Now, correlate--that's a big word. What does correlate mean? There's some
consistency. There's some relationship between the score on this aptitude test
and your first year college grades. That's true. There is some relationship.
The problem is it's a very modest relationship. It is a positive relationship,
meaning it is more than zero. But it is not what most people would assume when
they hear the term correlation. For example, your height correlates better
with your weight than your test score correlates with your first year grades.
Jane Balin, Michelle Fine and I did a study at the University of
Pennsylvania Law School where we actually looked at the first year law school
grades of 981 students and then looked at their LSAT scores. And it turned out
that there was a relationship between their LSAT and their first year law
school grades. The LSAT predicted 14 percent of the variance between the first
year grades. And it did a little better second year: 15 percent. And I was at
a meeting with a person who at the time worked for the law school admissions
council who constructs the LSAT. And she said, well, nationwide the test is
nine percent better than random. Nine percent better than random. That's what
we're talking about.
So it may be an efficient tool in that you get the students to pay for it.
The schools don't pay for it. It allows the schools to then rank order people
based on a number that is assigned to them. But it is a fairly arbitrary tool.
And it is certainly not a thermometer of merit, if by merit--and I'm assuming
we don't mean merit is the equal of first-year college grades or first-year law
school grades. Merit is a big word. And it has to encompass, it has to carry
a lot of weight. It does a lot of heavy lifting. It means more than just how
you're going to do first year in college. Because if all we cared about is how
well you do first year in college, we would have college as one year. Right?
Why would you have to be there and pay tuition for three more years if this is
only about first year of college? If it's such a good predictor, why do you
even go to college? Just take the test and then get a diploma.
So there must be something going on within the institution of higher
education or within the legal academy that we think also carries, quote, merit.
In which people are learning how to work and play well together with others, in
which people are learning intellectual self-confidence, in which people are
being exposed to research skills, in which people are being trained to be
leaders. None of this has any relationship to the testocracy. No one claims
that aptitude tests predict leadership, predict emotional intelligence, predict
the capacity to make a contribution to the society. The only relationship is
between the test and first-year college grades.
And what I was about to say earlier was that, with FairTest and others,
they will say that what the test actually judges is quick strategic guessing
with less than perfect information. Boys, for example, do better on the math
portion of the SAT than girls. They routinely score 40 to 50 points higher.
Many people say, well that's because girls are ignored in high school math.
That may be true. And yet the girls do just as well in college when they take
math courses as the boys, despite their lower SAT scores on the math portion.
And when you interview the boys as to how they approach the test, the answer is
they basically viewed it as a pinball machine. And the goal was speed and
winning. And the girls on the other hand, wanted to work through the problems
before they put down the answer. That, apparently, is not merit.
Somebody who wants to work through a problem before concluding with an
answer, is not guessing and they're not fast. And so on some level, what we
are confusing as a result of this over emphasis on the testocracy, what we're
confusing merit with is speed and the confidence to guess.
So what do you mean when you say, we need to change the paradigm, that
we have to move beyond one size fits all testing?
Well, it means that we have to start with an understanding of merit as a
complex concept. That merit has to encompass what we expect graduates of
institutions of higher education to be able to do. Merit is not simply an
efficient way of scoring or ranking people. It is not simply a tool for US
News and World Report to be able to rank colleges so that it can
promote its news magazine. Its college edition is apparently such a popular
issue that it out sells all the other issues of US News and World Report
combined. And then that particular issue begins to influence admissions
officers as to what they rely on because they're afraid that their ranking in
US News and World Report will go down if they don't emphasize the SAT.
So you set in motion a really difficult cycle to break.
So when I say we have to change the paradigm, I'm suggesting that we have
to understand that you can't grade or score merit as if merit were your basal
temperature. Right? Merit is something that is complicated, that has to
relate to what is it that we want you to do before we understand how skilled
you are at doing it. How competent are you at doing what we want?
Now that opens up a very big question, a very big conversation. What is
the mission of higher education? And that's a conversation that I think we
need to have before we start to understand admissions as a matter of selection.
You have to link admission to mission. Admission should be a subset of
mission. And the mission of institutions of higher education can vary. Public
institutions, for example, have a democratic function. They're being
subsidized by all of the taxpayers of the state. Presumably they should afford
all of the citizens of the state an equal opportunity to not only attend
institutions of higher education that they are in fact paying for, but in some
states such as Texas, graduates of the University of Texas Law School are
over-represented in leadership positions throughout the state. So in some
ways, access to the University of Texas Law School, a public institution,
should be distributed so that all citizens of Texas are then represented by
people who can be trained to be leaders of the state.
So it's not just that each individual has the right to go to the school.
I'm making that argument. But each individual within the state should have an
equal opportunity to qualify to get to the school, as well as an equal
opportunity to be represented in a democratic sense by people who then go to
the school, function as leaders, and make important public policy decisions for
the state. So that's in a public context.
