The war on merit takes a bizarre turn
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
I'm genuinely curious what this is supposed to mean. Every student gets into the same university? They all get the same job at the exact same salary upon graduation? What is the real-world consequence of this policy supposed to be?
If your outcome as a student is guaranteed to be equal to every other student's outcome, what is the incentive to work harder?
Outcomes being equal doesn't necessarily mean they're good. The students could all fail and get minimum wage jobs. That would also be an equal outcome.
Even if we assume the school goes to the extreme of assigning students the same grades and recognition regardless of performance, maybe some virtuous students don't care about the recognition and spend extra time studying math because they simply love math. They will end up being better at math than students who don't - an unequal outcome. How is the policy supposed to address this?
The logical reaction is to put in zero effort.
So, your guess is as good as mine, because that video certainly is not some kind of school policy position, as the article implies. I'm pretty suspect of the rest of it, since as someone else pointed out, the school actually did notify the students! They just didn't hold a big ceremony. The actual issue that the parents had is that the physical awards - which were delivered to students, in paper, at school, on their desks, did not arrive before early admission deadlines. The students were informed prior to the deadline by emails to their official school district accounts, which the article says they don't often check.
This just overall feels like a culture war hack piece, it's full of red flags from top to bottom, and I mean, it's from a Federalist byline...
Good point.
I'm not from or in the US (although I frequently work in or with USAians) and it's just astonishing how much of the US Federalist | Conservative pieces lack any kind of policy substance -- the media from that side of the aisle seems almost entirely focused on raising dust in the air over trite matters of near zero import.
I like fiscal responsibility and a lot of principles that these groups supposedly stand for - but the culture war obsession of the US right is just performative.
I think your view of the conservative reaction may be colored by the fact that you don’t have the other side of this culture war wherever you are in Europe or Asia. To my knowledge, elite high schools in Germany or China aren’t abandoning objective metrics like grades and test scores on the theory that those things are “racist.” Heck, Germany and France don’t even track outcomes by race the way Americans do obsessively.
Not to my reading.
I would summarise this as an article about the shortcomings of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation [1], their failure to put sufficient postage on notifications and their offloading of their notifications onto schools.
[1] https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=1758&...
The National Merit Scholarship is based on a standardized test called the PSAT. It’s not the most important thing in the world, but important enough that every year the Washington Post would publish the list of students from the DC area who were selected. This was great marketing for the school, because TJ students were like 2/3s of all the students recognized out of dozens of high schools in the area. There was no pizza party, but the school would go to some effort to publicize the result because they felt it reflected very positively on the school.
Two years ago, there was a huge fight over TJ’s admissions process. The school had become 70% Asian, and had very few black students. In that fight, progressives attacked standardized testing as racist. The progressive school board then changed the admissions process to a lottery system. A federal judge found that the change was motivated by anti-Asian racism: https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/we-won-coalition-for-tj-w.... Then an appellate court overturned that decision, and now the Supreme Court is deciding whether to hear the case.
In that context, what the article is about is the TJ administration downplaying the National Merit Scholarship results, which until recently they had publicized and pointed to as a source of pride. The story is thus about a deliberate decision by the administration to downplay a certain kind of educational metric, based on progressive ideas, that until very recently the school had embraced as an important metric.
Frankly it’s bizarre for someone from outside the US to say conservatives are waging a frivolous “culture war” here. What the conservatives want to do is keep the system that TJ had until two years ago, which is still the system most of Europe and Asia has.
All that you added was not in the article and therefore not in the summary of the thrust of the article.
> The story is thus about a deliberate decision by the administration to downplay a certain kind of educational metric
It's about results arriving late and then filtering through what is pretty much a universal hand to hand to students that all school suffer through.
WE have similar systems here, important reults and awards are directly notified to students, not filtered through a school admin. The fault lies with the National Merit Scholarship Corporation .. who seem to expect others to do their work for them.
> Frankly it’s bizarre for someone from outside the US to say conservatives are waging a frivolous “culture war” ..
Do you not read your own countries media? Have you not seen the baseless hysteria over trans people, "woke history", etc?
If I picked up an article in a newspaper in your country about some long running politically contentious issue, would it include years of backstory so I could understand the significance of it with zero background knowledge of the situation?
