It’s the first day of school,* so the Times has a series of op-eds about education in America. It’s an interesting mix of the usual assortment of fantasy and condemnation that largely goes nowhere as the educational establishment engages in its annual determination of what new fashion trend to promote this time around.
But one op-ed faces a hard choice, one that is so disfavored as to require parents to go to court to stop their local school board from trampling hard working, dedicated students under the sharp hooves of their unicorns. It’s an homage to merit.
Merit demands excellence and rigor. It is not, as its critics often insist, an elitist, classist or racist value. It acknowledges that all kids have talents. Even though talents are not distributed equally, it is our obligation as parents and teachers to nurture each child’s individual spark and make sure that all children have the chance to be the best that they can be.
This from an immigrant who came to America unable to speak English, and yet succeeded.
Merit should never have become a battlefront in the culture wars. I understand the impulse to declare the system rigged when so many children, particularly Black and Hispanic children, have fallen behind academically. But the answer to racial disparities in math and reading scores and advanced academic enrollment is not to blame the game and re-rig it to favor outcomes that please certain political constituencies but do little to make life better for struggling children. The solution is to channel more resources into disenfranchised communities — from the Black urban poor to the white rural poor in my native West Virginia. The solution is not to give up on merit.
There is no more pernicious racist lie than black and Hispanic children are incapable of achieving anything based on merit.
To the extent there’s a “problem,” merit is no guarantee of success. There are other elements, luck, timing, connections, which differentiate between hard work resulting in accomplishment. But the alternative, not trying, denigrating effort, punishing effort by refusing to recognize it, almost certainly guarantees failure.
This race to the bottom doesn’t help the young people it sets out to uplift, including students with learning disabilities, people facing socioeconomic challenges and new English language learners.
Of course, the author of the op-ed is Asian, which makes her suspect since everyone knows they have a culture of hard work and sacrifice to achieve success, and that’s far too much to expect of black people, if you think so little of them.
The question is whether we seek to achieve equality in success or failure. Or are you one of those people who don’t believe black and Hispanic children are smart enough, good enough and capable of being just as successful as anyone else, if given the opportunity to be their best?
*Yes, not for you, but for most people, so suck it up for once and don’t try to make it all about you, you flaming narcissist.
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People really need to start framing this debate more as a question of merit vs. white supremacy. Saul Alinsky rule #4. Don’t push back from outside the antiracist narrative, push back using it. The people dismantling merit-based mechanisms in the name of “equity” (for group identities, which are apparently more real than persons) are using the same rhetoric and reasoning that underpinned Jim Crow, they’re just doing a lot more hand-wringing over it. And they’re scuttling real material solutions that would improve the conditions of *persons* in the name of chasing racialized narratives that quickly become dysfunctional feedback loops.
It’s like the old t-shirt (sort of) says…”I love abstracted group identities. It’s people I can’t stand.”
The kinder, gentler racism. Take up the white man’s burden. . .
Everything that was old is new again.
“ Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut.
But I doubt anyone pushing the idea of making every student equally bad ever read Vonnegut because he was an old white male full of privilege.
Merit and excellence are really squishy words that encapsulate a whole list of phenomena. Woddy Allen once said that just showing up was 80% of life, and others have said that a willingness to just try to do the work is more important to success. But those specific phenomena carry bad connotations that we can’t even talk about,uch less use in public policy analysis. So all we have left is meaningless undefined words, connected by emotions.
There will always be someone who reads Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron and comes away thinking that it tells a triumphant story, rather than a tragic one.
That is the most frightening thing I have read today.
But then, there are “science fiction critics” who think that Starship Troopers is a militaristic/fascist novel. (And who apparently have poor reading comprehension).
“But despair is a sin.” Dr. Jerry Pournelle.
“which makes her suspect since everyone knows they have a culture of hard work and sacrifice to achieve success”
…and there it is. It’s not about race, it’s about culture.
Yup-! It sprang straight out of the article- If you want old-fashioned academic hard work & success your next President better be Putin or Xi.
To the extent that it’s a squabble for resources, a first step would be to ensure the resources are adequate.
However, the problems are trickier, because there is no “best” solution. To greatly simplify, “A” students do best in classes by themselves, but “B” students do best when in classes with “A” students. I’m sure there are many other situations where classroom dynamics complicate matters.
I think you’ve wandered into the wrong room. You want the ACLU, down the hall to the left.
I’d suggest: “from each according to ability, to each according to need” as a principle.
You’re neglecting gifted identification. Those “A” students should have already been removed and served in a different way. The “B” students then compete among themselves in genpop. Dragging down the ceiling isn’t what is happening as of current, though funding for gifted education has its own problems. And districts don’t necessarily offer the screeners in languages other than English. Oops.
Raising the floor is more difficult. In a more perfect world we might be able to pour funding and resources in to do so, but more often students filter down and out into alternative or dropout prevention and recovery schools which might not care so much about rigor. They’re in the business of up and out.
All this to say, it’s a massive problem with no clear solution or set of solutions. Abandoning rigor won’t do. That much is for sure, but we’ve already watered down high school diplomas to the point of tastelessness. The fix might be more expensive than anyone is willing to pay. It’s easier to complain about the fall of education in America than do anything about it.