When it comes to American education, the arc of history bends away from justice. Our high schools increasingly serve as a sorting mechanism between two choices: elite higher education and everything else no one cares about. (See “Our Kids,” “The Tyranny of Merit,” “The Meritocracy Trap,” and “The Years That Matter Most.”) Wealthy parents harangue school administrators and hire tutors to fill in the perceived gaps in their children’s educations while everyone else puts their eggs in the basket of whatever resources their child’s school has available. The COVID-19 pandemic is, of course, widening this chasm.
But an even more immovable stumbling block on the road to manifesting our national ideals is the fact that our children never were, are not now, and never will be equally blessed with the narrow band of academic talents that school rewards. Even in an alternate universe where every American child sets out from the exact same familial starting point, and attend schools of equivalent quality, some students would end up winning and many more would end up losing.
Writer Fredrik deBoer has a new book called “The Cult of Smart,” which he defines as: “the notion that academic value is the only value, and intelligence the only true measure of human worth.” He wants us to get real and acknowledge that the ways students are measured in school and by the market today does great harm to “untalented” students.
As deBoer points out, in absolute (as opposed to relative) terms, American public education has actually made big gains over the past century. We’ve raised high school and college completion rates, along with reading and math levels, across races, genders, and ethnicities. But we don’t talk about American public education in glowing terms. Rather it is, “All disaster, all the time.” This is because all we pay attention to is relative learning. We don’t take note of learning on its own terms, as a good in and of itself that benefits a child. Children are not standardized, or standardizable, but our schools attempt to standardize them anyway.
All the government cares about — all society cares about — is how one person’s learning stacks up against others’ learning, and where those placements put us as a country in comparison with our competitor countries. We’re all forced to see learning through a wholly competitive lens because politicians see China and India biting at our heels. Thus, our national “unhinged obsession,” as deBoer calls it, with pushing kids into the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields, in which students from those countries excel. Everyone’s jumped on the STEM wagon in the past decade or so, but the long-term advantages of working in STEM fields don’t necessarily recommend them.
Just two decades ago, many of us were made to join in the absurd top-down premise that we could literally “leave no child behind.” George W. Bush’s signature 2001 No Child Left Behind law declared that, by 2014, 100% of American schoolchildren would be proficient in reading and math. We could reach this patriotic goal if only the educational establishment put its mind to it.
As a teacher back then at a go-getter middle school in the South Bronx, I absorbed the message, and put my mind to it. The mismatch between what I was expected to do, and was able to achieve, partially explains why I left that job after only two years. I felt each student’s failed vocabulary test as my own failure, every low standardized test score as evidence that I wasn’t working hard enough. A decade later, as a high school English teacher brought in to teach “reluctant learners” for a year, I couldn’t convince my classes to read even a book as brief as “Of Mice and Men,” and started to think that perhaps the failures were not only mine.
They were not. By 2014, fewer than 50% of American students scored proficient in reading and math, a sad fact true for every racial and ethnic group, in all 4th and 8th grade subgroups, with the notable exception of Asians across the board, and white 4th graders in Math. We didn’t learn much from NCLB. President Obama maintained the spirit of that legislation with his 2015 “Every Student Succeeds Act.” He also made the sweeping call for every American to earn a college degree, but the college graduation rate barely budged between 2007 and 2019.
If we can’t force schools to make every student succeed, what can we do? For one thing, we can lower the stakes for failure. Toward this end, deBoer has suggestions sure to raise a few eyebrows. Among them, he’d like to lower the legal dropout age to twelve, since “there will always be a portion of adolescents who have no interest in continuing formal schooling, and forcing them to do so not only impinges on their freedom but wastes time, energy, and resources better spent on those who want to be in school.”
He’s right. I vividly recall a male student on my high school class roster I had to mark absent about three out of every five days. I eventually learned he was spending those days working alongside his dad and uncle, learning the family automotive business. I clearly saw that the just, logical, and practical thing to do — the thing that would benefit him, the school, and his classmates who wanted to be in school — would have been to give him my blessing to learn the family trade, instead of making him pretend to read John Steinbeck.
