by Penny, Laura
It is way too easy to blame Grand Theft Auto and text messaging for poor student performance. Sure, some pop culture glorifies anti-intellectualism, but the gap between Canadian and American test scores – and the fact that crabapples once said the exact same things about comic books, jazz, and the talkies – show us that pop culture is not really the problem.
The most important factor in determining student performance is class. Poor students do poorly: a class divide that ensures future class divisions, undermining the meritocratic North American dream, the idea that poor people can, by dint of their hard work and smarts, do better than their forebears did. This ideal still brings immigrants to our fair shores, and in Canada, the children of immigrants are much more likely to complete high school and finish university degrees.
The term meritocracy is fairly new, coined in 1958 by British sociologist and politico Michael Young. Young was quite dismayed by popular adoption of the term, since he meant it pejoratively. The Rise of the Meritocracy was a dystopian satire of the new elite. Young worried that the education system was rewarding a narrow set of skills, such as doing well on IQ tests or getting into the right brand-name schools. The meritocracy, Young argues, is just as unequal as the traditional British class structure, and even more disingenuous for pretending that anyone can succeed and that success is proof of merit. The poorly educated and just plain poor become embittered and disenfranchised, and the successes become smug at best and hubristic at worst.
In a 2001 editorial for The Guardian, Young wrote:
The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get. They can be insufferably smug, much more so than … the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side. So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves.19
This is a pretty prescient description of the rhetoric we’ve heard lately from the geniuses of Wall and Bay streets. The successful routinely invoke the meritocratic bona fides of a system that tells them they are meritorious.
Still, North Americans exhibit a positively romantic attachment to the notion that Canada and the U.S are indeed meritocracies, societies that reward smarts and hard work. Meritocracy is an important part of Barack and Michelle Obama’s appeal; both frequently stress that they are poor scholarship students who have made good. People long for examples of meritocracy in action because they are worried that their cherished dreams will not come true. Politics, pop culture, and self-help all sell assurances that we will succeed, but the demand for such assurances shows that we are really anxious about our prospects.
A 2008 Zogby poll on attitudes in the American workplace found that three-quarters of U.S. workers thought the American dream was less attainable than it had been eight years earlier. Another study on economic mobility, conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts in concert with lefty and righty think tanks, found that the American dream was alive and well – in Canada, France, and the Scandinavian countries, where citizens were twice as economically mobile as people in the United States or the United Kingdom.20
You may recall from a few short pages ago that countries such as Canada and the Scandinavian nations scored better than the U.S. on international tests. Coincidence? I think not. More economic mobility means more resources at home and more incentive to do well. Less economic mobility means more fatalism and resignation on the part of poor students and more dreams of winning the class lotto the way people on TV and in movies do, through luck and pluck and looks and the kinds of talents one develops over the course of an inspirational montage.
In the United States, the middle class has been more rudely and vigorously screwed by its financial betters than it has in Canada, so it stands to reason that Canuck schools score better on average and that U.S. schools exhibit greater extremes. America has some of the world’s most highly respected schools, but they exist a world away from the under-funded, overcrowded ones that serve the students who most desperately need a good education. Even Dubya knew this was the big problem. Programs such as KIPP and Teach for America have made laudable efforts to improve impoverished schools. Some American school districts have also realized that class affects the classroom, and they are opting to modify their race-based integration policies to class-plus-race formulas.
But this isn’t just a question of cash; the U.S. does spend much more, if more unevenly, on education than we skinflint Canadians do. It’s also a cultural thing, a reflection of certain social attitudes, a side effect of our differing anti-intellectualisms. Canadian anti-intellectualism is not quite as vocal as the U.S. version, and there is a little more respect for education in the Great White North. Part of this is a result of something old: Canada’s Europeanism, much of which is a reaction against the mega-culture next door. Part of it is a result of something new: immigrants, who tend to push their kids to excel in school.
Canadians are generally more deferential than Americans, and therefore have more respect for those who succeed in the confines of established institutions. People are still mildly in favour of professors and science nerds, provided that they engage in wry self-deprecation. An intellectual cannot put on airs or come off like a swell. This is fatal in a land that loves to hack its tall poppies. So long as Canadian smarties act like secular monks, devoted to the greater good of research or their students, they’re fine. Not as good as hockey players, not as loathsome as politicians, Canuck brains are largely out of sight and out of mind until they magic up a Canadarm or some medical doohickey and win a Nobel Prize and five approving minutes on the CBC. There is one exception to this rule. Illustrious foreigners, especially Brits and Americans, who choose to live in Canada have much more leeway to pontificate and greater licence to make pompous pronouncements. They’re kind enough to grace this global backwater with their presence, so they can puff and brag a bit.
