MANY BOOKS HAVE been written on the failings of the American education system. The recommendations to fix these problems are quite varied and include the development of a national curriculum, giving teachers fair wages, ensuring that teachers are involved in the decisions of central administration, and encouraging extensive family involvement in students’ lives. And these are just the suggestions found in one author’s book.1
The idea I’d like to advocate in this book, however, is simple but powerful: we need to change our understanding of merit. Currently, merit is measured by an individual’s test scores and grades. The higher the test scores and the better the grades, the more entitlements are granted to an individual by teachers, parents, administrators, other students, and even the general public. But this need not be the case. Instead, I’ve found that what is urgent for our world—and thus what we should consider most closely in education—is a student’s capacity to collaborate and to think creatively. Here I intend to explore the current meritocracy in America and how it developed along with the rise of the SAT and other supposedly objective metrics used to evaluate a student’s candidacy for college.
In the next section of this book, I will propose a new framework, one focused on advancing democratic rather than testocratic merit. This section draws upon a number of case studies—most in the field of education, but not always—to demonstrate how teamwork and the fortification of strong collaborative relationships can achieve the ends that will serve our society best in the long run.
IN 2012, UNIVERSITIES, businesses, advocacy organizations, and communities of color held their breath as they waited for the Supreme Court to decide Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. The case had been brought by white University of Texas applicant Abigail Fisher, who argued that the university’s race-conscious admissions program was unconstitutional because it had denied her admission on account of her race. As the public awaited a decision, many feared that the case would threaten the future of race-conscious admissions policies, despite the fact that ten years had passed since the Supreme Court had decisively upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action in Grutter v. Bollinger.
So when the Supreme Court finally released its opinion in the Fisher case, on June 24, 2013, proponents of affirmative action breathed a sigh of relief. The majority opinion (which will be covered in greater depth in the next chapter), authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, was anticlimactic, even reassuring. Issues of diversity were still on the table; the opinion had not dismantled affirmative action altogether, as most had feared.2 Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the majority, albeit on different grounds. He wrote separately to argue that affirmative action and any consideration of race in admission should always be unconstitutional.3 In fact, Thomas argued, all attempts by a university to achieve diversity among its students were exactly the kind of racial discrimination that had maintained segregation, because it meant the university was considering race in the first place.4
According to Thomas, then, any naming of race was tantamount to racial bigotry. He described race-conscious admissions as a type of “discrimination [that] has a pervasive shifting effect” because the “University admits minorities who otherwise would have attended less selective colleges where they would have been more evenly matched.”5 Thomas went on to write, “As a result of the mismatching, many blacks and Hispanics who likely would have excelled at less elite schools are placed in a position where underperformance is all but inevitable because they are less academically prepared.”6
Justice Thomas’s argument—what we might call the “mismatch effect”—is a stark reminder that our universities have drifted away from their public mission to create active citizens in a democratic society. They have shifted their attention, instead, to that single moment in a student’s college (or law school) experience: the moment of admission. If, as Justice Thomas argues, students must only be admitted to places that “evenly match” them, what responsibilities are left to higher education? In Justice Thomas’s formulation, universities perform little more than sorting functions, cherry-picking students who have come up the escalator of excellence and arrive at their doorsteps presumably pre-packaged and pre-equipped with everything they need for success.
This drift from a mission-driven to an admission-driven higher education system should give all of us pause. I, for one, have had formative, nurturing educational experiences that made me a better, more inquisitive, more accomplished student than I was at the moment of admission. It should also give Justice Thomas pause, because Thomas himself was the beneficiary of mentorship and thoughtful guidance during his college years at Holy Cross. Justice Thomas has acknowledged the important role his mentors played in creating an environment of challenge and support that allowed him to reach his educational goals. As such he is a poster child, reminding us that the duty of our universities is to give students an educational experience in which merit is cultivated, not merely scored.
