Does Egalitarian Education Fail Democracy? | The Agenda

equal opportunity that underpins the promise of democratic nations begins with access to a decent education but that's not what's happening according to writer frederick deboer his new book is called the cult of smart how our broken education system perpetuates social injustice and frederick deboer joins us now from brooklyn new york to explain it's great to meet you how you doing i'm good how are you doing steve just great thank you so much i want to start with an excerpt from your book and then we'll chat this book is my prayer you write for the untalented an attempt to show how badly our society and its people are hurt by the obsessive focus on schooling and smarts we can build a better future but only if we are willing to think clearly and speak frankly about who succeeds in the current system and why okay let's start there and let's be clear about what you're saying and perhaps what you're not saying here more importantly are you saying that we shouldn't be encouraging people to go as far in their educational lives as they possibly can no i think that people should pursue education what i think that we need to do is we need to diversify or really re-diversify what it means to be an educated person and the type of things that we are teaching in k-12 schools and colleges and other contexts i think that it's really important to understand that there has been the last 30 or so or years uh particularly in america but in other places like canada there's been a um a transformation in how we define success in schools so now we see the uh educational outcomes of educational like excellence in quantitative terms right the obsession in the american educational policy world is gpas sat scores state standardized test scores graduation rates right it's all numbers this is actually a very new phenomenon if you go back to 1970 in many places in the united states parents would receive almost no quantitative information about how their student is doing in school they would get report cards and this the students would get grades and those uh in their classes a b c d f um and they probably care about those grades but in many contexts they wouldn't even be reporting an overall gpa they wouldn't be averaging the gpa up uh in many contexts these students would be taking no state standardized tests um or very minimal testing uh the at this at this point the participation rate in the sat in many states was very low i mean often less than 10 um the class rank was often not computed at this time uh there were not states giving schools or school districts report cards as often happens in american education now so there was just a great deal less of quantitative information to say that uh you know this student is doing well this school this district is doing well and uh that change has in my opinion uh come with it is a narrowing down of what we mean what we mean when we say you know an effective student a quality student an excellent student that before everything can became reduced to numbers that there was a sense in which there were values that we were trying to uh spread in our schools that were not quantitative and measured things like patience kindness sociability creativity et cetera i think that the obsession with numbers has created a situation in which we no longer respect the diversity of ways that students can be excellent well maybe this is a good time for that anecdote that i read in your book this goes back to a time when you were teaching in public schools you're trying to teach a kid long division and he just couldn't get the hang of it um seemed like the end of the world for him i just can't get it he said what's the kind of newer better approach that you think we ought to have been taking as opposed to how we might traditionally handle that situation sure so the the the answer is not this kid should not be taught long division that's not the point right the point is is that right now um and increasingly with more due to more and more policies to this effect um we have a narrow set of criteria through which students can pass from one grade to the next or they can earn their diploma and this is particularly true in high school so high school especially with the adoption of the common core standards has seen more and more strict rules about what it takes to be able to advance through the system and so you take this kid who's struggling in long division uh right now in many k-12 contexts he'll have the ability to pass to the next grade and to continue to develop those skills as he ages up but if you get to high school you have a lot of kids who for example can't pass their algebra requirement and if they don't pass through outdoor requirement they cannot move to the next level in school so this is a problem just theoretically but it's also a problem because we look at for example there are states such as arizona where it has happened in the past where something like 65 of their students are failing to meet their math requirements is 65 and so you have this major subgap that's keeping people from advancing in their careers it's also a problem because we know that an inability to pass to the next grade is a major driver of dropouts because if you're someone if you're a typical 16 year old and you grew up with a cohort of kids you moved through school with them and then all of a sudden you are now being left behind and you have to uh spend all of your time with kids who are a year younger than you um that is in many ways to stabilizing and insulting and degrading and so it's not surprising that a lot of kids drop out in that scenario what i'm advocating for is not that we say oh this this kid can't do math let's give up but i am saying that if we loosen these standards if we give students a a bigger set of options for how they can progress we'll be acknowledging the fact that different students have different strengths and we'll be expressing to all of our young people hey look there's lots of ways to be a useful person to be a valuable person so a good example is if you can't pass your your your algebra requirement your algebra 2 requirement which is a really big one or in college often it's organic chemistry is another big filter class they call it um or weed out class um how about we provide alternatives that uh test some of the same skills but that are more flexible