> It's about results arriving late and then filtering through what is pretty much a universal hand to hand to students that all school suffer through.
TJ isn’t some neighborhood high school. It sends dozens of kids into Ivy League schools and Cal Tech/MIT every year. The administration is like a well oiled machine in making that happen. In fact, taking the National Merit Scholarship test is completely optional, but TJ makes it mandatory for its students. That’s because the school was very proud of the fact that the Washington Post would publish the list, and local schools would have a few each and TJ would have 150+: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2002/11/14/stud....
The National Merit Scholarship results have been distributed to schools the same way for decades. TJ always publicized the results to students promptly (and not by sending an email to some account nobody ever checks). I remember when the results came out my year, it was announced publicly and everyone went to check the list. The fact that TJ downplayed it the last couple of years reflects an ideological change, not some administrative mixup.
> Do you not read your own countries media? Have you not seen the baseless hysteria over trans people, "woke history", etc?
We’re talking about education. Simple question: In your country, do you have people trying to get rid of standardized testing on the theory that it’s “racist?”
Well, I'm from .be where teachers fight it. There are many excuses used, inequality coming to the foreground in the past 10 years or so, but the real reason is that it would allow comparison between teachers and schools (and thus expose bad teachers and schools). The whole sector rallies around this opposition, including the various levels of government (because selective parents are a cause of higher expenditures). Public education is objectively worse than the (less funded) alternatives. We have 7 different governments, 4 of which have their own education system. They're all worse than private education, and catholic education when test scores at universities get compared.
So why was it not a problem previous years, or with other schools?
Sounds like the school decided to "randomly" start playing the whole malicious compliance card to me.
I seriously do not understand anyone who supports this stuff. It's mind boggling and will be the end of US dominance, if not the eventual end of the US itself.
This is just a tiny tale in a giant story that has been going on for decades. The US primary education system has been systematically ripping out merit and high achiever programs in favor of "equity" since at least the 1990's. You cannot read this article and ignore all other context.
TJ kids are already ridiculously high achievers. They don’t need structural systems pushing them that way. Changes like gutting 8th period and further subjugating curricula to the College Board have weakened the school, not strengthened it.
This is the texture of the debate right now in the US. The far right have colonized all theae reasonable positions as sort of gateways into more extreme ideology.
What you say is reasonable and I utterly agree, however just know that this conversation has been weaponized by the right.
Gee, what a pity there’s no opposition of note to these positions on the left. Surely there would be many leftists open to loudly condemning these positions and mocking those who hold them mercilessly, publicly.
That’s a roundabout way of saying “my political opponents are right about this but I’m going to refuse to acknowledge that because I disagree with them about other stuff.”
Also, the opposition to “wokeness” is not “far right.” City Journal is an urban conservative magazine, a group that skews moderate. Many of the writers, like Nomani, were Democrats back when that mainly meant you favored higher taxes and more social services. Opposition to “wokeness” helped Glenn Youngkin win Virginia, a state that voted for Biden by 10 points, and helped DeSantis win a 20 point majority in a state Obama won twice. In states like Florida and Virginia, which turned blue thanks to immigrants under Bill Clinton’s brand of economic liberalism and social conservatism, opposition to “wokeness” simply reflects the democratic party’s shift towards a more socially liberal platform.
As applied to education, “woke” ideas are far left, attacking ideas like color blindness and race neutrality that are widely held by the center, and most minorities themselves.
Sure, and a lot of conversations about racism or inequality are muddled by the approaches used by the far left. Should we stop taking reasonable positions just because far right (or far left) happens to agree and benefit from those?
The adopted system, although removing the standardized test, still incorporates grades as an absolutely essential metric.
A federal judge in the eastern district of Virginia ruled that getting rid of the admissions test and the new holistic review was expressly motivated by a desire to change the racial balance of the school. The fourth circuit stayed the district court order pending appeal in a 2-1 decision. The Supreme Court upheld the stay, over the dissent of three justices.
And the adopted system does still deeply consider grades, which you claim are being discounted.
