Some Kids Are Smart, Some Aren't

One of the worst things we do in K-12 education is tell students they have to go to college.  Not everyone can or should.

Before I was born, California created its Master Plan for Education.  It outlined our 3 levels of post-secondary education:  community colleges, the CSU System, and the UC System.  The UC's were supposed to educate the top eighth or so of high school graduates, the CSU's the top third, and the community colleges were for everyone.  Even then it was recognized that only the top third of high school graduates should go directly to a university, and I see no reason why that percentage should have changed.

Yet, we tell kids that college is the way, the truth, and the light.  Everyone should go to college.  We subtly, and not so subtly, tell students that if they don't go to college, that pretty much the first adult decision they make is the wrong one.

We load more and more courses that are required for graduation, and we make school almost entirely academic.  Remember when schools had shop classes, typing, home ec, drafting, shorthand, etc?  We have none of those at my current school.  Not one.  Sure, we have robotics, and while it's extremely cool, it's not the same as wood or metal or auto or electronics shop.  Sure, we have a medical "career and technical education" program, but that's not the same as home ec.  This shouldn't be an either/or situation, we should have "all of the above".  But we don't.  We get more and more academic, and wonder why kids are turned off from school.

And then there's this:

All that Fredrik deBoer wants us to do is concede that not everyone can be above average. That’s just the nature of statistics, its iron and immutable logic. In many realms, we accept this without hesitation: height or weight; the time it takes to jog a mile; my persistent inability to carry a tune.

Apply this to education, however, and things get touchier. Some students, to put it bluntly, simply aren’t smart enough. This may sound cold-hearted. But, deBoer contends, the truly callous approach is to ignore this reality.

That’s just what Americans do by fetishizing academic ability as a true measure of just deserts. In policy clichés accepted by left and right, education is the foundation of meritocracy — the foundational belief of what deBoer terms the “Cult of Smart.” Its near-monopoly on education policy emphasizes the need for one-size-fits-all standards and disruptive quick-fixes: tech gimmicks; Facebook’s partnership with Newark schools; No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and standardized testing; the priority of abstract subjects like algebra; an emphasis on teacher quality as the primary obstacle holding back student performance.

More perniciously, it leads those who aren’t academically talented to regard themselves as failures from an early age.

The contrarian deBoer is a left-critic of liberalism and the myth of meritocracy. Paths toward economic and social failure in the contemporary United States, he laments, are myriad; those that lead to success increasingly few. He sees this as meritocracy’s essence. Just as many of us will never grow to be six feet tall, many will also never succeed even in a perfectly meritocratic society. “Our system can promote equality or it can sort people into a hierarchy of ability,” he writes. “It can’t do both.”

The author tells us more about deBoer, a person I would find despicable, but that doesn't mean that everything he thinks is wrong.  I agree with his ideas above but disagree with his so-called solutions (for reasons that the author points out).  This seems more reasonable:

As it turns out, demolishing the Cult of Smart isn’t just a left-wing project. Though conservative critics of 21st-century meritocracy and mainstream education policy don’t agree with all of deBoer’s proposals, they’re sympathetic to some. His call to de-emphasize the importance of a four-year college degree and promote vocational and trade schools finds echoes in the policy forum American Compass. Indeed, Charles Murray arrived at the same conclusion over a decade ago, making the case for vocational training in a 2008 essay for the American Enterprise Institute. His argument, too, was grounded in the uneven distribution of academic ability — and the need to value the kind of intelligence a skilled manual laborer requires as morally equal to that required by a white-collar worker with a B.A.

If you're equating academic prowess--or pretty much any other prowess, really--with morality, then you're a fool. 

When my son was in elementary school I took him to Mexico.  We saw what in this country would be considered fairly severe poverty.  He hadn't seen that before and, seeking understanding, he asked me, in the blunt terms of a child, "Does that mean we're better than them?"  I replied that no, we're not better, we just have more than they do.  We have more benefits and blessings than they do, and we are to be thankful for that, but all good and decent people have moral worth.  And I believe that to my core.  To me it's the most American of beliefs.

My son can be forgiven for considering, as a 9-year-old, that prosperity might have some relation to morality.  Adults should not think that way, and they shouldn't think that way about academic ability, athletic ability, race, wealth, or job title, either.

Public schools should educate everyone, but they shouldn't educate everyone the same way.  I'm all for letting students choose a path--academic, vocational, artistic, or otherwise--and having different academic requirements in those paths.

But that's just me.