The Ford Foundation, for example, did a study of a national survey of
voters, asking them what they thought the goals of higher education should be.
Many of the voters, an overwhelming majority, said that it should be career
training or skills development. But a very large majority--not 82 percent as
with those who said that higher education should provide basic skills--but a
very large percentage, about 67, 69 percent said that one of the important
goals of higher education is to train people to work in a diverse society. And
then another group, about the same--two thirds--said an important goal of
higher education is to prepare people to work and play well, to go work and
play well together with others in a diverse society, not just a diverse work
Why are people only focused on race, not on gender, class, or
In this society race is a flag that you can wave in front of people as a
means of distracting them and diverting their attention from the real issue.
And so people are scapegoating. That's what I would argue happened in the
Hopwood case, that people were encouraged to scapegoat the black and Mexican
American students who were the beneficiaries of affirmative action, and
identify them as if they were the problem, when in fact the real problem is
elsewhere and is affecting all of us.
I use the metaphor of the miner's canary. The experience of those black
and Chicano--or in Texas, Mexican American--students is the experience of the
miner's canary. The miners used to take a canary into the mines to alert them
when the atmosphere in the mines was too toxic--not only for the canary but for
the miners. And the canary's more fragile respiratory system would give way,
alerting the miners that it was dangerous for them to remain.
And my argument is that the experience of those black and Mexican American
students at the University of Texas is the canary. And they are alerting us
that the testocracy that we are using to admit everyone is poisoning the
atmosphere, the educational atmosphere in the society as a whole. It's
affecting all of us. But in this society, because of the legacy of racism and
because of many problems that we have having access to a big conversation in
which people can have more than a single opportunity to speak--and therefore
they have to use their most dramatic claim, because they only get one time to
say something and get people's attention--because of that, we think we have to
locate the problem in the canary. We pathologize the canary. And then we say,
well we have to fix the canary, as if the solution is to outfit that little
canary with a pint-sized gas-mask so that it can withstand the toxic atmosphere
in the mines.
And my argument is, heed the canary. It is signaling us that we are not
doing much good for the society focusing simply on fixing the canary. We have
to fix the atmosphere in the mines.
Do you think that the past 30 years have been the era of the great
So your question is, will we look back at the era of 1965 to 1999 as--with
some nostalgia and regret--as the era of the multiracial university? and
comfortably continue with an all-white or predominantly white and Asian, and
predominantly affluent student population? And my answer is no. Because once
people understand that the canary is simply standing in for all of us, and they
begin to understand that this testocracy can be manipulated by those with
money, so that academic standards or what purport to be academic standards or
admission criteria are actually ways to credentialize a social oligarchy. They
are not, quote, meritocratic and democratic--even more important--systems for
distributing a scarce resource. Then more people are going to begin to
question the over emphasis on test scores. That's one answer.
The second is this. Part of what's happening--and it's not coincidental in
my view that 209 was addressed to problems in California. Part of what's
happening is that, as I said, affirmative action and the debate about
admissions criteria is a distraction from the real issue. California is
presently investing more money in prison construction than in construction of
institutions of higher education. And Victor Hugo over 140 years ago said,
every time you build a prison you close a school. And that's what's happening.
We are making higher education an increasingly valuable resource because we
have more demands for an educated and literate citizenry in terms of getting
good jobs in the work force. But at the same time, it's a valuable gateway to
citizenship. And citizenship here means not just a good job but also a
critical voice, leadership skills, the ability to learn how to work with other
people so that you can actually function in a diverse work force, in a global
economy. So it's not only increasingly valuable but it is increasingly scarce.
And so rather than address the question of scarcity--why are we withdrawing
state funds from higher education and investing them instead in prisons--we're
going to have a conversation about affirmative action, as if affirmative action
were responsible for the increasing scarcity of educational resources. And
that's just not true.
Do you think there's a fundamental conflict between a meritocracy and a
No. I think there's a fundamental conflict between a testocracy and
We have a new elite that is passing on its privileges in the same way that
the old elite passed on its privileges. But here's the danger or the even more
worrisome aspect of the new elite.
The old elite felt that it inherited its privileges. The new elite feels
that it has earned its privileges. And the problem is that the new elite
thinks that it earned its privileges based on its intrinsic merit. And
therefore the message to those who are not part of this elite is, "You are
stupid. You simply don't matter." Whereas, at least with the old elite,there
was this sense of noblesse oblige, that in order to defend or legitimate the
social oligarchy, you had to give back--as you said, the notion of service, of
public service, of some commitment to the greater good. And there was the
sense that even though you were privileged, it was simply luck that you
inherited the privilege. So those who were out of luck, so to speak, did not
necessarily think that that they were stupid. They were unlucky and
unfortunate but not necessarily stupid.