Besides, the push to raise high school graduation rates has lowered the value of the credential beyond recognition. They’re actually, in deBoer’s word, a “mirage,” and only went up because the government decreed that they had to. “This stats fudging is a classic example of Campbell’s Law … [which] states that the more important a given quantitative indicator becomes, the more likely it is that the indicator will be distorted, which in turn will lead to bad policy that runs contrary to the intent of the reasons for valuing the number in the first place.” Millions of students are already socially promoted each year from grade to grade irrespective of any gains in their literacy and numeracy skills, so why not lower the bar further?
Also, deBoer argues, it’s time to get rid of the high school Algebra requirement, as that one class prevents millions of students from getting through high school, and college. He cites the book “The Math Myth” for that discussion, and suggests replacing it with quantitative reasoning classes, and basic statistics.
I might also suggest courses on how internet algorithms manipulate what you see online and store your data, balancing a checkbook, managing a savings account, negotiating a salary, calculating mortgages, and minimizing student loan debt. Why do we require Algebra, which only a small percentage of adults actually use, and not the real-world knowledge every adult has to know?
deBoer would like us to get real about our expectations of what schools can accomplish. They can aim for equality, or apply a meritocratic model. They can focus on meeting the needs of low-achieving students, or focus on getting high-achieving students into elite higher education, but they can’t do both.
The idolization of smart work, and ignoring of all other forms of work, accelerated with the rise of the “information economy.” Consider our use of the word “smart” itself. As Michael Sandel pointed out in “The Tyranny of Merit,” “smart” was not much on the tongue of presidents before the 1990s, but Bill Clinton and George W. Bush each used the word more than 450 times. President Obama used it more than 900 times.
When deBoer gets pushback from people who insist a “cult of smart” does not exist, he points them to our immigration system. We used to beckon the world’s huddling masses. Who is welcome now? We award points to would-be immigrants based on their educational credentials. We want nuclear physicists from India; we do not want Honduran families fleeing violence. The former “belong” here. The latter do not. The millions of American high school graduates whose schools sold them and their families on the promise of “It’s college or nothing,” but can’t hack even entry level community college classes, might also feel they don’t belong here.
deBoer takes great pains to distance himself from the racist or sexist notions that academic ability can be predicted by identification with any group (race, ethnicity, gender) but takes equivalently great pains to insist that individuals vary a great deal in their academic ability, spending a chapter exploring the heritability of intelligence.
I wish he had spent less time making an argument that no one can reasonably dispute. We all know that our abilities are, to some degree, inherited. What calls for exploration is how to expand the definition of “smart.” For the book’s purposes, intelligence is equivalent to traditionally-measured academic ability and, in an interview, deBoer regretted not considering the concept more broadly. I also wish he’d not so blithely tossed around the cruel term “untalented.” It seems even those of us who want a broadened definition of success, talent, and smarts have internalized the exclusive definitions.
Much as some, including me, would like them to be, the trades are not a panacea. The likelihood of landing a truly good job in the trades (which encompasses a huge number of fields) is heavily region-dependent and subject to the whims of a fickle housing market, deBoer correctly asserts. He does, however, believe it’s a worthy aim to make the trades less “weird,” and a form of “voluntary tracking” early on in one’s school life might help encourage more kids to consider them. (Southern Berkshire County is one resort region where the trades are a very good bet, so I’m pleased to know that this is happening here.) Had voluntary tracking, combined with a robust externship program, been in place at my school at the time, my student could have gotten a jump on automotive training without breaking school rules to do it.
But we’re stuck with the system we have and short of upending our entire economic order — deBoer is an avowed Marxist — parents will have to revolt individually against the cult of smart. For me, it’s an uphill battle. My elite private school education instilled in me a love of language, literature, travel, and history, but also brainwashed me. Having been identified early on — by IQ tests and grades — as verbally gifted, I assumed my gifts obviated the need for me to work hard. I thought I was a writer, even though I wasn’t writing, because my verbal scores told me so. Every aspect of my education justified my belief in my superiority to the unfortunate souls who scored lower than me.
But the cult is turning on me now. My 10-year-old son’s learning disability makes reading a chore and writing still more painful. I don’t want him to end up a loser in the zero-sum game that starts with high school, but I’m just not trained to see his brand of intelligence, and I don’t think our schools are, either. Once we were on a whale-watching boat, sailing back into Boston Harbor and observing the city skyline, when he asked me, “How deep did they have to dig to make those buildings?” If only he’d asked me how to say deep or dig or building in Latin, I might have been helpful.
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