In arguing that students should arrive at college “evenly matched” to the school’s standards for excellence, Clarence Thomas seems to have forgotten that when he arrived as a sophomore transfer along with nineteen other freshmen at Holy Cross in the summer of 1968, Father John Brooks, a dean, student advocate, and mentor at the college, had personally written up files on each of them, highlighting what set them apart from other young men. Father Brooks had identified each of the men’s strengths: some had challenging family backgrounds that they had already shown signs of overcoming; others had exhibited a willingness to push beyond expectations and give back to their communities in big and small ways.7 Father Brooks believed that the black students may not have been fully prepared for Holy Cross, but more importantly—more urgently—he felt that Holy Cross was woefully unprepared for them.8
One evening in the autumn of 1968, Clarence Thomas came knocking on Father Brooks’s door. He had come by to discuss some classes, but the conversation turned quickly to many larger questions, including Thomas’s feelings of alienation as he adjusted to college and his anxieties that his grades would not secure him a spot at an Ivy League law school.9 Brooks listened with an open heart and then assured Thomas that he could find within himself the ability to succeed, not only at Holy Cross but in the future as well. Father Brooks promised Thomas that he would always hold him to high standards, but that if Thomas were to find something too difficult, Brooks’s door was open for them to talk and find a way.10
During Thomas’s years at Holy Cross, he found himself knocking on Father Brooks’s door quite frequently to talk with his mentor about coursework, campus life, and current affairs.11 After graduation, Thomas did attain his goal of attending an Ivy League law school, and at Yale Law he dreamt about using his legal career to “right the wrongs of segregation.”12 During one of his law school summers, thanks to a fellowship that I helped him obtain, Thomas interned at a civil rights law firm in his home state of Georgia, and began a legal career that ultimately brought him to a seat on the Supreme Court.13
There is, in other words, both a direct and an indirect conflict between Clarence Thomas’s own lived experience and his criticisms of college admissions and affirmative action. This conflict is not just limited to Justice Thomas; Thomas’s current view of the way college and graduate school admissions in America should work is a widespread cultural tradition. Admissions to post-secondary education in Canada provide a stark contrast to the American system. In Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article “Getting In,” he tells his own story of how, as a Canadian teenager, he applied to universities in his country. He recalls filling out an application one evening after dinner where he spent “probably. . . ten minutes” ranking his preferred universities. He vaguely remembers filling out a supplemental list of interests and activities, and sent that in. His high school sent in his grades; there was no need for an SAT score or to ask anyone to write letters of recommendation. “Why would I? It wasn’t as if I were applying to a private club,” he recounts.
Admitted to his first-ranked school, Gladwell, in the article, said he considered it an odd question as to whether he considered himself a better or more successful person for having been accepted there, as opposed to his second or third choice.
In Ontario, there wasn’t a strict hierarchy of colleges. . . . But since all colleges were part of the same public system and tuition everywhere was the same (about a thousand dollars a year, in those days), and a B average in high school pretty much guaranteed you a spot in college, there wasn’t a sense that anything great was at stake in the choice of which college we attended. The issue was whether we attended college, and—most important—how seriously we took the experience once we got there. I thought everyone felt this way. You can imagine my confusion, then, when I first met someone who had gone to Harvard.14
To illustrate the difference in approach represented by the United States and Canada, Gladwell uses the analogy of a modeling agency versus the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps, Gladwell writes, “doesn’t have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It’s confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier.”15 Modeling agencies, on the other hand, sign on recruits because they are already beautiful.16 Applying these ideas to university selection processes, Gladwell argues that the “extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies. . . makes it seem more like a modeling agency than like the Marine Corps.”17
Professors Robert Paul Wolff and Tobias Barrington Wolff pose a similar argument in a law review article published a few months before Gladwell’s New Yorker piece. In it, they paint a picture of the tiny imaginary island republic of “Invertia.”18 The father-son author duo then take the reader on hypothetical visits to two of Invertia’s preeminent national institutions: a world-class hospital and a top-flight university. In the hospital’s emergency room, the visitor sees two patients: one suffering from an apparent heart attack and one complaining of a small pimple on his nose. Unexpectedly, the emergency room staff leaves the heart attack victim to die, turning its attention to the second man, a tall, tanned figure whom the Wolffs call “a veritable Adonis” (referring to the legendary Greek god of beauty). The Invertian minister of health, who goes to the hospital with the Wolffs, has this to say in defense of the doctors’ choice of treatment:
Every so often, we see a patient who is obviously bursting with good health and natural physical gifts—fit, vigorous, strikingly attractive. When such a patient comes along, needing only the very slightest medical adjustment to emerge in perfect condition, a patient with whom our chance of success is virtually one hundred percent, we are prepared to waive the normal procedures and speed the admission process. . . . Invertian society needs an elite core of superbly healthy men and women whose every last imperfection or blemish has been meticulously removed by the most modern techniques of medical science.
Admissions procedures at the university, however, are quite the opposite. There, the Wolffs describe the university admissions office’s summary rejection of a straight-A scholar-athlete who, in her free time, performs as a concert pianist and volunteers with inner-city and disabled youth. An underachieving, semi-literate young man is chosen in her place as a member of the incoming class. The university representative explains its decisions:
[The] young woman is already so well developed intellectually that she does not need what an elite university can offer. . . . To spend the scarce educational resources of our top university on her would be wasteful and inefficient. . . . Educationally speaking, if I may put it this way, [the young man] was in extremis when he walked in. . . . At this very moment, our team of professors is working with him, starting the painful, difficult process of developing his intellect, challenging his mind, helping him work through the shame and self-doubt of semi-literacy. . . . Imagine the thrill we all feel when one of those young people, whose mind had all but ceased to exhibit curiosity and creativity, begins to read, to write, to think, to argue, to question a world that has, until then, been closed to him.