Yes this is part of the culture war, but that’s not a reason to dismiss it out of hand. Everyone in this story was a democrat until 2015. Around then a subset of mostly white Democrats discovered racism still exists and completely lost their minds about it. My parents think what’s happening at TJ is nuts and I couldn’t even get them to vote for Larry Hogan.
The person in the video is the superintendent of the Fairfax County Public schools who stated that "equal outcomes" are a priority for her upcoming tenure. Maybe not a policy directive, but the leader of the school system is stating that it is a priority they intend to focus on.
The author has an agenda, sure, but they didn't fabricate the video or put words in the mouth of the district superintendent.
adjective
ad ho· mi· nem (ˈ)ad-ˈhä-mə-ˌnem -nəm
1 : appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect
an ad hominem argument
2 : marked by or being an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made
made an ad hominem personal attack on his rival
It is incredibly stupid for the National Merit program to leave the decision to notify students up to the schools. In such a situation it is entirely 100% certain that a situation like the one at Thomas Jefferson High School will eventually happen. In fact it's probably happened multiple times already, due to incompetence, which is why it should scrapped.
From the article:
> On September 16 of this year, National Merit sent a letter to Bonitatibus listing 240 students recognized as Commended Students or Semi-Finalists. The letter included these words in bold type: “Please present the letters of commendation as soon as possible since it is the students’ only notification.”
You know what's better than a system where the schools need to be monitored to make sure they tell their students? A system where you don't have to scrutinize what the schools do, because you told the parents and the kids directly.
It's 2022. You have the information of the students who took the tests, obviously. This is a solvable problem. It can, and should, be fixed.
Yes, now, the National Merit organization will probably come up with a direct notification procedure, but it was not a failure on their part to assume that schools would act in their own self-interest.
Also: "On Monday, December 12, after getting caught, Kosatka sent an email to the parents of Commended Students, notifying them of the “important recognition” and saying, “We are deeply sorry” for not sharing the news earlier. He claimed school officials would contact college admissions offices to correct the record."
However in addition to those (superfluous) notifications, the article notes that the individual students themselves received email notifications: this is the notification I referred to in my previous post. Strangely the article brushes past this point and never addresses precisely when these notifications were sent to students.
This was the part of the article I found confusing, given that the notification to students would be the most important date that determines whether a student could use the information in their college application. If the school sent emails to students' accounts, the date should be easy to verify and include in the article, but the author does not do this.
"One former student said he learned he had won the award through a random email from the school to a school-district email account that students rarely check; the principal neither told his parents nor made a public announcement."
Indeed, zooming in on the specific claims regarding application deadlines, it's hard not to put together the following picture and observe that it is entirely compatible with the precise way the author (apparently an accomplished journalist) wrote the piece:
1. The school received the notifications in mid-October.
2. They sent out email notifications to students in a timely fashion.
3. Students failed to read these "random email notifications" because, duh, they're teenagers and don't check their school email.
4. The physical certificates (irrelevant, but a nice keepsake) took longer to distribute
5. Parents were notified only later on, and then pitched a fit about it because (unlike their kids) they do read their email.
6. The school, mollified by the parents' fury, promised to notify the parents in the future so that they could make sure their kids' inattention to email wouldn't result in further screwups.
7. An angry parent wrote an article subtitled "Why are administrators at a top-ranked public high school hiding National Merit awards from students and families?" implying (falsely) that the school deliberately withheld notification to students, and carefully cherry-picking facts to make that case.> National Merit hadn’t included enough stamps on the package, but nevertheless it got to Bonitatibus by mid-October
The parent is basically complaining that the school didn’t drop everything and make handing out certificates to 240 students their top priority.
They were handed out to student a few weeks later
> One former student said he learned he had won the award through a random email from the school to a school-district email account that students rarely check; the principal neither told his parents nor made a public announcement
So the students were notified by email, which they don't bother checking, and it's only the regular old mail that was slow to get to them (for regular old mail and physical constraints reasons, nothing extraordinary).
When you get into the meat of the article, though, it makes it more clear that the school just forwarded a paper cert to the kids, and didn’t make a big deal about it. And parents are complaining because the school didn’t make a big deal out of it or get it to students “fast enough” to apply for some early admission stuff.