for different kind of learners so instead of having to pass algebra 2 maybe you can pass a quantitative reasoning class and that's the kind of class where you learn introductory statistics you learn to think through problems with numbers you look at real world scenarios and that way is you're still teaching math skills and you're still preparing someone from a world in which they want to be numerate but where you're broadening the options available to everyone and i think that's particularly true because the simple fact of the matter is uh many many people don't use abstract math in their day-to-day life ever and it doesn't make sense to make that a strict requirement for graduating from high school because you're hurting a lot of lives and i don't really particularly see what the educational advantage of doing that is no i take your point but i i think i may have taken a different lesson from that kid who couldn't do algebra as well which which speaks to a i think a bigger point that you're trying to make in your book and it's a difficult point it's a it's a point that is fraught with mind well in fact i'll read the quote this is what you say um the kid who couldn't do long division he just didn't apparently have the natural aptitude to do the long division and you say to talk frankly about natural academic talent is to wander into a minefield so tell us about what some of those minds in that field you're referring to are you know i think that if you talk to parents of multiple children probably the big man field is which kid is your favorite but the second biggest one is you know who's your smarter kid and i think that even a lot of parents who obviously love their children equally and want to see them in the best light i think a lot of parents will quietly acknowledge that maybe one of their kids is a little bit more talented than the other right that they're that they pick things up quicker that they have more natural aptitude the minefield stems from the fact that if you acknowledge those things you can certainly take them in a really ugly direction right so you can imagine sort of taking you know an incoming group of like say third graders and you test them and you say okay these kids at the at the bottom are never going to be uh academic stars so let's use resources on them let's just warehouse them let's not give them high quality teaching let's not give them access to a lot of the resources that we use for education obviously i think that's really ugly however we should acknowledge that taking those same kids who struggle academically and expecting them to meet the same standards that the most talented kids do is just as cruel right and it's also a waste of resources and it's a waste of teacher attention and time when instead what we can do is we can value those kids just as much but we can set them with different kinds of benchmarks and metrics and tasks that play to their strengths rather than just their weaknesses again i you know i think it's a classic example um you know of uh education right now is like the man who only owns a hammer and so he sees a world full of nails around him right when you only have that one tool when your only tool are these standardized test scores and similar then all you see is a world full of you know ways to measure students by the same criteria but if we were to be more humanistic and we were to broaden and say you know what like yes it's a valuable skill to be good at man but it's also the valuable skill to be someone who makes friends easily or to be someone who can be patient when they need to be someone who can think creativity or someone who can uh who can think critically all these things are things that we can value and if we can generate ways inside of our schools who value them just like we value the ability to do algebra for example then i think that we create not just a more humane system for our students but a more efficient system for our schools and our teachers as well how would we do that though how would we recognize with a university or college degree the fact that okay you can't do algebra but you're a more empathetic person okay you can't do calculus but you're a more patient person can we recognize that with a piece of paper at the end of the day well this is the question i mean i think one of the things we should we should recognize is you know the diploma is not even right now a sort of universally interpretable object by which i mean um diplomas are already assumed to have to say different things about you based on where you go to school right a caltech diploma is very different from uh a uh diploma from the rhode island school of design right and that's not just true in terms of the different degrees that people are getting but that we make assumptions about what the institutions are doing and there have been some um some colleges such as green college and other places that have done experiments with radically different grading systems you know there are colleges that are in the process of retiring uh traditional gpa is what wps traditionally conceived and replacing it with other kind of metrics there's also a movement which i find quite exciting which some people call the badging system or the portfolio system where instead of you go into college and you satisfy a long list of criteria that ends up with a degree and you have the same degree as your partner next to you on the left your partner respects you on the right um you over the course of your college education you earn different badges that indicate discrete skills specific things that you can know or do um and that you can then go to an employer and say hey look rather than saying i just got this diploma which you know means many different things you can actually look one by one of the different things that i've been assessed on and that i've learned and that i can do now that kind of change in both the schools and in the economy where they will be valued is going to take a long time but i do think that there's a real opportunity uh particularly with some of the newer technologies that we have available now to diversify the way that we think about what it means to graduate from college where instead of seeing everybody as just being a college degree or not which is a very you know uh imprecise way to think about things too instead to really disaggregate stuff and say i'm going to