The authors use the fantasy nation of Invertia to show two stark alternatives: a world in which resources are used to improve even further those in near-perfect health versus one in which even the lowliest of citizens are given the tools to cultivate their intelligence in order both to have the opportunity to excel and to contribute to their society. I find it extremely disturbing that our universities resemble more closely the hospitals that take in classes full of Adonises to treat them for a pimple on the nose than they do mission-driven universities that are engaged in educating and nurturing all of their students.
You might think I am exaggerating. I wish I was. It is a shock to discover that the doctors of Invertia, preoccupied with Adonises, are everywhere. When I went to the Yale campus to see my son graduate I picked up a copy of the student newspaper, which had published a profile of the graduating class. I scanned it with interest (looking for mention of my son, of course!) when I came across a chart called “By the Numbers.” The undergraduate class of 2009 was described this way:
| BY THE NUMBERS UNDERGRADUATE CLASS OF 2009 | |
| 1,321 | Students in the original freshman class |
| 157 | Students in the original freshman class with alumni parents |
| 750 | Median SAT Verbal score |
| 740 | Median SAT Mathematics score |
| 9.7 | Percent of applicants admitted |
| 113 | Number of international students |
I tried to figure out what was bothering me so much. Eventually it struck me: every single one of these statistics that the paper was celebrating reflected student achievements or demographic facts, all of which were established before the students even got to New Haven! It was as if the entire Yale College experience had been nothing but a confirmation of high school scores, as if it were a finishing school run by a modeling agency. Where was a list of the students’ accomplishments as a result of their college experience? Where was evidence of the college’s own self-described mission of educating future leaders and citizens of a democracy?
Yale and other elite institutions such as Harvard and Princeton are private institutions. Yet despite their generous endowments and steep tuition rates, they are still subsidized by state taxpayers. Many are situated on land that the public donated. Their faculty receives public subsidies through research grants, and their students receive a disproportionate amount of federally financed scholarship funds. This subsidy occurs despite the fact that the majority of their enrolled students are wealthy. Colleges such as the “Big Three”—Yale, Harvard, and Princeton (but not limited to these three by any means—offer enormous opportunity to a few, while largely avoiding their obligation to the many by taking an increasingly scarce public reservoir of riches and making it available primarily to those who can pay. The result? Predictable. Anyone who wants to play the game has to shift their attention from the mission declared by our country’s elite institutions of educating future leaders and citizens of a democracy to the goal of gaining admission to their storied halls.
In his recently published book, Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College, journalist Andrew Ferguson astutely describes the frenzy that accompanies the college admissions process today. As he comically recounts his experience helping his son apply—and get in—to college, Ferguson laments:
What had once been a fairly brief and straightforward process, in which the children of the middle and upper classes found a suitable college, filled out an application, got in, and then went happily away, returning home only now and then to celebrate holidays and borrow money, has evolved into a multiyear rite of passage, often beginning before puberty.19
This rite of passage, Ferguson says, carries with it a probability of ultimate success that is “much worse than a crapshoot.”20 Frankly, I’m not familiar with the game of craps, but these odds don’t sound very good. We could also compare getting into college to entering the lottery (something all Americans can relate to)—except it is not random, like state-sponsored lotteries. Instead, the odds of winning in this lottery are stacked in favor of the Adonises of our world, the children of the wealthy.
In a 2014 Boston Globe article, Beth Teitell describes one seventeen-year-old high school senior whose extracurricular activities, designed to make him attractive to the college of his choice, were padded to the point of absurdity. The student had “studied electrical engineering at Skidmore College, argued in mock trials at Columbia University, developed apps at MIT, and screened patients for tuberculosis in Thailand.”21 Teitell rightly identifies that “with college tuition an enormous financial stress for many families, adding pricey summer programs to the tab is something that’s out of reach for most people, who see resume-building activities as yet another example of wealthy families trying to buy their children advantages.”22 And nowhere is the gap between what the haves and the have-nots can do for their children to help them get into college more visible than in the test-preparation courses that presumably ensure that most notable attainment of the American Adonis: a high SAT score. The SAT, as the preeminent standardized test for college admission in the United States, best reflects our national obsession with the moment of college admission, rather than with the post-graduation missions of those who attend our colleges and universities. This despite the fact that SAT scores are accurate reflectors of wealth and little else.
Are your no. 2 pencils sharpened?