It’s been a while, but I remember most of those “National Merit” type things to be not very important or relevant. It’s just based on your PSAT score.
I know when I was a student, it was probably below 25%
It’s not really a “prestigious award”. According to the article, 240 kids at the school got the same thing.
At my large high school, lots of kids got it too.
The school got a stack of certificates. They sat on the principals desk for a while, then they sat with the guidance counselor or homeroom teachers before being passed out.
The parent is basically complaining because:
1. They didn’t notify the parents via email.
2. They didn’t find out in time to put in on an college early admission application.
3. The school didn’t make a big deal of handing out the awards in an assembly or similar.
This sounds more like a complaint from an overbearing helicopter parent than any sort of issue that HN would care about.
"One former student said he learned he had won the award through a random email from the school to a school-district email account that students rarely check; the principal neither told his parents nor made a public announcement."
I have a lot of sympathy for school administrators and school board members. They deal with this sort of stuff from parents all the time.
But homeroom teachers didn’t distribute the awards until Monday, November 14, after the early-application deadlines had passed. Teachers dropped the certificates unceremoniously on students’ desks.
“Keeping these certificates from students is theft by the state,” says Yashar.
... so they did get distributed, albeit without much ceremony. Also, that's in plenty of time for scholarship applications, so "Recognition by National Merit opens the door to millions of dollars in college scholarships and 800 Special Scholarships from corporate sponsors" is a bit of a non-sequitur.
That's what I thought when I was a kid, but it turns out that the important college ranking system uses "number of national merit finalists" as a high weighted metric. I got a full ride to a respected state university solely from that PSAT test and so did two of my friends.
I personally think that my time hanging out with people watching classic rock concert footage during 8th period was rather valuable for my life and happiness and many of the personal skills I learned are valuable for my career.
This isn’t about deprioritizing excellence.
Agreed, it's about giving fifty percent reward for zero percent effort.
I think HN readers remember perhaps better than most how much the "peanut gallery" in the back of the class interfered with our ability to learn. I find the idea those assholes are going to get at least half credit for doing nothing absutely repugnant.
Actually, it looks like the Washington Post used to publish the lists at least as late as 2014. I don’t see anything from WaPo after that though.
In what way is it critical to loudly publish awards handed out to students based on a test they took in 9th grade?
This story has fuck all to do with testing or test scores. The same test was administered. The same rankings were applied.
By any chance, are you privileged enough that you never have to care about such "crap"? Because believe me, what you call "crap" might be a big ladder for someone less privileged to climb out of their actual crappy situations. Such "crap" labels often help getting admission to a good college, or embellishing your resume if you want and need a good job.
“This crap” refers to the publishing of merit scholars on a list, not actual achievement. That’s just achievement porn.
I genuinely do not understand the logic behind what is essentially skin-color diversity.
(https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/04/court-allows-elite-virgin...)
A) historically a number of groups have been disadvantaged.
B) this has lead to those groups "falling behind" advantaged groups from a wealth perspective. [side bar - wealth begets wealth, while poverty begets poverty, and while it is possible to rise up it is hard]
C) since it is easier to get good grades when you have money, it's more impressive to get good, but not necessarily top, grades from a different starting point. Thus the route, not just the result, should be considered when reviewing applications.
D) thus admitence with "just grade scores" tends to favor those groups with money, which would result in a largely hermogenous student body.
E) education extends beyond just knowledge. The goal is to turn out adults who will function well in a society as a whole, get good jobs, add value to the community, and do on.
F) in modern times it is considered poor form, or worse, to exhibit bad speech or behavior patterns. You can no longer behave like your great-grandfather, you can no longer speak like your grandfather. To do so will harm your prospects.
G) thus, in order to become better human beings, its good to rub shoulders with those of different social, financial, gender, ability levels. In the safety of a school environment everyone can better be taught, and practice, the social norms of the day.
H) thus a diverse student body is good for all students. Previously disadvantaged groups get a leg up. Currently advantaged groups get to interact with those dissimilar to themselves, and thus improve those interaction skills.
US society likes to believe that "hard work" is the secret to financial position. But hard work itself is hard to measure, so we measure grades instead. However grades are more a function of current economic status, not work, and if anything reflect the hard work of the parents, not the students. There are various tools used to try and improve the proxy measure, things like diversity quotas and so on.
