The self-esteem movement is one of the marvels of our time. It goes on and on, even though its assumptions are wrong and its basic premises have been discredited by a great deal of research. Like a monster in the last 10 minutes of a horror movie, it has enough fatal wounds to stop a platoon. But it keeps stumbling on, seeming not to notice.

Will it ever expire? Apparently so. A long article last week in the New York Times sounded very much like an obituary. To be fair, the article contained a brief disclaimer ("Self-esteem is by no means dead"), but most of the text suggested otherwise. A subhead said "An idea whose time has come . . . and gone?" Since the Times caters to, and usually speaks for, the educational elite that has kept the movement afloat, we are surely entitled to detect some significance here.

One obvious factor mentioned in the Times is that the increasing emphasis on school standards and achievement has weakened the hold of self-esteem theory and the preoccupation with feelings at the expense of actual learning. The world of how-to and self-help books also seems to be turning away from the excesses of the 1980s and early 1990s. The conception of self-esteem as a kind of commodity one can acquire by constant self-affirmation now appears to be trivial and silly.

The Times quotes Albert Bandura, a psychology professor at Stanford, as concluding from his research that "self-esteem affects neither personal goals nor performance." This is certainly so. The core assumption in the self-esteem movement is that children cannot learn or develop properly unless they form a positive self-image. But no study has ever demonstrated a connection between feeling good about oneself and improved performance. Some students feel terrible about themselves and become academic and social successes. Others brim with self-confidence and do awful work. The Social Importance of Self-Esteem, a 1989 book of essays on the movement, contained this line: "One of the disappointing aspects of every chapter in this volume . . . is how low the associations between self-esteem and its consequences are in research to date." And that book was published by true believers, as part of an effort to promote California's $750,000 program to make self-esteem an official state goal.

Helping to dumb down. Since 1989, the research on self-esteem has been devastating. When psychologists Harold Stevenson and James Stigler tested the academic skills of elementary school students in the United States, China, Japan, and Taiwan, the Asian students outperformed the Americans, but the U.S. students felt better about themselves and their work. They had managed to combine high self-esteem with poor work. The researchers found that American schools worry more about sensitivity and how students view themselves than about actual academic performance. Instead of bringing performance up, the pop-therapeutic approach was helping to dumb down.

For more than 40 years, low self-esteem has been widely cited as a serious obstacle to black success in school and the workplace. The theory is that a racist society holds blacks back by imposing a low sense of self-worth. But researchers have repeatedly found that the self-esteem of blacks is no lower than that of whites, and often quite higher. A summary of this research, published in an article titled "The Myth of Black Low Self-Esteem," points out that this consistent finding goes all the way back to the mid-1960s. A massive 1966 study by James Coleman (of the famous "Coleman Report") showed that blacks as a group had a remarkably strong sense of self-esteem, despite all the social pressures arrayed against them.

"The Myth of Black Low Self-Esteem" gently raises a point about public policy. "The low-self-esteem argument has become a leading rationale for many state and federal initiatives in hiring and education," write the three authors of the report, Stephen Powers, David Rothman, and Stanley Rothman. The assumption that blacks were psychologically damaged by whites became a foundation stone for affirmative action programs, emphasis on black role models, and the installation of the multicultural curriculum in schools and colleges. Though arguments for these policies can be made without reference to self-esteem theory, in fact the theory was used to frame and promote them. As the three authors wrote, the policies "draw their authority, at least in part" from the theory of low black self-esteem. What happens now that the theory seems to have no validity at all?

Another argument from self-esteem theory--that low self-esteem is the cause of violence, hate crimes, and many other antisocial acts--has also been discredited. As the Times mentions, studies of gang members and criminals show that their self-esteem is as high as that of overachievers. In fact, one influential study concluded that violence is often the work of people with unrealistically high self-esteem, attacking others who challenge their self-image. Another study disproved the familiar theory that welfare mothers become pregnant to boost their self-esteem.

The Times ends its report with a professor saying of self-esteem theory, "It will come back." This sounds like the final line of a conventional horror movie. But at least it indicates that something scary is going or gone. Will someone please tell the schools?