assemble this set of skills and then i can go on the market and say here's what i can do frederick i want to get back to this parent child thing because i i and i know you use the example in your book of uh lebron james who's a phenomenal basketball player and therefore we are not surprised that his son is a pretty good basketball player as well i'm in canada i'm going to use hockey for an example bobby hull was a great player we shouldn't be shocked that bret hull was similarly a fantastic player gordy howes in the hall of fame are we shocked that mark hall mark howe his son is also in the hall of fame no i don't think we are the notion of educational achievement being something you'd inherit from your parents though is something well it's somewhat threatening to the whole educational system as it currently exists in north america yes tell us how and why well yeah i mean i i you know uh we we have to be careful about speaking we have to speak carefully i guess the degree to which i i discussed some of the evidence that shows that academic ability is uh genetic in the book um but the degree to which that's true or is not it's not something that i'm going to be able to figure out it's going to take people who are way smarter than me to figure that out but we should not foreclose on the possibility that your biological parents have a big impact on who you are academically because we know that genetics influences everything about us as human beings and i also think it's important to say we're already kind of operating on that assumption anyway so you know we talk a lot sociologists talk a lot about what they call a shortage of mating and assortative meeting means that increasingly as time has gone on more and more often um people are sorting into marriages and having children with people who are educationally similar to them so if you go back 50 years ago it was much less likely that you were going to if you were had a college degree marry and have kids with someone who also had a college degree as time has gone on that dynamic has just gotten more and more and more prevalent and powerful over time which means that we are already kind of practicing a system in which we're sorting ourselves as a country into uh more and more sort of by educational band and in fact one of the big stories of the 2020 election is that by many metrics your educational status whether you have a high school diploma or a college diploma master's abuse whatever that this has become a more politically determinative metric about you than your race right so in other words more and more often now we are seeing that people are grouping themselves by education rather than race and so we've already got a situation in the united states where we're paying a ton of attention to who we are educationally and choosing partners and co-parents on that metric and so i think one of the things we need to do is speak frankly about that condition and begin to explore what it means rather than ignoring it because we find it uncomfortable because it's not going to get any better or things aren't going to get examined if we just pretend like this is a conversation we don't want to have well i do find this fascinating because you know for the last half century we've been telling everybody it's all about merit you're only going to get anywhere you're going to get in this world if you are meritorious and and are credentialed and deserve to get there and now we've got your book michael sandell was on this program from harvard not too long ago talking about the tyranny of merit and i want to make sure i understand that what you're saying that if our even if our meritocratic systems of education were better at including greater numbers of students from populations that are historically discriminated that a meritocracy fulfilled would even be more cruel than what we have now can you explain that to me yeah i mean i think the way that i would look at it is this right um we we very uh uh righteously i think have in recent decades begun the work although we're far from finished of reducing the impact of racial category on people's life uh outcomes and we have done so because we recognize that uh you know the race that you are born into is not under your control and is an arbitrary distinction that uh is uh unjust to reward with poverty or wealth or whatever um and that's an important uh uh advancement that we're sort of stumblingly slowly making as a civilization um the the thing that i i want people to to think through though is if it is in fact true that there is such a thing as a natural aptitude for school for academics and thus a natural aptitude for having a white-collar job that earns a lot of money right if that is in fact something that is innate to you at least partially innate or intrinsic to you then that having that ability is just as arbitrary as the racial category into which you fall right if you don't choose it if you can't control it if your parents conceive you and then you end up having to live out the consequences of either a lack of talent or having talent then how can we say that that's any more fair or any more uh legitimate or just than if we uh are a racist society in which people's arbitrary racial category also impacts the negative way um the more that we believe that something is innate the less we can fairly say that you deserve your outcomes based on that factor and one of the remedies you have for this and let's put it on the record right here you you say it in the book you are a self-avowed marxist and you believe that there are some versions in a communist society that could address the problem of inequality as we've discussed it here today maybe you could amplify a bit on that and tell us how you think that would work yeah i mean i would avoid the term communism because it's very loaded and it's historically complicated and um i'm not sure that as much as i i self-identify with marx's philosophy i don't know that communism can be ported into 21st century conditions where things have changed very deeply particularly in terms of the knowledge economy but i do think that a vastly more redistributive system in which we are generating a lot of wealth and productivity and rather than just distributing a base to people based on a market economy but rather creating a deeper sense of shared prosperity in which we are guaranteeing certain minimal living