The Economist's "Meritocracy in America" piece

They're right, of course. And it's gonna get worse before (if) it gets better.

In all seriousness, the emotional brutality of our public schools--kids allowed to treat each other in ways adults would get arrested for--dumbs most of us down into solipsistic conformity. Those kiddie boot camps lay the groundwork for us to be consumers of official products and ideologies that we of course could never produce, just like we could never be cool, and just like we should never try to be, or suffer the cruelty of the cool. Voice outrage as an adult and be greeted with the same label of "envy" or "weirdo" you got as a child in the cafeteria by your fellow self-policing put-upon. And meanwhile Bush is homecoming king, er, I mean, "president."

etc. as they'll say.

Don't do it, everyone who says that, myself included ends up canceling it because there are just too many words, too quickly and they just keeep coming, arrrgh (good magazine though)

C'mon, man, the future of fuel is in recycling boll weevils.

WE WUV YOU WEEVILZ!!!!

I've got a hint for these guys: these trends aren't the result of who is or isn't going to Harvard

What's causing it then? I'm not disagreeing with you, just wondering what you see the problem to be besides the usual suspects. (and to be fair, the article didn't list inequality in colleges as the cause of disaparity btwn rich and poor, but as an "example"--which, as you pointed out, is the main problem with the article; all stats and no solid conclusions.)

But haven't only two British prime ministers in its entire history not been Oxbridge educated?

it's nice to see the economist's victorian utilitarianism rubbing up against itself: "class immobility bad, policies to combat class immobility...still pretty bad" but really the one line against the standard boogeyman, affirmative action, nasty as it was, seemed really phoned in and pro forma; at least they did say that race isn't synonymous with class, and that legacies are a much bigger problem (i don't disagree with either). there are unspoken things at both ends of the argument that are really heretical for the E, like OUR RULERS AND THEIR IDEAS ARE INBRED AND EFFETE, and WE NEED A FUCKING ESTATE TAX.

i really wanted to see some numbers on how well legacy kids perform compared to their comrades but i'm sure a) no school dares to keep track, and b) grading at elite institutions is so toothless there'd be no point. but them i'm a morlock with a big mouth so what the fuck do i know.

The most essential point I took away from the book can be summrized in a few sentances.

The major problem with using the SAT and other standardized 'aptitude' testing is precisely that it adopts 'aptitude' as a proxy for 'merit' and then channels huge rewards to those who demonstrate 'aptitude', at an age when they have almost no genuine accomplishments to show the world, except high test scores. This is a damned peculiar way to apportion rewards.

The second major problem is that it is extremely unclear what the SAT and other aptitude tests actually measure. The company that produces the SAT is very careful to limit their claims for the test, saying only that it predicts academic achievement (i.e. grades) in the first six months of college and even then it predicts such success with about 60% accuracy!

In spite of all this, completing a degree at an Ivy League school gives you entree into a self-perpetuating elite - an elite that believes they merit their priveleges, even though they earned their spot on the gravy train based on nothing more than some vaguely understood and highly questionable measure of 'aptitude'.

gypsy I guess what I'm saying is that No Child Left Behind is way more than a slogan. it's an active catastrophe. at least that's how it was related to me over the dinner table by a public school teacher a few weeks ago. she told me that kids with behavioral problems, for instance, are expected to complete the same material in the same time and with the same grades as everyone else. we're talking mentally disturbed people who fling other people about, who are retaking their junior year at age 22. and if they don't perform, the school gets "punished." and there's no extra funding provided for meeting this goal. this is one tiny example of "testing" without the means to accomplish it (i think congress calls this an "unfunded mandate") in a sea full of them, with one inevitable outcome: a general punishment of public schools, and by extension public schoolchildren, and the flight towards private schools by students who can afford it will just intensify. and the economist describes this as a step forward.

then I think about the boos Ashlee Simpson got at the Orange Bowl and how my reaction was "Don't go trying to be famous if you don't have what it fucking takes" and how for several minutes too long yesterday I let myself feel vastly superior to a teenage girl who was told in no uncertain terms that she sucked by an angry mob of thousands.

