What Is Merit? The Thomas Jefferson Magnet Science School Case

 

You never want to find yourself in agreement with Samuel Alito.

But as if I understand the case of the Alexandria, Virginia Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology accurately, I may find myself in that noxious company.

I will have to read more about this case, but as it was presented on youtube (by a right wing platform) the facts of the case seem reasonably clear.

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST) is a public "magnet" school in Alexandria, Virginia which admits worthy, which is to say, "talented" students from anywhere within the geographic boundaries of this northern Virginia county. The measure of worthiness, or talent has been a standardized test and grades.

Apparently, while local middle schools and high schools have about 6% Asian-American students in their classes, TJHSST has had 73% for years. The implication is that Asian origin students test extremely well and have good grades and so they get in in high proportions. (MIT may have the same tilt.)

But then somebody in the government agency overseeing the TJHSST decided the fact that there were only 2% Black and 2% Hispanic and 23% White students, the racial mix in the school had to be "rebalanced."  Applicants were then reviewed and judged by "life experience" and the standardized tests were either eliminated or re-weighted, so the percentage of Asian students fell to 55% and the other categories of race increased commensurately.

A group of parents of Asian students in the county brought suit, saying that the merit basis for the school had been corrupted and the effort was nothing less than an anti-Asian conspiracy.

Merit no longer mattered as much as race/ethnicity.

I got myself labeled as a bigot years ago, when, in discussion with some media folks (magazine, newpaper, TV news) at a social function I said if 100% of the next class at Georgetown Medical School turned out to be Asian, or Black or Jewish or White, it would not bother me one bit. The important thing is to get the best doctors, not what color they are.

In science and technology, one would think, all that matters is who can do the work. You would think choosing the best kids for MIT or TJHSST would be fairly straightforward--you can test for math and science with pretty objective examinations.

I really do not care about the race the pilot of the next Delta flight, as long as he's really good at flying airplanes. Same with my plumber or HVAC guy, or my automechanic.

It's the job that matters.

On the other hand, even in science, examinations can be misleading. I thought I was never much good at science in high school where all the tests were multiple choice, fill in the blanks and they were testing for rote memory and a narrow band width of understanding. When I got to college, I found myself getting the highest marks in my biology class where we were using blue books to write out essays to questions which were more sophisticated than multiple choice questions.

Turned out, I was a pretty good student in that science. My genetics professor caught me by the arm and told me my final exam had been the best exam he'd read in years. Of course, I only got a "B" in genetics because I could not be bothered about a bunch of fruit flies in the lab. If they had had the sort of columns and technology used in any forensic lab now, I might have been more interested in genetics lab.

And medicine actually is more like a football team than a mechanics school. You need all sorts of very different talents and types: try filling out a football team with big slow guys who make great lineman but cannot run down field and catch a ball. You need quick quarterbacks and balletic receivers. And so it is in medicine: the qualities which make for a good pediatrician will not help much with the cardiac surgeon, or the cardiologist or the trauma surgeon. 

Obvious Talent

I cannot think of a single exam which would select for the wide variety of talents you would need to fill all the different specialties from OB/GYN to neurology to rheumatology to radiology to dermatology to ophthalmology.

So, maybe the single standardized--I presume multiple choice--test for the TJHSST was objective, fair but meaningless and selected for only one type of talent, a type for which Tiger moms could hire tutors to prepare their kids to master.

Harvard faced a similar problem with their selection process. Asian kids with great test scores and grades were told they were grade grubbers with no personality.

And the Asian kids and their parents reacted predictably: Wait, you told us you would define merit by grades and test scores and now you are saying really "personality" counts more?

In the last century, the Princeton man was not suppose to care much about his grades; the Yale man was not supposed to spend too much time studying. You were supposed to spend time at your clubs and on teams and singing in the Whiffenpoofs. 

But then the Russians put up the Sputnik in 1957 and Americans woke up to the fact that being good at science and technology was important.

The local court rules that the new admission policy at TJHSST was not discriminatory against Asian kids because 55% of the class was still Asian, even though that number was down from 77%. 

That did not satisfy the Asian parents, as you might well imagine, because that 22% loss came out of their kids' futures.

So when Justices Alito and Thomas bewailed the fact the rest of their colleagues declined to hear the appeal from the Asian parents, who claimed affirmative action had been applied to increase the numbers of Blacks and Hispanics and those gains were losses to the Asians, I had to agree, that is exactly what happened.

Allan Bakke argued the same thing in 1978--he had been denied admission to a California medical school because seats had been held for Black students, and he had lost his chance because of his White race.

There are ways to judge talent. If you audition for a seat in the orchestra at the New York Philharmonic, you play your violin from behind a curtain. All that counts is the music the judges hear.

If you submit a story to a short story contest anonymously, they are not giving you points for being White or Asian.

But admission to schools cannot be so color blind, unless we spend a lot more time developing tests which really do identify the wide range of talents we need for all those wide ranging challenges we face as a nation.