Americans are more inclined to emphasize the goods an education can get you, treating school as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Consequently, the people who stay in school because they love the things they are studying have failed to reach the end, and are merely delaying the inevitable real world. American admiration of the self-made man or the rugged individualist means that scholastic success will always be a consolation prize at best, less worthy than starting your own company or inventing something. You can achieve the latter goals on your own, and the market determines whether or not they are successful, not some hoity-toity coterie of experts. It’s hardly surprising that a culture that routinely derides academic prowess – as opposed to fiscal and physical expertise, the objects of collective worship – produces middling, bored students.
I’m not quite cynical enough to conclude that standardized testing is a deliberate dumbing down, a way to snuff brains out before they become perilously critical. I don’t think that the people who come up with these accountability schemes are trying to make that Kurt Vonnegut story come true, consciously creating Harrison Bergeron–esque Community Handicappers. It’s just another instance of the more-money-than-brains mindset at work, of our fondness for technical reason and rejection of other ways of thinking. Business lobby groups like Chambers of Commerce remain staunch supporters of accountability measures such as standardized tests. The exclusive focus on basic English and math suggests that the ultimate goal of school is training people to work, not teaching them to read and write and think and argue. All we really need to do is learn ‘em so they don’t frig up the cash register or offend the customers.
The other shitty thing about accountability schemes is that they drive a lot of teachers out of the profession. The Web teems with complaints from former instructors who tired of teaching to the test. This only exacerbates one of the real problems affecting public schools on both sides of the border: it’s very difficult to recruit, train, and retain good teachers. Teaching has
one of the highest attrition rates of any profession, with many leaving within five years. Some bitch about the mediocre pay, others complain about discipline problems in the classroom, but the most commonly cited reason for leaving the profession is intransigent and ineffectual administrators who undermine or overrule the teachers they are supposed to support.
Again, part of the problem is attitudinal. Teaching is treated, at best, as a default career, something middle class-ish but not as good as real moneymaking professions such as doctoring or lawyering. Teaching still suffers from being a feminized profession, a girl job, part of the pink-collar ghetto. This is a hangover from the days when teaching was one of the few professions open to women. But a lot of those old lady teachers were tough birds and battle-axes, strict disciplinarians with high standards. Christ, my own grandmother once sent me to detention for accidentally calling her Nanny in class. She ruled the third grade with an iron fist.
Such discipline is no longer permitted by many school boards. Teachers now have much less autonomy than my Nanny did. The idea that teachers are simply glorified babysitters – and the old saw “Those who can’t do, teach” – says a lot about the way we really value the profession that is the gateway to all the professions. This lack of status means that the best and the brightest, the really hardcore nerds, often avoid teaching careers.
Guess which college majors get some of the lowest scores on American college exit tests such as the GRE, GMAT, and LSAT? That would be the education majors. Even the hungover popped-collar biz bros have better scores than America’s future educators.21 Which students get the highest scores on these exit tests? Everyone’s favourite joke majors: philosophy, English lit, and humanities, along with respectable pursuits such as physics and math.
If the ed majors I’ve encountered are any indication, teaching does indeed draw too many not-so-scholarly young women who just looove kids but are not so crazy about learning. Kids don’t need teachers to teach them how to be kids or to coo over how cute and special they are. These women should certainly open awesome daycares or have their own lucky broods. They’re perfectly fine for the first couple of alphabet and number years, when kids should be having fun while they learn, but there is no way they should be responsible for grade 5, 8, or 12 English or science or history.
Caring about your subject matter is much more important than caring about the children. We need teachers who looove English or science or history, which is not always the case with ed majors. This is another real problem, one that starts with the way we educate our educators. Many choose to teach and then pick teachable subjects, which seems totally bass-ackwards to me. To be fair, universities often err in the opposite direction, hiring prolific researchers who have gone so far into Etruscan pottery or quantum physics that they can no longer remember how to explain it to someone meeting it for the first time. Those professors stink too, but they don’t do as much damage as the teacher who is totally dependent on the answer key and discourages any deviation from it.
Standardized testing regimes, perversely, reward these uninspired, ill-informed “just following orders” teachers. This is pretty funny when you think of every beloved movie teacher ever. Hottie or zany charismatic or inner-city hardass, beloved superstar teachers succeed by making their own rules, by caring more about poems or the kids than The System, man. The public eats up this heroic teacher myth with a ladle. Then they vote for pols who push standardized schemes that ensure their fantasies will remain exactly that.
This isn’t just movie myth, either. If you ask most people about their favourite teachers, they will usually describe a devoted weirdo or a classic disciplinarian, someone whose enthusiasm for the subject was infectious or whose willingness to impose stringent standards made it clear that learning matters. When people complain about the teachers they hated, you often hear about the boneheads who just repeated the textbook chapter and verse, who were unable to cope with any questions the book did not answer, who squelched the curiosity that drives genuine learning.