Then I think about my personal experience with the educational system and the experiences of others I've been privileged to know, from Montessori school to the Ivy League with diverse public institutions in between, and think about how the two main forces for upward mobility in this country that I can think of that I've seen work are affirmative action and military service.

Then I kind of wonder where I was going with this post. Er, meritocracy. Semantics of 'merit.' Uh, astronauts. Something.

GI bill and Mortgage Interest Deductions too.

BOO HISS

Excuse me? Where did you get this idea? Last time I checked private school teachers are paid less and generally less qualified (no credentials required). (assuming you're talking about k-12)

Tracer, another problem with programs that "reward" schools based on improvements in test scores is that poorly performing schools can merely improve a little bit and be rewarded with teacher bonuses. Meanwhile schools with historically high performance get nothing because they don't fall below the standards necessary to qualify for the bonuses or they don't show enough "improvement" because they are already doing well. I don't know if this specifically relates to All Kids Left Behind but it's something that's happened with California schools.

What I read boiled down: America's wealthy are all war profiteers and passed on fat cash to their children.

But it's worth noting that the lousiness of American public education is a bipartisan problem. Some of the complaints about teachers' unions and intransigent administrators are actually true. In years of dealing with hidebound, paranoid, petty power hungry public bureaucracies, I never found any more hidebound, paranoid and petty than public school administrations. That doesn't mean we should privatize the schools or any such thing, but it does mean that some conservative critics of public education (like the people at the Center for Education Reform) are right about at least some things. A smart liberal reformer could harness some of those people to make actual useful changes. Are you listening, Barack?

Where did you get this idea? Certainly not from any major metropolitan area, that's for god damn sure.

-- Allyzay Needs Legs More (allyza...), January 7th, 2005 1:51 PM. (allyzay

is this person british? i seem to remember a thread explaining that private school in britain = public school in the u.s. or i have gone insane today.

As for private/public schools, my mom's a private school teacher, and it's true that they on average get paid less; they also have to put up with a lot more crap from parents; the trade-off is that they have a lot more freedom to teach as they please, which is why a lot of the most interesting teachers gravitate to private schools. Well, that and generally having fewer disciplinary problems (or a different kind of disciplinary problem, anyway -- more spoiled brats, fewer sociopaths).

I got this idea from the two generations of public school teachers in my family (from a major metropolitan area in California). I searched for some links to send you but searching for information on teacher salaries, unions and public vs. private school brings up tons of right wing crap and calls for privatization that I don't want to wade through.

But to generalize, it's pretty much common sense. Public school teachers are unionized while private school teachers generally are not. And public school teachers have teaching credentials and some graduate level education while private school teachers are not required to and therefore generally do not. Common sense should tell you that union protection plus higher levels of education mean that the public school teachers make more money on average. Of course this will vary from school to school and district to district. But the myth that "the good teachers" are all at private schools is misguided and offensive.

The idea that private school teachers somehow have more freedom is kind of funny to me as well, considering that most private schools are religious institutions.

"Of those schools or districts using a salary schedule, public charter schools offered the highest base salary for teachers with a bachelor’s degree and no experience. The average starting salary for teachers with no experience in public charter schools that used a salary schedule was $26,977, compared with $25,888 for public school districts. Private schools offered the lowest base salary, with teachers with a bachelor’s degree and no experience earning $20,302 annually."

from http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=55

Well, in religious schools there's more freedom to teach religion (if that's your thing). But nonreligious private schools, like the one my mom teaches at, allow for a lot more flexibility in curriculum, classroom activities, etc. Mom's a science teacher, and she likes to spend a lot more time taking the kids outdoors for field studies (ecosystems, etc.) than she would be able to in a public school. Her curriculum is entirely her own -- she's built it from scratch over the past 15 years or so.

"The objective qualifications of private school teachers and principals, on average, are less than those of public school teachers and principals.
* About 30 percent of private school teachers are not state certified in the field of their main assignment, compared to 3 percent of public school teachers (table 3.3).