conditions for everyone is a fairer one because again if we think genes matter if we think things are innate then it becomes really hard to morally justify for example someone who was born without a lot of talent for things that are marketable now um that person's poverty you know once upon a time being able to carry a big heavy rock around make you a lot of money right you know a couple thousand years ago if you were the biggest strongest warrior you know you were the guy with the biggest muscles then that was something that was very marketable nowadays if you're that person and that's your thing if you're not good at school if you're not a scientist if you're not good at computers but your thing is being big and strong right you're most of what you used to be able to do has been replaced by machines and maybe you go and you become a laborer and you make twelve dollars an hour right so uh why is it that we would reward that person two thousand years ago with with you know riches and prestige but now that same person is somebody who is going to be on the unemployment line and on food stamps you know how can we say that this person who has the same general level of ability that the the person who happened to be born 2000 years ago he was a hero while the person here is someone who needs to be uh the beneficiary of the state you know the moral justification for that is perfectly fickle right this person who lives now is just unlucky enough to be born in a time in which uh it's not valuable to to have his characteristics and i think we should especially think about this because with the rise of artificial intelligence a lot of the professions right now that are very remunerative that are very valuable um are going to be replaced by machines right so in other words being a coder being a programmer right now is a fantastically well paying position but there's going to be a time when the code is written by code and ai is doing the job that coders do now so if you're born now it's lucky to have those skills maybe in 150 years those skills are no longer marketable because computers are doing it anyway and so we have to think about the fact that you know what is rewarded in the economy is fickle and changes over time and if that's true then in my opinion we shouldn't punish people for having to be born with the wrong skills i take your point but there's a political follow-up question here that i need some help with and that is you know many of the people that you're talking about right now are not choosing a socialist alternative uh we heard donald trump actually in the last election campaign to talk about how much he loves the uneducated uh if he is supposedly i guess the sort of revenge against the smartypant set why are the people that you are purporting to speak for here following him instead of your option well i think you have to look at sort of the distribution of these ideas i mean you're absolutely right about who sort of is is voicing these various ideas but um again like the economy is kind of fickle right and it changes quickly and people who thought that they were doing the right thing all of a sudden find out that they're not being rewarded so here in the united states we had for a very long time you know this idea of like the factory at the edge of town job right where um you didn't have to have a college degree you could just have a college diploma you go to the factory at the edge of town you would not be rich but you could get a job where you'd work your 40 hours a a week and you could own a home raise a family own a car etc um that lifestyle has largely died out for a variety of reasons big one beam automation right we now we manufacture a ton of stuff in the united states but manufacturing employs a small fraction of the number of people it used to employ because we have robots and machines that do the things that human beings used to do the people who were employed in those positions are the kind of people uh who once would have gone to work at the factory at the edge of town job these tend to be people who are donald trump's style supporters and i think their anger is reflected at the fact that their parents were able to sort of work according to that social contract and have stable economically secure lives and many of them can't do that same thing anymore because the economy changed and the economy changed in the economic favor of people like me who have college degrees and who work in a knowledge economy and who live in urban centers like i live in brooklyn and so there's a lot of resentment towards the ideas that come out of from people like me and some of it is justified i think ultimately you know uh i hope that that the dynamic that you're describing but if it does change it has to come from a broadening community understanding that there are forces in the economy that change everybody's outcomes that are not under our control i don't share andrew yang's politics so andrean who was the democratic presidential candidate in 2020 and is now a candidate for mayor here in new york but um you know he does have a vision of the economy where he says like look if you look at the long-term trend over time a fewer and fewer percentage of americans are involved in the formal economy and that's just that number has gone down down down steadily and so you're creating this class of people who are just totally outside of the formal economy and they don't really have a place in the society and he's identifying the fact that you know there are long-term structural changes to how our our economy works in our deal works that is outside of the control of individuals and at some point we have to start to think about the fact that um it is sort of assuming that everybody's economic outcomes are under their control it becomes a very cruel thing you've given us a lot to think about and frederick deboer we appreciate you coming on tvo tonight to talk about the cult of smart your newest book take good care and thanks for joining us thanks so much for having me the agenda with steve pakin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you thank you for supporting tvo's journalism

Channel: The Agenda | TVO Today

Views: 3,079

Keywords: The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, Education, Democracy

Id: 5kFYcrFLSb0

Length: 24min 43sec (1483 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021