And I think the damage that we are doing through this testocracy, which is
credentializing a different elite, is the damage to both the people who have an
inflated sense of their own merit and an unwillingness to open up to new ways
of problem solving, an arrogance that there's only one way to answer a
question. Right? Because on that SAT it only gives one credit for one right
answer. So that means all problems have a single right answer. And the
question is, can you guess it within a short period of time. And it also
conveys to those who are left out a very damaging sense that they internalize.
And I think it really paralyzes true democratic experimentation.
What are your views about the gap and what we can do about
I'd have to start the question from a different place because the problem I
have with focusing on the test score gap--and I'm not opposed, in fact I'm
committed, to improving access to educational resources across the board. And
if in fact, the test score gap reflects the failure of this society to provide
equal access to educational resources, then we should solve that problem and
make sure everyone has the same opportunity to get an excellent education. But
I think the preoccupation with the test score gap, again, over-emphasizes the
value of the tests as a value in and of itself rather than as a proxy for some
other set of concerns.
Michael Feuer, who works at the National Academy of Science, tells the
story of walking down the street and seeing a woman with a baby in a carriage.
And he stops. And he admires the baby. And the woman turns to him. And she
says, "Oh, if you think the baby is beautiful, you should see her pictures."
And his point is that the way were are using tests is the same way the mother
was using the photograph of the baby, that we think the test somehow is a
better picture of the baby than simply looking at the baby in context.
Now, when you say to me, well there's a test score gap, part of what I hear
is that we have been taking pictures of these babies using a particular kind of
camera that seems to show white skin and middle class experience in all its
glory. And that those with a different kind of experience don't show up very
well using this particular film, or this particular angle.
Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't take pictures. But maybe we also need to
figure out ways that we can demonstrate--because I think Christopher Jencks and
others would concede that when given the opportunity to succeed, those who are
motivated to take advantage of that opportunity, do succeed. Harvard, for
example, did a study of three classes of its graduates. And it was trying to
determine what correlates with success as Harvard defined it. Harvard defined
success as financial satisfaction, professional satisfaction and contribution
to the community. And two things correlated with success as Harvard defined:
low SAT scores and a blue collar background. And part of the analysis or the
conclusion from that study is that those who are motivated to take advantage of
an opportunity, when given the opportunity, will succeed. That's certainly the
message of Derek Bok and William Bowen's The Shape of the River, that
those who are motivated to take advantage of the opportunity, when given the
opportunity, can and often do succeed, often in ways that are different than
their more privileged peers. The African Americans for example in the
Bok-Bowen study became leaders within their community at much higher rates than
their more affluent and better-scoring white counterparts.
Are you then saying that instead of focusing on merit we should be
focusing on opportunity? Or are you saying that merit is
I'm saying that you cannot know merit until you see it in the context of
opportunity. So merit, in my view, is a function of mission. It is not an
abstract concept that is genetically endowed. I think in this society we tend
to believe that you are born smart or you are born not smart and the goal of
education is the goal of that thermometer. We are going to dip your brain in
some particular, sort of neutral environment and determine whether you were
born smart or whether you are smart. And then if we determine you are smart,
then we give you an education. Then we give you the opportunity to become a
capable and functioning member of this society. And my claim is that we can't
tell who is smart until we know what it is we want them to do. And it is only
in the context of investigation of someone's capacity, that you know who can do
the job and who can do the job well.
What we have now is a complete diminution of standards. What do you say
If what we mean by standards is the ability to memorize facts, then we are
not keeping up with either cognitive, sociological or most scientific data
about how people learn and how they use what they learn. Because, to me,
standards are only valuable if they can predict problem solving ability.
Because ultimately, what we want as a society is to train people who can solve
problems, not just train people who can take tests.
Aren't we saying that here's living proof that the standard actually
predicted something, that being a longer time to graduate, and in smaller
But the goal is not simply to graduate. And the goal is not simply to pass
the bar. The goal is to become a lawyer. The goal is be a lawyer who can
solve problems. And that's where the standards advocates fall down. Because
they can't predict who is going to be a good lawyer and who is going to be a
lawyer who makes a contribution--not only to his or her family in terms of
making a good living, but to the society as a whole. We have to be willing to
consider that the goal is ultimately to see how people function in the society,
not simply in little isolated units of analysis.
What do you think of the implementation of affirmative
Affirmative action was always a very modest remedy. And in many ways, the
demise--and I do think that affirmative action is not only under serious
assault but is withering on the vine--but in many ways the demise of
affirmative action also represents an opportunity. Because it represents an
opportunity to reconsider a modest remedy and actually go after the true source
of the problem. If affirmative action was justified because conventional
criteria failed to provide adequate information about the capacity of a certain
previously under represented group of people to perform and to succeed, then
perhaps it is now time to go after those conventional criteria--which it turns
out, also failed to provide adequate information about the capacity of a very
large group of people, some of whom have been included but others who have also
been excluded but nobody has noticed. Because in this society, if you are poor
and white and you don't do well on these tests, nobody notices because your
situation is invisible in the larger pool of affluent whites who are doing just
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