For the last few months, my wife and I have been trying to schedule a dinner date with my daughter. She is in the process of opening up her own Pilates Studio, whose demands seem to have her on call 24/7. Even when we reach her by phone, she keeps interrupting the conversation with an urgent call from one or more of the agents involved in opening up the studio. In these brief conversations, however, I have been surprised at how quickly and expertly she has mastered the details of finance, personnel, architectural design, constructional management, logistics of all kinds, and the intricacies of governmental rules and regulations.
I should not have been surprised, she has always been a hard worker and very goal-oriented. Where my doubts might have arisen about her ability to open up and run a studio were her experiences with formal schooling. Although she was diligent in her studies and did fairly well in college, she always struggled with formal academic studies. In a recent family discussion of the gap between the abstractions of the academic world and the realities of acquiring building permits my son made the following comment: “You know Dad, what schools measure matters very little in the real world.”
Both my wife and I, who spent our entire careers in teaching and administering in schools, were, to say the least, unable to mount a modest response to my son’s insight. Our failure to author a persuasive response to my son’s claim was our personal experiences in schooling where the various talents and abilities we developed in our various school positions were never measured in a formal academic setting. In that same conversation, I recounted the comment by my high school algebra teacher who repeatedly told the class that if we didn’t do well in Algebra our career choices were doomed. Of course, in the real world of teaching and school administration, where I was fairly successful, I never used algebra again.
As I recounted my experiences in the classroom and school offices, there were numerous talents and skills—team building, communication, critical thinking, perspective taking, self-control, planning, and social-emotional awareness– I employed that were never taught or measured in schools. This brings me to the theme of this blog which will be a summary of the ideas that David Brooks wrote about in a recent Atlantic journal piece.
Brook argues that the definition of merit in this country was established by a committee formed in 1892 by James, Conant, President of Harvard University, to standardize the high school curriculum. The committee began the project in response to two problems with the current system of college admissions. The first problem was high school transcripts filled with course offerings that defied any form of quantitative analysis. The second problem was a college admission process that looked passed student grades and instead looked at their parent’s bankbook. Conant believed that American Democracy was being undermined by a “hereditary aristocracy of wealth.”
The fix that Conant’s Committee of Ten presented to high schools throughout the nation was a college admissions process that prized academic achievement over any other human trait. Academic achievement in this redesign of college admissions was based on grades in a series of prescribed academic subjects and scores on standardized tests. The committee’s report assumed that intelligence—again measured by grades and test scores—was the highest human trait. College admissions offices would become the primary players in the sorting system segregating the smart from the not-so-smart. The other assumption Conant made was intelligence was randomly distributed and thus would achieve a broad mix of student backgrounds sitting in college classrooms. This later assumption proved false when parents, parents with money, orchestrated a set of skill-building processes—from college coaches to SAT/ACT preparation programs—to sort their son or daughter into the premiere university programs.
This brings me to David Brook’s sins of meritocracy, which are now trapping schools and households into a giant sorting system:
Sin #1: The system overrates intelligence: As in the case of my daughter, the many skills my daughter is employing to open up and manage a Pilates Studio are not measured on standardized tests or are revealed in grades in academic subjects. Relying on some quantitative measure of school performance, in the words of David Brooks misses, “70% of what we want to know about a person.” Intelligence, in other words, is not the same as effectiveness.
Sin #2: Success in schools is the same as success in life. As a lifelong educator, I can testify to the fact that success in schools is entirely dependent on the ability to jump through hoops that adults put up. In the words of David Brooks: “grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant, but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership, ability, creativity, or courage.”
Sin #3: The game is rigged: A true meritocracy would sort people by innate ability, but what the college admissions process has become is sorting students by how wealthy their parents are. Well-off parents are investing massive amounts of money in all manner of college preparation programs to make certain their children are admitted to an Ivy League school.
Sin #4: We have created an American caste system: We now have in this nation a deep divide between those who are well-educated and those who are less well-educated. Those less well education suffer from a variety of ills: divorce, drug addiction, and obesity. The cognitive elite withdraws to gated communities with six-figure incomes and a range of privatized services that cater to health and well-being.
All of these sins of meritocracy have not only failed at Conant’s goal of creating a natural aristocracy of talent but created a host of blowbacks that have led us into several foreign quagmires, shattered our trusts in institutions, funneled talented elites’ jobs in finance or consulting; and, presently, provoked a populist backlash that has divided our nation into red states and blue states.
Brooks ends his article with a call to “humanize meritocracy.” The concept, in and of itself, is a worthwhile goal. We live in a society, whose complexities, demand smart people. The big change must become how we define merit. The qualities so admired by Conant—quantification, objectification, optimization, and efficiency—need to be replaced with non-cognitive skills that are harder to quantify: emotional flexibility, grit, social agility, curiosity, sense of drive, and mission, agility, and social intelligence. Few schools in this nation possess the organizational structure and instructional methodologies that would accommodate and advance this new definition of merit. I have written numerous blogs on what these kinds of schools would look like. For the most part, however, our schools will continue to mirror the goals and processes developed by Conant. Placing humans on a single scale—the bell-shaped curve—is easy. The difficult question school administrators should be asking themselves, one which is often professed in school mission statements is: “What is each student great at, and how can we get them into the appropriate role?
Alan C. Jones 