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Street Roots • February 13-19, 2015
Lani Guinier, author of "The Tyranny o f the
Meritocracy,”speaking at the University of
Rochester in New York,
L.G.: By ‘‘victims/’ I assume you mean
(people) who are not benefiting from our
contemporary conception of what merit is.
And those áre poor and working class
whites, poor and working-class blacks ¿|p o o r
and working-class people of any race.
Because the conventional testocracy that
has been adapted and adopted throughout
the United States tends to reward people
based on their ability to do certain kinds of
testing. It was revealed that one’s SAT
scores are really not very predictive of one’s
college grades and, more importantly, are
even less predictive of the kind of citizen
that you are going to be in terms of the
contribution that you can make the larger
society as a result of your benefitting from
the lessons and the challenges of higher
education.
J.P.: How heavily do educational
institutions lean on test scores, as opposed to
other factors, in admissions? The Harvard
website, for example, says admissions staff look
at various qualities. And they even ask, “What
sort o f human being will you be in the future?”
B ut it didn ’t include the words "test,” "score”
or "SAT.”
L.G.: Yes, well they’re interested — it's
certainly much more than a one-dimensional
test score. They want to know what kind of
person you are.
J. A D A M FENSTER / UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
Lessons in meritocracy
C iv il rights attorney L a n i G u in ie r talks about the failure o f our higher
education system to create a better democracy and the damage done to society
BY JARED PABEN
outspoken pioneer in the civil rights
movement. She was the first woman of color
to be appointed to a tenured professorship
mericans are a competitive lot, and
at Harvard Law School. Earlier in her
that can have its advantages, but not
academic career, she was a professor at the
necessarily when it comes to
educating a generation that will need to University of Pennsylvania Law School. In
the late ’70s and early ’80s, she served as an
collaborate in order to solve our intractable
attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the
problems.
U.S. Department of Justice. Through most
That’s thé perspective of civil rights
of the ’80s, she served as assistant counsel
attorney and Harvard professor Lani
for the NAACP’s Legal Defense &
Guinier, whose new book takes issue with
Education Fund.
the higher education system’s reliance on
But her name is probably familiar for
our society’s interpretation of "merit” to
another reason. In 1993, President Bill
determine who gets into college.
Clinton nominated her to the position of
“We’re very good at competing, especially
assistant attorney general for civil rights,
in an individualistic way,” Guinier tells me.
but facing controversy and negative press
"But in terms of solving problems,
later withdrew the nomination.
especially problems that are longstanding
Today, the education rights of students
and significant, I believe we’ré better off
around high-stakes testing has drawn
learning how to work together to solve
increased attention from social justice
those problems.”
advocates, and Guinier’s focus on the
"The Tyranny of the Meritocracy:
university system highlights the progression
Democratizing Higher Education in
of those policies.
America” was released on January 13. In it,
STAFF W R ITE R
■
Guinier argues that our university system,
through its admissions process, is creating
an elite, exclusive and individualist society,
when what we need is a more democratic
learning community.
Guinier is the author of several books,
including “The Tyranny ofthe Majority:
Fundamental Fairness in Representative
Democracy,” which discusses voting rights
and America’s elections system.
Throughout her life, Guinier has been an
Jared Paben: Couldyou give us an
overview ofthe merit system that’s used by
colleges and universities for admissions and
why you believe it’s not working?
Lani G uinier: My critique of the current
system is focused on the practice - or the
questions that are part of the practice - of
interviewing, determining and evaluating
students who are worthy of being admitted.
And I’m using the concept of merit as an
incentive system that basically rewards
actions a society values. And so, in the
United States, what this society seems to
value is performance on a paper-and-pencil
test that, presumably, predicts how smart
you are. "Predicts” meaning it evaluates how
smart you are and then predicts how well
you’re going to do in college.
And my concern is that our thinking
about merit has been preoccupied with
competitive individualism in terms of how
you’re going to get into college, rather than
what you’re going to do after you graduate
from college, which I think of as being more
meritorious. What contribution are you
going to make to the larger society, whether
it’s through politics or through business or
through community development? And I’m
here, in some ways, relying on the work of
David Labaree, who is a professor of
education at Stanford University, and he
talks about the values of higher education
and whether those values are measured
based on the contribution to democracy -
that is, to the larger society or the
influence that higher education has on the
individual in a kind of competitive
individualism: The individual benefits from
being “smarter” based on a performance
that is often a paper-and-pencil test, rather
than based on merit that’s defined by or
reviewed and conceptualized as a
contribution to solving important problems.
J.P.: Who are the victims of the testocratic
merit system that we have now, and why?
J.P.: So it’s not strictly a single criterion
that the educational institutions are using?
I t’s really a whole idea or a whole attitude
surrounding the quality of candidates for
coUcsco? -
i—
L.G.: In a sense, yes. And that’s a good
thing, because you’re looking at people in a
three-dimensional way, based on what you’ve
said. The problem is that that three-
dimensional way includes the ability to take
certain tests that are then normed to the
test scores of upper middle-class white
students. And why are they normed to
upper middle class white students? Because
those áre the students whose parents have
the money to pay for them to go to test
prep, so that they can then do well on these
tests. So that the tests — as one scholar said
— are better predictors of the car your
parents drive than they are predictors of
how well you’re going to do in college.
J.P.: Is the root of the problem that colleges
are not admitting enough students, including
those with lower test scores, and/or that we
need more scholarships and grants for
students?
L.G.: Well, my critique of your question is
that it assumes that the goal is to determine
who does best on tests. But if you look at
the work of David Labaree of Stanford,
institutions of education have broader goals
than simply admitting people who are very
smart. Part of their goals is to educate
people who are going to be leaders in
society, to educate people who are going to
be problem solvers in this society. These are
not ideas or commitments that you can
determine based on someone’s SAT.
J.P.: This is a little bit of a different
question, but of special interest to me because I
did do a term o f AmeriCorps: What role do
national service programs or the military have
See MERITOCRACY, page 5