The Tyranny of the Meritocracy by Lani Guinier

Author:Lani Guinier [Guinier, Lani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0628-3
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2014-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Democratic Merit in the Classroom: Eric Mazur and Uri Treisman

YOU’VE READ HERE about the problems of testocratic merit—and there are plenty of them. It all begins with an admissions test, the SAT, that colleges use to select the “best and the brightest.” The so-called best and the brightest are often nothing more than students who can perform well on a test, often by using quick strategic guessing with less-than-perfect information. Boys, for example, do better on the math portion of the SAT than girls. They routinely score forty to fifty points higher. Many people say, “Well, that’s because girls are ignored in high school math.” That may be true, yet despite their lower SAT math scores, these girls do just as well as the boys when they take math courses in college. The difference becomes evident when you interview students as to how they approach the SAT. The boys basically view it as a pinball machine: the goal is speed and winning. The girls, on the other hand, want to work through the problems before they put down the answer. For the SAT-test defenders, carefully analyzing a question, apparently, does not exemplify merit. Our over-emphasis on the testocracy has us confusing merit with speed and the confidence to guess.

How to guess is one of the topics covered for students whose families can afford intensive and expensive test preparation and training. This economic division, combined with the fact that the SAT is normed to the values and culture of the upper-middle class, allows certain demographics to replicate their success. Yet these same test defenders ignore the fact that the SAT is a poor predictor of academic performance over four years. As I noted in the example of the Yale class of 2009 “By the Numbers” chart, the emphasis on tests is so great that by the time students have graduated from college, their SAT scores are often still their most valued trait. For this cohort, it’s unclear what the “value-added” of the college experience has been, since they have already been ranked and sorted in the admissions process like contestants in a beauty contest. The result is a pyramid-shaped meritocracy where everyone competes for the few spots at the very top. Affirmative action falls short as a complete solution because it simply repopulates this hierarchy, allowing it to persist.

This hierarchy under which our educational system currently operates—which sees merit as individualistic, measured by tests, and divorced from the notion of the collective good—poses several problems. It allows us to become comfortable seeing the success of a few at the top as proof of success of the group as a whole. The goal becomes moving a select few individuals to the very top, rather than preparing every student for future success. A meritocratic hierarchy based on individualistic notions of success also renders irrelevant how those at the top leverage their success: whether they lift up the whole group or only look out for “number one.” The testocratic meritocracy blinds us to the fact that in the pyramidal structure most students necessarily will be at the bottom.

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