Of course imperfect improvements to imperfect proxies still result in contraversy since the system is still flawed. And naturally those most disadvantaged by the rules feel the sting the most.
None of this explains or excuses the behaviour of the school in with-holding these results though. The logic behind that is strange. Why would a top quality school, with a diverse student body, look to prejudice the ability of those students to get good college positions?
I can see some logic in not making a public song and dance about it, but surely all students, and their parents, should be notified as soon as possible?
On the up side, the fact this is "news" at all suggests this is a very uncommon practice.
Edit: Though point taken that isn’t the case now with the high school policy. It does seem to be, however, a held sentiment.
I do think it's unfortunate that cultural groups have largely coalesced around race in this country, but that's the reality, and it won't change if the groups don't interact with each other.
I’m not arguing against diversity nor skin-color prejudice in America, I’m raising the question of how we best define diversity and associated ramifications.
In the end it's tough for me to see any good diversity metrics beyond income and race, and it seems to me they are both valid and not necessarily related. If you value diversity you should probably aim to have both economic and racial diversity.
I've also noticed that many of the people claiming that race is a bad diversity metric have minimal experience interacting with different racial groups which leads me to believe it is largely from a place of ignorance or even bad faith.
“Race” or specifically European-ancestry versus former slaves is the main, historical dichotomy in the US. But well-to-do “Asians”, various people from the continent of Asia, people from other continents, and mixing tends to dilute the historical dichotomy. But the mindset persists. To me it seems as though skin-color diversity feels good to certain (perhaps many) Americans, but it isn’t necessarily logical.
(Editing for typos)
Wonder why colleges don't publish stats of how many kids are admitted from, say, each quintile of wealth or income. I guess that would be an inconvenient stat to expose.
Dude, some people have to lose. We can shuffle as much as we want, we can probably make them perfectly distributed amongst races, sexes, heights, weights, whatever.
But there will still be a shit ton of losers. It's just how the world works. You can't have 8 billion flying Tesla electric private jets to Malibu.
*It's influenced by other things too of course. Once you hit a (fairly low) limit it's going to start skewing more and more male. Upbringing is a huge part of it too so children of divorced parents tend to perform worse etc.
Certainly not by gifting people stuff, but buy gifting them education.
You bet you'll see me voting for woke people in the public school district.
"On Monday, December 12, after getting caught, Kosatka sent an email to the parents of Commended Students, notifying them of the “important recognition” and saying, “We are deeply sorry” for not sharing the news earlier. He claimed school officials would contact college admissions offices to correct the record."
Maybe.
Is sending National Merit certificates out a few weeks late evidence of such a conflict?
No.
Does this article come across as a tempest in a teacup, thereby also weakening its argument that there is a broader war on merit?
Yes.
Propagandists would be wise to choose their battles, Chicken Littling every bureaucratic snag or even isolated incident as evidence of a widespread issue creates fatigue.
I'm wondering if NMSC or College Board (conducts PSAT/NMSQT) notified students directly, would school admins kick NMSC out? I doubt they would be able to resist the leverage if parents went political.
There have already been explicitly racist tests including the NASP from 1964 until 2015.
More racism, cheating, and lying doesn't cure racism, it diminishes faith in public school system and gives ammunition to the pro-private school libertarian types who scapegoat "big gubberment" and don't want to pay any taxes. For what it's worth, California played cute with curricula, race-based admissions, and forced bussing in the 80's and 90's and most of the top students (the rich ones) left for private schools.
I'd be interested to know the demographics of children of that county and of the surrounding areas because I don't think they're 72% Asian or 60% male. Gender is not necessarily a problem given how the current education system fails boys and men. Are the students mostly future lawyers, doctors, and software engineers?
The same exact kids were awarded the scholarship. Absolutely nothing about the PSAT or the award changed.
The struggle between "this is the best school" and "these administrators are terrible" is never resolved, but it sounds like the quickest way to end this battle in the "war on merit" is for the National Merit Scholarship Corporation to mail the paper to the students instead of outsourcing it to the teachers.