Meritocratic Education and Social Worthlessness

Khen Lampert

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781137324887
• eBook ISBN: 9781137324894
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

This book critically examines the socio-cultural role of achievement within education, arguing that the increasingly global demand for measurable standards of academic achievement is an expression of political ideology and the aggressive competitive reality of a neo-capitalist schooling system, resulting in many students feeling socially worthless.

1

Belling the Ring

Abstract: This chapter analyzes the bell curve’s presence in the deep structure of school evaluation and measurement, as well as, unconsciously, in the minds of teachers and educators. The bell myth shapes a reality of worthlessness for most children. It establishes academic achievement as the only worth-scale in education, granting worth to a small and predetermined number of students while excluding the remaining majority.

Lampert, Khen. Meritocratic Education and Social Worthlessness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137324894

On the subject of education’s common sense, it is worth noting that formal education, particularly in public schools, has become in the 20th century a synonym for “education.” For most people – children, parents, politicians, teachers, journalists – education is what takes place in a school; with its physical structure (a large, grey, concrete edifice partitioned into rooms and long corridors, much like a factory, hospital, prison, etc.); its idiosyncratic actions (a lone adult facing a group of children, rationed hours of planned teaching, short recesses, examinations, homework, etc.); and the social functions it fulfills. All of these embody education. Common sense also tells us that school’s role, through which it realizes its social purposes, is embodied first and foremost in the curriculum. The academic and public dispute on the nature of the curriculum has been raging for decades. Conservatives, clerics, and neo-capitalist liberals, who usually hold the political power to dictate and affect educational content in the present era, preach traditional curricula that highlight religion, science, math, and finance studies. They normally prefer curricula with a nationalist and/or religious, chauvinistic, pro-technological, and pro-western bias. The manner of teaching is of little interest to these approaches, so long as it produces the desired, measurable results.

Critical theorists prefer to highlight alternative teaching methods that promote critical thinking, creativity, and individual and social consciousness. To them, education is more than formal teaching, and the pedagogy they seek is dialogic and empowering. Both camps, however, agree on one point: school experience is a learning experience that generates knowledge in students, and sometimes in teachers. Knowledge is the goal of education, and in spite of disputes on how to create and/or transmit it, and fierce struggles around “What knowledge should be transmitted and/or created?” and “What it the purpose of the knowledge?” still one thing is agreed upon – knowledge is the purpose of school.

If generation of knowledge in students’ minds forms the operational definition of school, then, like all output-producing operations, it can be measured. At this juncture, critical theorists, together with open education advocates, leave the discussion – clearing the stage for the bureaucratic, conservative policymakers who try and implement their business-administration logic in education. To their view, if the education system possessed a procedure for infiltrating children’s minds by using, say, a brain detector helmet that could measure the emergence and operation of new concepts, this would be a spectacular victory; so spectacular that it could define education as a “science” and convert it into a commodity tradable on the stock exchange (see next chapter). Unfortunately, such a procedure is as yet unavailable, and one must content oneself with the next best thing: tests and grades. Testing and grading are such important tools of school life that one can scarcely imagine it without them. In fact, a significant part of the definition of teaching is linked by this logic to what is known in education as “evaluation and measurement.” In actuality, this is mere relative judgment of students’ performances and their ability to play a very specific game with traditional, arbitrary rules, as well as to regurgitate requested content at a given time and a given format.¹

Many educational criticisms have been written about the costs of the grading system. Some critical theories propose methods for alternative evaluation – evaluations amounting to more than dry, numerical scores, evaluations incorporating dialogue that includes the learner, and even “peer evaluations” in which children are asked to evaluate their friends. The problems with these experiments are partly practical, and manifest in two areas:

1A bureaucratic framework of numerical grades will always be more efficient than any alternative evaluation method. In the neo-capitalist school reality, where time has economic (that is, absolute) meaning, alternative evaluation could never take root. The hours and effort required of a teacher to provide long, detailed evaluations of each of her 35 students is simply intolerable; authenticity would soon evaporate, and the evaluations would start featuring “shortcuts” employing common, generalized expressions.