A bad teacher, or a system that encourages bad teaching, does serious damage to scores of kids. Happily, the reverse is true too; a couple of good teachers can help make up for a multitude of childhood challenges and set someone off in the general direction of a better life. I was lucky enough to have several really great teachers, arch-conservatives and radicals, old-school hardasses and eccentrics, who convinced me that teaching was the most awesome job in the world. I still feel that way. And I know a critical mass of other profs and teachers who feel the same way, and suspect that you might know or remember some too.
That is why, even though I am concerned about the deleterious effects of passive, overly testy education, I am suspicious of “school sucks” stories. They obscure real problems in the school system that could be ameliorated with political will and some cash. I don’t want to make this sound easy-peasy; it’s difficult to agree on educational standards, and even harder to implement and assess them. It demands a lot from parents, students, teachers, and administrators. But most of the people who cry public-school crisis have little interest in doing this kind of hard work. Instead they cry crisis to advance a political agenda that is usually anti-public and anti-school, anti-intellectual and anti-union.
Lest we forget, St. Reagan, when he was campaigning in 1980, swore he would destroy the Department of Education, a child of the Carter administration. That and the reinstatement of school prayer were the only education “issues” Reagan gave a toss about. A Democratic majority made his plan impossible, and then, in 1983, the report A Nation at Risk came out. Full of dire stats about poor performance in math, reading, and science, the report is heavy on Cold War gloom and doom: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”22 This is reminiscent of the previous education panic, the 1960s freak-out about Sputnik, the fear that the Russians would out-science and out-smart the West. Only this time, it wasn’t just the commies. The Japanese, with their superior cars and students, were also gaining on America.
Every president since Reagan has made political hay of the school-crisis-speak we see in A Nation at Risk. Critics of the report allege that it was an unduly dire reading of indicators like SAT scores. But it is also very important to note that this report made little mention of standardized tests as a solution for problems in the schools. It had nothing to say about voucher systems or tax breaks or school choice, much to Reagan’s chagrin. Rather, it recommended more demanding curricula, longer school days, and higher standards.
Education expert Diane Ravitch, who served in Bush I’s and Clinton’s education departments, says that A Nation at Risk is “the most important education reform document of the 20th century”23 and argues that schemes like NCLB have totally betrayed its spirit and goals. Ravitch makes two arguments about school reform that I am very partial to. First, she points out that the focus on testing eclipses another, more widespread problem: the sheer shoddiness of many school textbooks.
State standards and publishing-house concerns about complaints mean that texts range from pap to just plain wrong. This is another one of those issues, like charter schools, where the antipodes of right and left meet. Ravitch contends that righties police offensive issues (evolution, sex) while lefties sanitize language (racism, sexism, Eurocentrism). Combine cruddy texts with teachers who are strongly encouraged to stick to them – or are too dependent on them – and you get kids who learn to hate reading and learning.24
Moreover, even though individual states defend the autonomy of their school systems, textbook content is often influenced by the states that place the biggest orders for books. The second-biggest textbook market in America is Texas, which is currently run by so-con right-wingers who have made approving noises about science texts with creationist material. They support striking Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall from the history books and r
eplacing them with the likes of Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, Rush Limbaugh, Focus on the Family, and the NRA.25
The textbook publishing industry is making a mockery of the notion that each state has complete control over its curriculum. That brings us to the other part of Ravitch’s analysis that I like. She supports a national core curriculum, and she has argued in favour of one for a long time. She would like to see a school system where “every student would have the opportunity to study history, geography, the sciences, the arts, literature, mathematics, and civics in every grade, with adequate time for physical education.”26
When Ravitch was working for Clinton, she tried to institute national curriculum standards, but they died a messy legislative death. Many cited some of the same complaints that came up when Dubya passed NCLB, objecting to federal meddling in local matters. But so long as students eventually leave their Podunk towns, surf a World Wide Web, and are subject to the vicissitudes of a global economy, education is not a local issue. Education is an everybody issue, and it should be a national priority. Federal governments in the U.S. and Canada should be more actively involved in ameliorating two gaps: the funding gaps between affluent school districts and impoverished ones, and the curricular gaps between challenging schools and challenged ones.
Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, has been speaking in favour of national standards, arguing that NCLB was too dumbed down and scattershot to work. Forty-six states have agreed to participate in the development of national standards, while the states that hate The State – Texas, Alaska, South Carolina, and Missouri – object to the proposal. But the dialogue about national standards is still being phrased in terms of accountability, school choice, and standardized tests. The conversation continues to be about narrow quanta, tougher tests, and more accurate measures of accountability.
