Status Updates From The Tyranny of the Meritocr...

"A healthy democracy depends on everyone having equal opportunity to understand and shape public action. When our education system produces a culture of competition instead of collaboration , or when it produces citizens who cannot work together to solve problems or incorporate diverse voices, this has important consequences for our democracy" (127).

"These classroom innovations show that it is possible to transform our vision of merit from a testocratic one to an interdependent, democratic one" (94).

"Teachers can create learning environments where students work to understand the material together, and through this process, the goals of learning become shared" (94).

"Society as a whole loses by embracing a system that focuses on and rewards the lucky few, while leaving out the unfortunate many" (82).

I need to look up The Posse Foundation -- this book was published in 2014, so I'm not sure if it's still around. I really hope so. I also want to find out more about the Bial-Dale Adaptability Index, Do schools actually use that? How do they gather students to assess them? What would it look like if in order to apply to college students registered to be evaluated in this way rather than taking the SAT/ACT?

Another element of tension the author introduces is the lack of success of the UPCS students once they leave for college.

As wonderful as the Clark University charter school sounds, the reality of making it work in public schools around the country is much more complicated. It requires a near total redesign of public education from the bottom up. Basically, burning everything down and starting over. What happened at Claremont is proof. Overlaying the Clark model on an existing public school resulted in disaster and teachers quit,

"If our higher education system is to remain competitive in the global information economy of the twenty-first century, we will have to move toward creating campuses where students live with other-race peers, have meaningful conversations with classmates with different perspectives, and are therefore pushed to be more thoughtful about our collective history and our democracy" (42).

Quoting Leon Botstein: "The elite institutions have willingly supported an alliance with the College Board to make their own lives easier, and we Americans seem to have accepted this owing to our misplaced love affair with standardized testing and rankings as the proper means to ensure educational excellence" (Time Magazine article March 2014)

The SAT best measures the wealth of those who take it -- the numbers bear that out.

Compelling argument in chapter 1. Guinier cites Gladwell New Yorker article -- comparing U.S. to Canadian college admissions process. His analogy: Canada's process is like the Marine Corps, U.S.'s is like a modeling agency. Marine corps focuses on developing potential candidates through robust training, modelling agency seeks out candidates who are already perfect and makes them more perfect. What an apt analogy.