2Years ago I visited the school where my son was learning. This school was experimenting with alternative evaluation, and I arrived on the day when the mid-year report cards were handed out. I found the kids sitting on the stoop outside class and comparing evaluations. They soon discovered that the same five hollow sentences appeared in all their reports in one guise or another. They discovered that the “unsaid” can always be deduced, and most importantly to them, they developed within minutes a system for converting the several lines of text evaluation into a single, clear number. Only then did they relax.

One of the interesting aspects of school evaluation is the overt and covert presence of the bell curve, or Gaussian curve, as a normative expression of evaluation. Every formal school grading system converges, deliberately or not, into a bell curve that dictates a priori the value structure of academic achievement. That is, forever and absolutely, a few children will be defined in the grading system as excelling, most as mediocre, and a few as failing. It makes no difference where we position the bell or how steep the curve is: half the students will find themselves under the median, and through a lengthier school process will be defined by their environment and therefore by themselves as “below average.”

However, if academic achievement constitutes the school scale of social worth, and if the sole, objective, and absolute expression of academic achievement is the relative grade, then half the children are by definition worthless. Are the children who are situated higher up on the bell luckier? Not always. Harris, for example,² demonstrated from research how, when a class is divided into four groups with two groups “above average,” the members of Group B, defined as “only good,” lose their motivation to learn and decline in their achievements. In terms of the present discussion, they lose their sense of social worth, granted exclusively to the high performers.

In fact, the bell curve was originally no more than a statistical tool for describing the mathematical distribution of error, and it is very limited in its applicability (despite graphing what is known as “normal distribution”). But it seems that the relative elegance and ease with which the curve can be attained was too attractive not to apply it to social groups, which turned it from a statistical calculation to a tool of ideology. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, the bell curve was proposed by eugenicists as a means for establishing racial superiority, and later became a research tool that dictates study results in psychology and sociology. The social history of the “bell curve myth” was presented with a sharply critical eye as early as the 1980s by Goertzel and Fashing,³ who analyzed its problematic implications in various fields of research, including education.

In their article, Goertzel and Fashing recall the famous late 1960s/early 1970s “grade inflation crisis” bemoaned by US university administrators. The fact that professors tended over time to award students “overly good” grades, and the statistical difference in grades among academic departments, demanded a “call to order.” This meant an explicit call to apply the bell curve to the grade set of each professor individually and of all departments comparatively, and included the firing of recalcitrant professors.

The issue became a major focus of conflict on campus, leading the dean and other senior faculty and administrators to enunciate assumptions which are not often stated so clearly. They made it clear that their concern went beyond the question of the “average” or mean grade. They were also concerned that the number of A’s be relatively small. Indeed, they insisted that the usual distribution of grades should approximate a normal distribution in that most grades should be clustered around the mean (or C) with relatively few at the extremes. Most of the spokesmen who supported a normal distribution said they thought that such a distribution was the “usual,” “natural” or “common sense” result to be obtained from correct grading procedures.⁴

Goertzel and Fashing’s analysis produces three interesting data:

First, that the bell distribution itself has turned into educational common sense, and if indeed I am correct in asserting that one of the implications of division is the creation of “worthlessness,” this means that bell common sense is at cross purposes with Common Sense A as articulated in the Introduction.

Second, that there has not been (and still isn’t) any “pedagogical” reason to arbitrarily enact the bell curve on grading, and the actual reason should be traced to the clear administrative need for reducing enrollment to “easy” departments or advanced degrees – that is, a reason of ideology and politics.

Third, that the bell system can be manipulated; in other words, the curve is not by any means essential but can be applied to given circumstances. This last point is especially important for explaining my argument on the redundancy of the bell within the educational sphere, which I will explain with another example.

