From Sooner or Later, Ability Rules: on a long enough timescale, there's nowhere to hide by Freddie deBoer. deBoer is addressing an unpalatable truth our education establishment has been desperately trying to ignore.
If you have hard empirical measures of tested knowledge and capability, it is very useful to third party consumers, principally employers. I want to know 1) can this candidate do the work?, 2) does this candidate have any behavioral traits which might pose a danger to coworkers and customers?, and 3) does this candidate have any history which might create legal risk for my enterprise in the future?
Reasonable objectives. But they have disparate impacts based on culture, class, and familial structure.
For thirty or forty years we have been trying to both give participation prizes as well as maintain standards. In the past decade, participation prizes have begun to win out as the preferred policy. Schools from K-12 to Universities are beginning to ditch SATs for admission and even grades for performance.
None of this is good for society or the economy. Get rid of the empirical standards and the achievement becomes meaningless. Enterprises (governmental or business) will find ways to estimate capability, judge behaviors, and forecast risk. They will just become less accurate and involve more human judgment; i.e. more human fallibility and potentially more unconscious bias.
It is a bad trend but it will rectify eventually because we can't afford to just randomly select people for roles without knowing their capabilities.
deBoer starts out with the drive to improve graduation rates which has dominated the Education establishment for the past twenty years or so. Here in Atlanta, the first preferred strategy was to hold teacher correction parties where pizza was eaten while correcting students standardized tests before submitting them for marking.
Time consuming, laborious and not to mention illegal and counterproductive, this was abandoned after too many discoveries, bad press, and the termination of the School Superintendent. While classroom education has not improved in the intervening years, graduation rate have. Not because the students have become more knowledgeable and capable but because the graduation standards have been relaxed to the point where even the least engaged and uninformed student can graduate. There is no mission to educate. There is a mission to graduate.
From deBoer:
Click to enlarge.
There’s a fact that you hear a lot about in behind-the-scenes higher education chats that seems not to have penetrated with the public: remediation has gotten harder and more expensive, and over time the problem grows and grows.
Why have remediation costs exploded? Look at the graph above. There is no underlying trend in educational data that would suggest that this vast improvement is underwritten by actual student learning gains. We decided the high school graduation rate was a national scandal, we found that we could not actually bring students up to standards, so we cheated and graduated them anyway. Can’t actually meet standards? Hey, there’s “online credit recovery.” Need a model high school without model students? Here’s one where everybody gets As, regardless of ability. Can’t get students through even with all of these lowered standards and with all of these dirty tricks? Don’t have any standards at all.
OR Governor signed law suspending the state's proficiency standards for reading, writing and math in the name of "equity." https://t.co/F0ZQTtvk8J pic.twitter.com/Ug9Iz8CUvg
— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) August 10, 2021
When I worked at Brooklyn College there was this constant vexing problem across the CUNY system. Students who do two years at a CUNY community college are guaranteed admissions at a 4-year school, but these students often show up with their transcripts an absolute mess and completely lacking the necessary underlying ability to succeed. Their struggles gets foisted onto already-overworked senior college professors, and of course the community college professors who send them to the senior colleges blame the high schools. All of this contributes to a system where six out of ten undergraduates can’t pass their required math classes. Why can’t these college students do high school math? Well, when the cut score for your state standardized exam is so ludicrously low, what do you expect? Something like this is happening all over the country: unprepared students get into college under misguided access programs or simply through the financial desperation of the schools. Once their lack of ability is apparent, the choices are to either let them drop out and start their lives with student loan debt and no degree, or to simply abandon the idea of rigor and further devalue the meaning of a college education.
Why does that transfer policy persist at CUNY? One, the senior colleges need the enrollments to stay in business, and two, because leadership views it as an equity program and conditions that supposedly increase equity simply cannot be challenged within CUNY. It’s broken, everyone knows it’s broken, nothing changes.
Many people seem content to kick the can further down the road. Even a half-decade ago when I was in grad school there was a burgeoning movement to reject the notions of grading and assessment entirely. (They’re as old as education, but ah well.) Several of my peers said directly that they never gave bad grades, even to people who didn’t once show up or submit an assignment, because grades are the hand of the patriarchy or whatever. You can call that a fringe position, but of course grade inflation has been rampant in college for decades; students are consumers now and eventually consumers get what they want. Now, with a social justice pretext presenting itself, I think eventually most colleges are going to take the path of least resistance and just give almost everybody As and call it a day. Fewer dropouts = more tuition dollars, after all. At scale, we’re already seeing an admissions free-for-all at all but top-tier US colleges. Policy pressure in K-12 has been pushing more unqualified students into the college pipeline from below for decades; the colleges pluck more and more of them up from above to stay fiscally solvent. But the best-prepared students were already going, and now there’s no more low-hanging fruit, and the kids they’re recruiting simply are not prepared and don’t belong in college. So they’ll just abandon rigor.
This is a profound moral failure of Educational leaders. They are deceiving the public that children are being taught and they are allowing kids with no ability to pass hard empirical tests to burden themselves with student loans which will haunt them through their adulthood. It is exploitation of the most vulnerable plain and simple by the Educrats whose performance bonuses and achievement counts keep rising despite their own empirical failures.
That which cannot go on, won't. At some point the music will stop and their won't be any more chairs for the Educrats. It would be far better for us to reinstate hard empirical measures of performance, make sure everyone with ability is getting their chance to succeed, and making sure that everyone not cut out for the rarified environment of university is none-the-less equipped with the knowledge, skills, and habits to function in a complex economy with success.
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