(FORTUNE Magazine) – The American educational system has been getting stomped on quite regularly. In both New York and Chicago, the local school systems have lately been accounted disasters. Eminent businessmen have been speaking out on the need for reform. Owen B. Butler, retired chairman of Procter & Gamble and present co-chairman of the University/Urban Schools National Task Force, denounced the schools recently for failing to provide decent educations for the most disadvantaged kids. David Kearns, CEO of Xerox, made a speech at the Economic Club of Detroit demanding ''a new national agenda'' with far higher educational standards. The rhetoric endlessly reflects an egalitarian fallacy. It assumes that any kid can get a good education if held to high standards and exposed to good teaching. So it also assumes that the system must be at fault if many children leave school without having learned much -- which is obviously happening. The rhetoric ignores an alternative explanation: that the schools are overwhelmed by kids incapable of learning much. Kearns's proposals seemed especially oblivious to this possibility. Incredible proposal: ''Every student -- without exception -- should master a core curriculum equivalent to college entrance requirements.'' Kearns wants the federal government to spend heavily on educational research that will tell us how to make it all possible. , But he is ignoring a lot of existing research that says it isn't possible. Arthur Jensen, perhaps the country's leading researcher into educational psychology, estimates that an IQ of 105 has been required for admission to an average college. It is beyond belief that kids with IQs much below 100 can master that core curriculum. And as is well known, half the country has IQs below 100.

In its February 1987 issue, the Phi Delta Kappan published a fascinating article. Its author: John B. Carroll, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina who was long identified with the proposition that every kid must learn to read at the 12th-grade level. Reviewing recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Carroll wrote that the goal now seems unrealistic, ''even with the best instruction that anybody might devise and with greater amounts of instructional time.'' He concluded that we would be doing well to get almost everybody up to a so-called ''basic'' level -- which is what's needed to read stories in a Grade 3 reader. Better schools would be desirable -- who could deny it? But so would a whiff of reality in the rhetoric about schools.