Early in Goertzel and Fashing’s historical overview there is the story of the Belgian researcher Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), among the founders of scientific statistics, and perhaps the first person who expanded the use of the mathematical curve that describes the distribution of random errors and attempted to apply it to social phenomena. Quetelet maintained that humans were created in nature in a manner consistent with “Average Man,” that is, that nature aims for a certain midpoint, but that this aim is disrupted with an error frequency describable by a bell curve. Quetelet’s ideas of “Average Man” dealt primarily with human physiology, and contained an “evolutionary” assumption concerning the superior mental capabilities of certain humans who, à la Quetelet, would be those to lay the foundation for a new, higher average in the future. As Goertzel and Fashing explain:

Quetelet’s doctrine of the Average Man was ill-suited to a society that was more in need of a rationalization for inequality than a glorification of the common man. His use of the bell curve, however, was useful as part of the social Darwinist ideology that was emerging as a justification for the inequities of laissez-faire capitalism.⁵

Quetelet’s concept of “Average Man” points to the potential possibility (later elaborated by eugenicists) to imagine an ideal and support it with the statistical bell. Quetelet himself is responsible for what we now call the BMI (Body Mass Index), the index of average weight-to-height ratio. Yet, this index describes a desired state – a sort of ideal weight/height ratio. It neither describes nor purports to describe actual weight and height! In other words, the bell curve is not a description of reality, of existing actuality, but of a state of affairs to be aspired to; it is used to present what ought to be, and not what is!

To return to education, the presence of the bell-ideal in education, or more precisely, the assumption that every group of students is belled into the weak, the middling, and the excellent, reaches far beyond education research. Likewise, various methods introduced to education, especially post-primary education, for creating bell-like grade distributions, fail to present a complete picture. The presence of the bell curve in school life is more than mere administration and research, as it has transformed through historical process into educational common sense in its own right. Many teaching practitioners are entirely unaware of its presence, and oblivious to the various ways in which it directs their actions. Teachers encounter children around various curricula, and test the children to gain and provide an idea of the scope and effectiveness of teaching as translated to knowledge and understanding in the students. To teachers, it seems that if all children “know the material well,” they (the teachers) will have achieved their professional goal, and they have no intention to fail or harshly judge any child. In teachers’ experience, the Gaussian curve is a given reality supplied to them readymade, which they actually try (unsuccessfully) to change – certainly they don’t create or steer it. Where study-planning is concerned, to the extent that a bell curve exists, it is clearly the purview of management or inspectors, and has no tangible part in the teachers’ work and relation to the children. Yet this is not reality. The bell’s presence can in fact be noticed in two complementary spheres of school life:

Examinations: the standard debate on the bell curve deals almost exclusively with grades, that is, with the relative performances of students and the statistical distribution of their test answers. Much has been written about the examination system as the direct and indirect manifestation of an ideological curriculum weighted with biases (gender, socioeconomic, cultural, age, familial, etc.) and discrimination, which requires of different students similar performances, almost always articulated in a language that grants access and preference to part of the students, those of wealthier classes.⁶ Other criticisms have presented teacher’s psychological bias for judging tests in a manner consistent with their worldview, prejudices, and self-image, and thus to award higher grades to students similar to themselves or to their ideal selves. These criticisms were and are true and important, but a key element missing from them is the presence of the bell idea during the simple act of composing an exam, and not only (as critics maintain) during grading. My argument on this point is straightforward: that for most standard and potential study materials, one can compose exams that will produce the bell effect. In fact, during composition one can program into the exam, with a fairly high degree of certainty, almost any desired grade distribution, even if the exam is checked by computer. For example, supposing that we wish to create a grade distribution in which very few students succeed and many fail – we could formulate an exam unsolvable for a student who sat in class, yet containing a small possibility for, e.g., children with prior knowledge. The converse is also possible – clearly it is easy to create an exam where all students succeed. This is true for almost any group of students anywhere, and almost any study subject. The common practice in composing exams today is to write exams with a high likelihood of an error distribution that conforms to the bell curve. This can be done, for example, as follows: we begin by writing trivial questions about material presented by the teacher, which most students would normally answer; to these we add questions from the material assigned for home study or rehearsal, which most students lacking the proper extramural environment would likely fail; finally we add two questions requiring confidence, speed, or prior knowledge, which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Belling the Ring
• 2  Worthlessness as Social Ideology
• 3  The Answer of Meritocracy
• 4  The Folly of Excellence
• 5  The Loss of Responsibility
• 6  The Problem of Worthlessness
• 7  The Difficulty of an Alternative
• Bibliography
• Index