The myth of meritocracy

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The Meritocracy Myth, Spring 2004, Stephen McNamee and Robert Miller, University of North Carolina – Wilmington (academic paper)

Appreciation to Diane Torres-Velásquez, professor, Department of Education, Educational Leadership and Educational Policy, College of Education, UNM, Albuquerque, NM, for telling me about this paper. I thought it might be supportive for busy people, to try to boil down and summarize the 9 pages of academic writing and footnotes.

 “There is a gap between how people think the system works and how the system actually does work. We refer to this gap as  ‘the meritocracy myth,’ or the myth that the system distributes resources – especially wealth and income – according to the merit of individuals.”

  • While merit does affect who ends up with what and who owns what, the ideal of “The American Dream.” vastly overestimates the impact of merit.
  • A number of non-merit factors create real barriers to individual access and mobility.

It is widely reported in America today,  income and wealth are unequally distributed. Let’s define “income” and “wealth.”

  • Income comes from wages and salaries – from jobs and work.
  • Income also comes from non-work – capital gains, interest, dividends, government assistance, rental property, …
  • Wealth is not an income stream, it is assets owned: cars, houses, businesses, real estate, stocks, bonds, trusts, …
  • The more wealth one owns, the more likely significant income is created from these owned assets.
  • Many assets also appreciate in value, contributing to more income and more wealth.
  • (Much) More income arises from owned assets than from individual achievement/jobs/work.

In today’s America, lots of current data show income and wealth being concentrated at the top of the system. A large number of non-merit factors cause and perpetuate this state of affairs:

  • Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, reflects individual capacity and environmental influences or experience.
  • Experience is enhanced through access to greater income and wealth.
  • Really big money comes from owning assets which requires little expenditure of effort, while really hard work or physical effort is often poorly paid
  • Attitudes –  it’s not clear whether certain attitudes cause success or rather success causes certain attitudes.
  • “Poor people” tend to adjust ambition and outlook according to their assessments of their more limited life chances, not “deviant or pathological values.”
  • “Present-oriented” or “short-term gratification” can be a function of not knowing where a next meal is coming from or whether to buy food or gas or kids clothes or medications with this paycheck.
  • The economically successful are not more honest or ethical than the rest of us – examples: Enron, WorldCom, Bernie Madoff, The London Whale, white-collar crime, insider trading, tax fraud, LIBOR, pay-to-play …
  • Where we start out in life has the greatest effect on where we end up; inheritance of wealth, position, access and connections, health care, comes first; merit comes second.
  • Most jobs becoming available in the past twenty years have been in low-wage and service sectors.
  • Geography matters – for the same job, economic opportunity and wages are greater in New York City or Los Angeles than in Albuquerque, Las Cruces, or Farmington.
  • For poverty rates, it’s just the reverse.
  • Unequal education matters; the quality of schools and educational opportunity vary according to where one lives, and where one lives depends on family economic resources and/or race.
  • Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Starbucks type businesses have shut down uncounted small businesses and entrepreneurial opportunities.
  • Corporate off-shoring of manufacturing has eliminated uncounted decent paying jobs.
  • Finally, merit is often neutralized or trumped by race, religion, age, physical disability, physical appearance, sex, and region.

Individual  “Merit” is not the myth.

The myth is the idea that social, financial and career resources and opportunities are distributed on the basis of individual merit.

The rich and the poor have always been among us, but exalting the rich and condemning the poor is not based on a complete situational assessment.

(My personal feeling is, such exalting and condemning moves us as a community and society, towards a less live-able and less fulfilling environment.)

To read the full paper, click here

To get a copy of their book, revised in 2009,  Click here.

Why is Feedback Shyamalan’s #3 Practice?

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Shyamalan’s 3rd identified practice for closing the education-opportunity-achievement gap is Feedback. Regular, consistent, timely feedback in formats usable by teachers, principles, and parents. This TEDx talk describes the behavioral economics, psychology and power of feedback in some very interesting ways.

Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work?

“Despite our best efforts, bad or inexplicable decisions are as inevitable as death and taxes and the grocery store running out of your favorite flavor of ice cream. They’re also just as predictable. Why, for instance, are we convinced that “sizing up” at our favorite burger joint is a good idea, even when we’re not that hungry? Why are our phone lists cluttered with numbers we never call? Dan Ariely, behavioral economist, has based his career on figuring out the answers to these questions, and in his bestselling book Predictably Irrational (re-released in expanded form in May 2009), he describes many unorthodox and often downright odd experiments used in the quest to answer this question.”

Civic Hacking: Re-energizing citizenship and Restoring Trust in Government

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Here is a quick summary of Catherine Bracy’s September 2013 TED Talk entitled Why Good Hackers Make Good Citizens.

I believe you will want to watch it a couple of times and share it with lots of others.

  • “Hacking”  is collaborative, innovative problem solving
  • Civic Hacking brings 21st a Century tool set to bear on the problems  government and society are facing
  • It encourages and empowers effective citizen participation
  • It re-energizes citizenship and restores trust in government
  • It is a way to create functional apps that serve real people in a user-friendly way

One example towards the end is just sobering.

The Mexico House of Representatives let a 2-year $9.3 million (USD) contract to build a bill-tracking system. Out of frustration and irritation, Mexico City tech-geeks created a contest to create a system in 10 days for a “prize” of $9,300 (USD) (!). They received 173 apps; 5 were presented to the legislature and are still being used; the $9.3 million contract was vacated.

