This post is a response to a recent opinion piece in the New York Times entitled School Is for Merit, by Asra Q. Nomani. As over the years I've written a lot about education, mostly about higher ed but then sometimes about K-12 as well, here I'm mainly going to excerpt from previous pieces and then provide the links to the full piece as well. Since readers sometime comment that I'm prolix in writing these blog posts, let me cut to the chase and only after that make my full argument.
There is much dysfunction in education these days. I'm certainly not the first to note it. This dysfunction exists even at schools in upper middle class and wealthy school districts. The dysfunction is the core issue that needs remedy, which will not be simple to consider nor to implement. The system may do well by a very small fraction of the students, but it is failing many others, including those with high GPAs. Talking about meritocracy, the way Ms. Nomani does, is applying a surface solution that won't fix the underlying problem. I am not writing to defend recent changes that she takes up (e.g. dropping the requirement of standardized test scores for college admission). Those too provide a surface solution. Let's talk about the underlying issues and see if we can agree on those. That's my aim below.
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The following is an excerpt from a post called The double-edged sword we refer to as 'high expectations' and gets at a fundamental issue when grades become prominent. The post was written at the end of the fall semester in 2015. I struggled with that class. In the previous three years teaching. the course had been more rewarding.
First and foremost is the question whether ordinary students are willing
to endure the frequent failure that is necessary for real learning.
Two reasons why they may not are: (1) potential damage to the GPA in so
doing and (2) potential damage to the student's ego from feeling
embarrassed by being awkward in front of others - classmates and
especially the teacher.
As to (1), real learning takes as long as it takes. On the other hand,
exams happen at times scheduled well in advance. One explanation for
why students memorize in advance of exams is that it seems a more
reliable approach for readying oneself against the vicissitudes of the
exam, while containing the readying activity to a manageable time
period. In turn, such students then grow to expect the instructor to
teach to the test, so when such expectations are confirmed memorizing
the lecture notes ends up indeed being good preparation. There is also
that this becomes a learned behavior (in the sense of habit formation)
so even in those circumstances where the instructor offers up questions
on the exam that follow only indirectly from the lectures, many students
will still prepare as they have in their other courses, for lack of a
viable alternative.
The above is an indirect argument that grades are pernicious in
encouraging real learning with ordinary students, as too many of them
will opt for the self-protection described in the previous paragraph,
when the grade consequences are sufficiently severe. Alternatively, it
can be taken as an argument in support of grade inflation. If students
are convinced they will do reasonably well grade-wise as long as they
attain a minimal performance standard - e.g., showing up and being
counted - then they have less need to self-protect via memorization and
might be more willing to go through the steps it takes to produce real
learning. This gets us to (2).
If a student is not self-conscious, then it is possible the student will
be oblivious to the risk of failure. In turn, that lack of
self-consciousness can lead to deep learning as the student gets fully
absorbed in the subject matter. It may be the honors students differ
from regular students mostly in this lack of self-consciousness and
hence in their ability to concentrate. For a student who is
self-conscious and who does fear failure as a consequence, a different
approach is needed if the student is to engage in real learning. The
student must be convinced that failure is no big deal. Failure is just
an ordinary part of learning, necessary early steps if you will. The way
to convince students of this is to create a safe space in which
students are encouraged to fail and fail often, all as part of the
larger process.
This post followed one I had written a few years earlier entitled, Why does memorization persist as the primary way that students study for exams?
The hypothesis, not particularly novel or really much of a surprise but I've never seen it expressed quite this way, is that The Disengagement Compact, George Kuh's aptly put but discouraging label for the unholy implicit contract between students and instructor, where no party is burdened much at all while all parties get to reside in a virtual Lake Woebegone, is manifest in a very particular way. If the Disengagement Compact is the Devil making himself known in undergraduate education, then memorization is the Devil's disciple, an artifice for claiming both that learning is happening and that substantial effort in the name of learning is occurring. Hardly anybody, after all, wants to be labeled a slacker. Further, students want to resist the damning evidence of low grades. So students somehow feel that they've been tasked by their instructors to memorize course content. Many instructors indeed do task their students this way so as to satisfy student expectations and thereby avoid their enmity.
I should have added here that course evaluations matter, more so for non-tenure-track faculty, whose jobs may depend on them. If these instructors satisfy their students' grade expectations, they are apt to get tolerably good course evaluations. This gives one real reason for why instructors participate in the implicit contract.
Let me turn to a different learning issue, one that is highlighted in the book, Excellent Sheep, by William Deresiewicz, where he was writing about students at Yale who took an English class from him. In my reframing of the issues considered there, students become excellent at jumping through hoops that elders (parents and teachers) set, but they never learn what pleases themselves other than purely hedonistic pleasure, so they surely don't learn what activities they should engage in that would produce this sense of pleasing themselves. They live in an artificial world created by the adults around them. Inwardly, many are quite depressed, for life has no real meaning to them.
In the process of reading Excellent Sheep, I wrote a post about my own experience in high school entitled, I was not a sheep. Were you? I will not put an excerpt from that piece here, but the various factors I list are worth considering. Since writing this post I've come to embrace the expression, the student has to drive the bus. My belief is that if the student does this willingly and with sufficient commitment then deep learning will happen, life will then have meaning, and the dysfunction I mentioned at the outset will largely disappear. The questions remains, how do we get there from here?
A student will drive the bus when the student is intrinsically motivated. The dedicated instructor who wants to promote deep learning will then ask, how can I teach my class so as to intrinsically motivate my students? Pretty soon after posing that question, the instructor will want to know about the relationship between extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. I consider this in a post called, Is Daniel Pink Confusing Us About Motivation And Economic Incentives? This excerpt is from the post.
