Andrew Hacker and the Perversion of Meritocracy: Is Algebra Necessary?

                             Professor Andrew Hacker (Amherst BA, Princeton PhD)

Prove:    (x²+y²)²= (x²-y²)²+(2xy)²

Should every doctor be able to solve this problem? Should every doctor who is admitted to Harvard Medical School or Johns Hopkins be able to solve this problem? Should every freshman admitted to college be able to solve this problem? 

Should every graduate of Rice University be able to solve this problem?

Should a talented 17 year old, who writes well, whose analysis of Thoreau is breathtaking, be able to solve this problem, if he wants to go to Harvard? Would Sylvia  Plath have been able to solve this problem? Or Katherine Anne Porter? Or F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Writing in the Sunday New York Times today, Andrew Hacker makes the case that the math is being A/ Taught incorrectly, i.e. too abstractly  B/ Used to flunk out worthy students and this  is harmful to the national economy, to individual lives, to American industry and to American education.

He uses algebra as his illustration, but he eventually gets around to an even more egregious example: calculus--which has been thrown in front of generations of aspiring pre medical students--as another case in point of a totally meaningless hurdle placed to discourage, to narrow the field rather than to actually identify people with the right stuff. 

We have been selecting out exactly the people with the wrong stuff for decades, discouraging people who would make really good doctors, lawyers and welders by making them prove themselves at irrelevant tasks.

It is as if we have been selecting a football team or a baseball team by making everyone pole vault over 16 feet. Anyone who do this is not on the team.  Of course, coaches would never be idiotic enough to eliminate everyone who cannot pole vault: They are looking for other attributes which are more relevant to each position on the team.

But Harvard et al have been, for years, cutting everyone from consideration who cannot score above 700 on the math portion of the SAT--anyone who is not able to vault over quadratic equations is not invited to be on the team.

"Meritocracy" implies the selection process looks not for family ties, nor for race nor for money but for merit,  and the very institutions in America which ought to know how to analyze for merit have failed at this task for decades.  
Well, not every part of the those institutions: The football coaches know merit when they see it. Ironically, the one part of the university which does not really belong at a university, the football program, has been better at assessing real talent, at defining scientifically exactly what characteristics constitute "talent" than the parts of the university whose business it is to select for academic talent.

 It's Moneyball in action.  

Remember Moneyball? The whole idea of that work was that "talent scouts" had for years been bad at what they were being paid to do. They were looking for the wrong attributes of merit. When someone actually took the time and invested the effort into figuring out what made a player successful and valuable to a team, they started drafting entirely different sorts of players.

But why should the Ivy League change its practices? They are smug and fat. Same for medical schools--people are banging at their doors. Why change, just because you could actually improve what you do?

Because, we are in a world economy now, and the Japanese or the Chinese will eat our lunch, once they figure out what real talent is and how to identify it. 

Sure as hell we will not.