"The dirty secret of surgery is that anyone can do it, if he's willing to simply put in the time and practice," a surgeon told me. I don't think that's entirely true, but once you get past a certain level of competence and skill, it is really tough to develop an exam which really can identify talent in excess of desire. That surgeon had the capacity to learn a lot of anatomy and to visualize things three dimensionally, and all the people he worked with had that same ability, so he thought everyone has it, which likely is not true. But his point is still fair enough--there are far more people who could do these high powered jobs or fair well at high powered schools than there are places for them.

If we want to be fair, we could simply put everyone's name in a hat and draw out the lucky winners.

That would be FAIR but maybe it would not select for the most talented class.

Discoverers of Insulin

But, at some level, once you have a lower bar of capability, the differences between the higher bars are less meaningful.  That was always apparent to me in sports: the first three finishers in the track meet, the swim meet, the horse race were often different only infinitesimally .

So, if I were choosing kids for Harvard, or for TJHSST, I'd screen out the kids who clearly could not do the work with a screening exam and then put everyone else's name in the hat and pull out the lucky winners.

Down And Out in the Meritocracy

 

Whenever I am feeling particularly maschositic...

Or whenever I am seized by a deep sense of resentment that I was never chosen for the best college or the leadership of a major corporation or as the main script writer for a classic TV series...

I bring myself down to earth by opening up whatever New Yorker magazine I may have at hand, turn to the final page and examine the Cartoon Caption contest.

It is there I can feel fully cognizant of just how average, ordinary, how undistinguished and unworthy of the idea of "first rate" I truly am.

Displayed there is a single, caption-less cartoon for my consideration and I usually draw a complete blank, struggle to offer some utterly prosaic uninspired idea and then collapse in a puddle of self aware self rebuke.

Then, to really twist the blade in that space between my ribs, I read over the "finalists" suggestion from the contest the week before and am at once dazzled by their brilliance--"brilliant" that word so overused as to be almost meaningless now, but the best description of what I find there. And in the face of the three extraordinary offerings from my fellow citizens, I sink to the bottom of my own well of collapsed self regard and gasp.

The only salutatory part is once I am at rock bottom, I have achieved getting to the point where everything else has got to be up from there. 

When I was in middle school (then called "junior high") in Montgomery County, Maryland in some capricious lark, no doubt launched by a bored bureaucrat in the depths of the Department of Education, they administered an examination to some unsuspecting cohort of students, who were spared English class that day, sat at their desks and presented with an SAT like test booklet. Breaking that seal with your #2 pencil that day unleashed a different experience from what we usually expected. The questions were not multiple choice but required essays, handwritten in those days, which presented its own special sort of bias, but there you have it. 

Each question was shown below a picture, a photo, a painting and the student was asked to comment on its meaning, to write a paragraph or two about the image.

One frame was left blank. The classic blank canvas, and this was a particularly important question. Some students simply wrote there must be some error here because there was no image on the copy of the test the student had been provided. (These students, we were later told, tended to be the students who scored highest later on the Princeton Scholastic Aptitude Test--the SAT. These students could see the game and prepare effectively for those concrete, there-is-always-the-answer-right-in-front-of- you type tests, but give them a blank page, not so much.)

Some students, confronted with the page wrote wonderful stories about a snowstorm with white out conditions. Others ruminated on what sort of state occurs before we are born. Others wrote about what comes after death. Some got so carried away by the blank page, they continued their answers on the back of the answer sheet. 

So, this experimental test was a game about creativity, imagination, the ability to express one's ideas using a pencil in hand.

You had to get the game, of course, and some of the straight A students with the high college boards, most of them actually, apparently did not get the game or if they did, they did not have that sort of intelligence or energy. These high SAT students got the game of the SAT, which required some learned concepts in math, some cunning to see the traps in the questions, some memory prowess and, in the case of syllogisms some feel for the variations in meaning in words or in difference between words like "to want" and "to need." 

But the rules for this test were different. A different game. 

I thought I did pretty well on that test, but, of course, never heard what anyone else, much less the test makers, thought. No scores were ever reported. Certainly, nobody from Harvard or Yale ever called saying they had read my exam and wanted me to come up and visit the campus. 

But now, looking at those blank spots for the captions in the New Yorker, I could appreciate the depths of my own unworthiness. 

Consider the #730 contest. Just look at that cartoon. For me, the important detail is in the expression on the lab rat's face, and that makes me choose the first answer below, but I would have been happy to come up with any of the finalist answers. Never could. My mind is just not that rich. Each of these answers is a reference to some social/cultural issue, and the last one is a jibe at that line about continuing a family tradition in the workplace. Each is beyond clever. Not me. 

But, there is a whiff of hope:  In a nation where at least half of the people find Donald Trump inspiring, there is some intelligent life buried under the red dust, and all you have to do to know it's there is to put a cartoon on the last page of The New Yorker and ask for suggested captions, and this life sprouts out, like photosynthesizing organisms reaching for the sun.

“I bet you also had to be twice as smart as the men.”

Eva Hess, Davis, Calif.

“And, when you get hungry, the cafeteria is to your right, left, left, right, left, straight, right, straight, left, and then you push on the big lever.”

Michael Moran, Evanston, Ill.

“They tell me your family has been doing lab work for generations.”

William Howard, New Fairfield, Conn.