Main point of Dan Pink's talk:
When we are already intrinsically motivated applying extrinsic
motivation, in the form of reward for good behavior or punishment for
bad behavior, is self-defeating because it detracts from the intrinsic
motivation, a much more powerful force.
I completely agree with this point. When intrinsically motivated we
lose sense of ourselves. We are totally into the activity, whether
reading a great book, watching a fascinating movie, or working through a
problem or puzzle that has captured our attention. The object of that
attention becomes the entire universe. It is as if we are in a bubble
that we are permitted to remain inside so long as we focus only on its
contents. Extrinsic motivation of any kind makes us self-conscious. It
bursts the bubble. Intellectually, it is like holding up a mirror.
Once we look at ourselves, it is very difficult if not impossible to
re-enter the bubble.
Later in the post I argue that eventually the bubble will burst of its own accord. It can't last forever. At this point extrinsic incentive is needed to contract anew with the student and hope another round of intrinsic motivation can ensue. To make this concrete, in the course I had been teaching during retirement I had the students do weekly blogging. I gave feedback on each post they wrote with extensive comments. But I employed portfolio grading - at mid semester there would be a grade for the posts in the first half of the course and at end of semester there would be a grade for the remaining posts. There would also be some comment to explain the grade given. This certainly wasn't perfect. But it is in the spirit of how we might teach to practice what is being preached here.
I want to change gears now. Let's focus on that unusual student who does learn in a deep way that is evident to others and in so doing learns to please himself or herself. Does the way this student performs have an impact on the learning of other students? Quite possibly, the answer is yes. The following is about my experience in Social Studies, when I regularly raised my hand in response to questions posed by our teacher, and then would give an extensive answer, one that most other students in the class wouldn't have come up with. It is from a post called, When Boys Had To Wear Ties To School.
Yet consciously, it was just me being me. At that level I'm quite sure I was not trying to impress my classmates. Was that naiveté or something else? I did learn near the end of 7th grade that it can cut the other way. We had autograph books which we got others in our class to sign, after saying something they felt about the person. One girl wrote that I made her feel uncomfortable in class. Had I gotten many such comments, I might have changed my in-class behavior. With just this one comment, while it bothered me, I didn't make any adjustment at all.
That very good students might intimidate more average students should come as no surprise. Later, both in high school and then in college, I witnessed this intimidation as deliberate, a kind of trash talking by nerds. When the nerds are themselves friendly with each other it may be no-harm-no-foul. Otherwise it might be a defense mechanism to hide being socially inept in other ways. More recently, I've had some friends in Facebook tell me that I was a positive role model for them academically, encouraging them to apply themselves more. Fifty plus years after the fact, I'm willing to admit the possibility though I'm still skeptical about it in this instance. The overall point is this. There can be externalities in how the behavior of one student impacts the learning of the other. A full analysis would aggregate those and then consider the benefits and costs. It is insufficient to simply consider the benefits for the winners in the meritocratic lottery.
The same issue can be applied to our national politics, where there seems to be much anger and resentment by Conservatives aimed at Liberal elites, with the Liberals too smug to realize they are causing this reaction and/or blaming it entirely on the media that over hypes what Liberals are trying to achieve. I wrote about this in a post called Unintentionally Making Others Feel Stupid. An evident solution to this issue would be to have Liberals communicate a sense of humility on the matter. But with what now feels like a virtual civil war between Republicans and Democrats, I doubt that such a concession can or will be made in the near future.
The last issue I'll take up here is about the role of meritocracy in school and what graduates earn in the labor market thereafter. In a post called Pluck or Luck I wrote the following:
The next day I stumbled onto a Web site that articulates The Just World Theory, and makes reference to a book from 1980 called The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion.
That the book is from more than 30 years ago suggests the issue has
been with us for quite some time. The Just World Theory leaves out any
role for luck whatsoever. People get what they deserve. It is an
extreme form of hindsight bias.
Zick Rubin of Harvard University and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA have conducted surveys to examine the characteristics of people with strong beliefs in a just world. They found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups. To a lesser but still significant degree, the believers in a just world tend to "feel less of a need to engage in activities to change society or to alleviate plight of social victims."
I want to confront this with some very particular data, which I used the last time I taught, back in fall 2019. On the second worksheet of this Excel workbook there is salary data from 2018 for Econ department Assistant Professors and Specialized Faculty (teaching faculty not on the tenure track). There is some discussion of those data in this post to the course Website. Also included for comparison is my salary from back in 1980, when I first started at Illinois as an Assistant Professor on the tenure track, with an inflation adjustment that is imperfect but workable. The reader should get the message that in 1980 I was earning less in real terms than specialized faculty were earning when teaching in 2018, and assistant professors in 2018 were earning a helluva lot more. This is one simple snapshot of a much larger phenomenon. The increasing income inequality in the society overall has lifted incomes within the top 10% of the distribution substantially. Is that windfall justice or mere happenstance? If the latter, shouldn't those benefiting from the windfall be willing to accept substantially less in compensation? That question was meant in a normative sense. In a positive sense, do we actually expect that? I surely don't.
Let me wrap up. I could have written a somewhat different post, one that focuses on core competencies - being able to read with meaning, being comfortable in having an open conversation that isn't mediated by a smart phone, having a good enough people network to be able to go ask for help from someone who is able and willing to provide it, and perhaps some others as well. If those core competencies were there, then perhaps layering meritocracy in school on top of that wouldn't be so bad. But if those core competencies aren't there, then what are we doing when talking about meritocracy? I chose to write the post as I did, because people compensate for their own deficiencies and we should be aware of the typical forms that those compensations take. Yet the point remains the same. What's fundamental is the need to address those deficiencies. Meritocracy then becomes mere window dressing. Let's focus on the fundamentals.