Click here to watch.

 

Closing the education-opportunity-achievement gap

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Closing the education-opportunity-achievement gap

It appears to me, the task of closing the education gap is two-fold, consisting of ‘Inside Jobs’ and ‘Outside Jobs.’

The ‘Inside job’ would be everything that happens in the classroom in a school in a district.

The ‘Outside job’ would be everything else – community, parents, not-for-profits, foundations, health, transportation, PTA, unions, politicians, legislators, city-county-state government, business, and like that.

For the Inside Job, the best expression I have come across is M. Night Shyamalan Foundation’s recent book, I Got Schooled, which very clearly says that closing the gap is a multi-faceted, ‘systems’ challenge, requiring a multi-faceted ‘systems’ response.

Money for the Inside job comes mostly through property taxes, oil-gas fund, and equalization formulas. A perennial problem is, arguments for employing these funds tend to use one-dimensional single-issue practices, based on favored views of lobbyists or organizations for a particular ideology, concept, or anecdote – and interdisciplinary integrated ‘systems’ solutions get buried in this narrow focusing.

Many, if not most, single-issue solutions have been tried once or many times over the years. Many are still being supported or proposed. However, truckloads of data from multiple points of view reveal very little change has occurred over the last 30-40 years.. Indeed, the Shyamalan Foundation found that implementing single practices without other important integrating components consistently produced dismal results.

Over time, institutions too often and too easily fall into status quo thinking-acting-arguing, and many (most) substantive changes come from outside such institutions. I believe Shyamalan Foundation’s I Got Schooled could only have been written from outside the educational institution.

In their search for a systems-type solution for closing the education gap, the Foundation required that the practices had to:

  • focus solely ‘inside’ the classroom/school
  • exclude ‘Outside’  the classroom influences exactly because they are outside the control of the classroom/school;
  • demonstrate substantial ‘effect size,” that is, they must produce demonstrable, measurable, and significant results; and,
  • be scalable for implementation

And therein lies the power and utility of their findings.

They identified five practices that, working together in a systems context, satisfy all these criteria:

  • Effective teachers – dropping poor; hiring good; why it’s important; how to do it
  • Leadership – how it’s important; what it looks like; how to do it
  • Feedback – frequency, consistency, teacher/principal usability – all critical
  • Smaller (high) schools – this turbo-charges the other practices
  • More time in school – by the time children of color or low income reach third grade they are so far behind it’s virtually impossible to catch up

If you don’t have time to read the whole book, these five practices are summarized at  tommilesabq.com.

For the Outside Job, the best expressions I’ve come across in Albuquerque are the ABC Community School Partnership and Mission: Graduate. The ABC Community School Partnership is tasking itself with:

  • Working in the Early Child to K-12 and non-graduated adult domains;
  • Identifying ‘inside needs’ that can be addressed by ‘outside’ organizations, programs, and resources;
  • Creating coalitions and collaboratives for matching proper resources with proper students-parents-teachers-administrators in proper times and places;
  • Using schools as hubs for coordinating and delivering services and resources;
  • Creating and funding full-time action positions called ‘Community School Coordinators’ to foster and coordinate matching-up ‘inside needs’ with ‘outside’ programs and resources.

 Mission: Graduate is focused on ‘who is not graduating and why,’ for Middle-School and High-School domains.

A really short summary for all this could be:

  • Shyamalan Foundation’s defines the ‘Inside Job;’
  • ABC Community School Partnership and Mission: Graduate describe the ‘Outside Job;’ and,
  • Community School Coordinators are the mechanism for effectively linking the two.

LEADERSHIP – What Does It Take [TED Talk]

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“Leadership” is the Shyamalan Foundation’s #2 practice, and I’ve blogged and emailed the summary details in the recent past. Here is a TED talk on the subject that both sounds supportive and extends some important examples.

There are many leadership programs available today, from 1-day workshops to corporate training programs. But chances are, these won’t really help. In this clear, candid talk, Roselinde Torres describes 25 years observing truly great leaders at work, and shares the three simple but crucial questions would-be company chiefs need to ask to thrive in the future.

Roselinde Torres: What it takes to be a great leader –   October 2013, San Francisco

College Applicants Sweat The SATs – perhaps They Shouldn’t

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An NPR Morning Edition article on a large study puts SAT and ACT standardized test scores in a real-world, practical context. Read the full article here. Here are the highlights:

  • SAT/ACT testing is not exactly a fair way to show skills.
  • what happens when you admit tens of thousands of students without looking at their SAT scores – the answer is – if they have good high school grades, they’re almost certainly going to be fine.
  • There was virtually no difference in grades and graduation rates between test “submitters” and “nonsubmitters.” Just 0.05 percent of a GPA point separated the students who submitted their scores to admissions offices and those who did not.
  • And college graduation rates for “nonsubmitters” were just 0.6 percent lower than those students who submitted their test scores.
  • High school grades matter — a lot.
  • Kids who had low or modest test scores, but good high school grades, did better in college than those with good scores but modest grades.
  • The study covered 123,000 students at 33 institutions over eight years; the conclusion: test-optional admissions improves diversity [and] does not undermine academic quality.
  • SAT/ACT testing may be discouraging students who have great potential for success [from applying to] a particular school,
  • The private test preparation market for the SAT and the ACT is a $2 billion-a-year industry in the U.S. Critics of the tests have long said the exams better reflect a family’s income and a student’s speed at test-taking than aptitude, competency or intelligence.