* More than 6 percent of private school teachers do not have a bache lors degree, compared to fewer than 1 percent of public school teach ers; and 34 percent have at least a masters degree, compared to 47 percent of public school teachers (table 3.4).

* About one in four private school principals has no degree beyond a bachelor's degree, compared to 1.4 percent of public school principals (table 3.9).

Private school teachers earn base salaries, on average, less than two-thirds of average public school teachers' salaries; and principals earn slightly more than half of their public school counterparts' salaries (tables 3.7 and 3.12). Private school teachers, on the other hand, are more likely to receive in-kind compensation: 15 percent receive tuition waivers for their children, 20.2 percent receive free meals, and 7 percent receive housing support (table 3.13). Such in-kind compensation is rarely available to public school teachers.

from http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/ps/97459006.asp

I don't mean to denigrate private school teachers, I'm simply trying to defend public school teachers. They are always the first to be attacked when people criticize the public school system.

However, the idea that public school teachers somehow don't create their own curriculum is a bit silly as well. Yes, there are certain state and federally mandated aspects of the curriculum but within that framework there is a lot of freedom and creativity. Would you prefer that we have no mandated curriculum so that a history teacher would have the freedom to totally ignore slavery? Would you let a science teacher question evolution?

Now, if you're talking about cutting back or doing away with standardized testing as a way to give public school teachers more freedom then I would absolutely support that. But I don't know how you could argue that there should be no oversight and no standardized subjects that all public school students should learn.

three-legged race? hacky-sack tournament?

if it really used to be the best people teaching, and now it's the worst, what changed? and if you want teaching to be competitive with other professions don't you need to make it more renumerative as the first step of any other reform, REGARDLESS of any other reform? who is going to fucking bother stepping foot in much more difficult pool when the cheese is still stuck at $27k? (the Economist made this argument abt a year ago, as it happens). you're waving the market as a magic wand, keith.

(sorry for going on about this -- i used to be an education reporter, and this stuff still interests me...)

Now, if this makes you happier, my dad finds the school he works for to be good one. In contrast, a good friend of mine from work was a teacher and taught at a private school. She ended up hating the experience, finding most of the students felt them unaccountable for any work done, something their parents readily encouraged -- which makes your little story about the teacher at the public school forced out because of assigning homework rather less remarkable. After she left, she made it a plan that her children would not in fact attend a private school and never would, and that she found the experience vastly overrated.

In otherwards, unsurprisingly, there is no magic formula of public = bad, private = good, and putting down the mental crackpipe calling this to mind would be helpful. There are examples of both in both spheres and plenty of shades of grey, similar as there are with teachers and with programs and more -- all my school experiences, all in public schools, demonstrated this to me readily enough. That there are destructive factors that can cause grevious problems in public schools is undeniable; privatization -- with this as, say, with other current issues of wide national interest -- is a silver bullet, adhered to with as much willful blindness to criticism as utter and total ideologues in opposition do with theirs. Engaging with a range of possibilities to address individual situations, rather than calling for one-size-fits-all balderdash, would be helpful. After all, private *and* public schools do already exist -- kindly embrace the idea that wiping out half of that partnership strikes me as limiting choice instead of increasing it.

Yeah. I've read a lot of things by pro-privatization/voucher people, and they're always long on pointing out the shortcomings of the current system and short on how exactly they think their system would be better. They don't even actually have a system. Ask a voucher enthusiast to sit down and actually diagram for you how exactly you would go about converting a public school system to a voucher system, and they just start repeating cliches about the glory of the marketplace. There is no plan. It's just like the approaches to Iraq, Social Security, etc. etc. etc. -- mindless dogma untested and unchecked by the complexities of the actual world...until the damage is already done.

I had a kind of shower thought/hottake that the function of meritocracy under capitalism, to the extent it exists at all, is to try to ensure that as many people as possible who are capable of leading the working class are instead subsumed into the ruling class. It's not a matter of fairness, it's just seeking to ensure that as much of the talent as possible is on one team. And it's a good strategy.