong and useless. We hardly interacted that first semester, even though Ursula’s office was next to mine. After a few months, he asked Ursula, “What is he like—-as bad as they all say?” Ursula let him know: “He’s a paper tiger, a chickenhawk. I’ve dealt with his type in junior high schools for years.” David was a real tiger. His research was powerful; his positions brave. He spent the first few years at ASU pursuing his research on teaching from his perspective as an educational psychologist. The Ed Psych department had opposed his appointment initially claiming he wasn’t enough of an educational psychologist. In a few years, he would publish the Handbook of Educational Psychology. Dean Gladys Johnson ignored their opinion as she ignored the opinions of most of the faculty that was being transformed from an inbred, unknown ed college into a contender. It was been a godsend that David did not associate closely with his colleagues in ed psych. In January 1993, I founded the second open access online journal in education: Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA). The first article was published on January 19th. A few days later, David came over to my office. He had read Issue 1, and thought it was remarkable that these things can go around the world in an instant and reach so many people. He was thinking of writing a paper. It was way out of his field but something was eating at him. Politicians were pushing the post-1970 SAT score decline and claiming in documents like "A Nation at Risk" that our schools are failing; vouchers, private schools, and charters are the salvation. “Write it,” I said. “It’s not in my field.” “Write it anyway.” Two weeks later, February first, he came to my office with a floppy disc. The next day, “Educational Reform in an Era of Disinformation” appeared as EPAA Vol I, No. 2. It has been one of the most popular articles in the 32-year history of the journal—it has been downloaded nearly 50,000 times—and it changed David’s life. About a year after David published his EPAA piece, he and Ursula came to my office to chat. He was thinking of doing a book, a book like he had never done before. His EPAA article had plunged him into a whole new academic circle. Different people were writing to him; he was receiving invitations to speak. He was, he said, becoming a policy expert. And he had a proposal. Politicians did not shape up after he published “Era of Disinformation.” They were still telling lies and trying to destroy our public education system. “I want to write a book. Will you join me?” “Well, I’m very busy. I think books will be obsolete in 10 years. I’d better not.” Brilliant. ("Bruce Biddle, wherever you are, you’re welcome.”) Thus began The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools. Those of us who were close to the book and its authors may underestimate its impact. The Manufactured Crisis has given two generations of scholars the ammunition and moral support needed to fight back against the conservative attack on public education. But its impact is even greater than this. When I quizzed AI on the origins of the phrase “manufactured crisis,” I learned this: The phrase “The Manufactured Crisis” is most closely associated with the 1995 book by educational psychologists Berliner and Biddle. They coined and capitalized the phrase as a label for what they saw as a politically motivated, evidence‑distorting campaign in the 1980s–early 1990s rooted in the Reagan-era report A Nation at Risk that falsely portrayed U.S. public schools as failing. Since then, “manufactured crisis” has been generalized and used more broadly in political science, law, and journalism to describe situations where elites exaggerate or fabricate a policy emergency to justify preferred actions or expand power, but those later uses build on the conceptual framing popularized by Berliner and Biddle’s book. It is difficult to imagine that David and I shared much. He was from the Bronx; I grew up in a cornfield in Nebraska. But we did share one thing. We both suffered from the impostor syndrome. We both were uncomfortable with how others viewed us, namely, as old wise men. I assured him he was no impostor. He tried unsuccessfully to do likewise. When I became Jewish in 1993, David welcomed me to the tribe with open arms-—well, with hugs, actually. He was a hugger. Every time we met, he hugged me. I never got used to it, but I would welcome one more now. He coached me on how to be Jewish. I coached him on how to write more like an English major. He called me Gene-ala, and he never looked down his nose at me. We texted a lot in his last days. His wife was no more and his heart was broken. He wished her a swift, painless end. What irony! He had just finished what he thought might be his last book: Public Education for Our Nation’s Democracy: Commentaries on Schooling in America. He was concerned about his health. He was confined to a hospital bed, but his thoughts were on his book. He was looking forward to its launch and the reviews. I was editing Education Review, another online journal. I sent the manuscript to Leonard Waks and explained the circumstances. Len is a severe critic. He reviewed it quickly. He praised David’s insights and loving care for young people. “His empathy for children, teachers, and families shines through; his clarity about the failures of political leadership is bracing...” (Waks, 2025). I sent Len’s last draft to BethAnn and Brett in the evening of the 25th of September last year. They read it to David at his bedside. It was published hours later. They said he was pleased. David died the next day. References Berliner, D. C. (2025). Public education for our nation’s democracy: Commentaries on schooling in America. Teachers College Press. Berliner, D. C. & Biddle, B. J. (1995). The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack on America's public schools. Addison-Wesley. Waks, L. J. (2025, September 25). Review of Public education for our nation’s democracy: Commentaries on schooling in America, by D. C. Berliner. Education Review, 32. https://edrev.asu.edu/index.php/ER/article/view/42872 Note From https://www.perplexity.aiin response to the question, “What is the history of the phrase ‘The Manufactured Crisis’?” (20 February 2026)