Leading articles in the Atlantic
and New York magazine have laid it out in stark and unsettling
detail: student reading and math scores
on the standardized NAEP tests issued to US students portray US students’ math
and reading scores at their lowest point since 2015, after consistently falling
since then. A direct contrast to the
situation prior to 2015, when math and reading scores were consistently rising,
indicating that US students were reading better and were doing math better
consistently. Now they are doing much,
much worse. Not the top Tenth Percentile
students, who are well achieving, and are consistently staying that way. No, the worst affected are those in the lower
percentiles, who are getting worse, less able to do math, less able to read at
grade level, much less at adult level.
Which means, they will be more and more likely to be shut out of the job
market for lack or requisite scores.
Since they are now among the most marginalized, the most subject to class
and racial disparities, the most likely to live in resource-starved
neighborhoods, the American problem with equity and its achievement will only
get worse.
Many reasons are given for this
decline, of course, but they tend to be presented as sole causes, rather than
what they really are, a series of interlinked causes. Among them are: isolation and reliance on inadequate virtual
learning during COVID, the rise of smartphone use, antipathy by teachers and
parents alike to the standardized tests of the No Child Left Behind Act, which
were often seen as punitive, with low scores on such tests leading to
punishments. Also, the clout of teachers’
unions, who want standardized pay and benefits for all teachers against merit-based
pay for good teachers. (It’s still the
case that the poorest qualified college enrollees are the ones who go into
education, and many a college professor has complained that his/her worst
students are the Education majors.) To
which I would add, schools, especially public schools, becoming the dumping
ground for all kinds of societal problems and neglect, and are thus
unrealistically expect to address long-festering social problems and issues of
equity, equality, and equality of opportunity while also teaching to an
acceptable level needed pedagogical skills, especially in science, math,
literature, and reading. But such are
impossible demands to meet, and unsurprisingly, in the name of equity merit and
emphasis on developing talented individuals are allowed to ignominiously fall
by the wayside. But as economist Noah
Smith recently pointed out in his Substack column, “Noahpinion,” allow merit
and talent to be shortchanged in the name of equity, demanding equal results,
no matter how specious, rather than equality of opportunity, shortchanges all
students. As Karl Marx himself pointed
out in the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” not all individuals are equal to
the same quality and quantity of work, which was his justification for the pay
method of the first stage of communism, “socialism,”: “From each according to his ability, to each
according to his work,” in contradistinction to “From each according to his
ability, to each according to his need.”
But Marx here was only concerned with physical capacity for work, even
though he should’ve added, mental and intellectual capacity as well, for not
all are equally intellectually gifted.
Gifts are widespread across the human race, but they are most unevenly
distributed. So, the bottom line is,
when we truncate the especially gifted in the name of an “equity” that only
ensures the triumph of mediocrity, we only shortchange ourselves as a human
race and as a human society. Noir can we
sanguinely expect AI to fill in for what we have lost in basic cognitive math
and reading skills. AI is no substitute for
human ability and knowledge, and is itself frequently wrong. If we humans lack the cognitive skills to
recognize AI error, we only perpetuate it.
There was a famous experiment several years ago, involving students
given a math test where they were allowed to use calculators, but the calculators
were set to be 20% off. Yet, for many of
the students, face with the cognitive dissonance engendered between what their
own cognition told them was the correct answer, and what the calculator said
was the correct answer, chose the calculator’s answer instead! Not at all auspicious. That is why teaching critical reading and
math skills is vitally important not only to the US educational system, but to
any educational system. It is time to
get back to the “basics” on teaching and learning, and perhaps, not allow or
insist that our public schools address all social problems, a task they are not
prepared to undertake. (Private schools,
and charter schools, have the leeway to address which social problems they will
address, and which they will blithely ignore.)
Equity is a worthy goal, but it is not the only goal. And it will not happen overnight, but will
take some time. For a start, we’d be
better off emphasizing equality of opportunity rather than equal results. As a good psychotherapist I had once put it, “If
it weren’t slow, it wouldn’t be real.”
Real, sustainable change takes time.
That which is easily and facilely achieved can be easily and facilely
undone, also. Lest we forget.
I’m a socialist, and while I
believe in equality and equity, I also believe in utilizing talent, ability,
merit, and skills, and enabling as many as possible to attain them. If this means unequal results in an equality
of opportunity, so be it. It’s like the
Superbowl: no matter how evenly matched
the two teams are, at the end of the game there is a winner, and a loser. They can’t both win. Yes, we do need a socialist meritocracy, a
Jeffersonian “Aristocracy of talent in a democracy of opportunity.” We d need to encourage our best and our brightest,
and we can by providing readily-available access to excellence, which is what the
New York City magnet schools and CUNY system of higher education have done so
well over the decades—enabling marginalized, working-class, and Jewish students
access to achievement and excellence, giving them the chance to excel. No, they didn’t all become real-estate
moguls, but so many of them became distinguished scholars, professors and
teachers, and even Nobel Prize winners.
This is what we should be aiming at as socialists, a meritocracy based
on equality of opportunity, not penalizing the meritorious and talented because
it doesn’t elevate mediocrity and inability to achieve in a false and spurious
sense of “equity.”
