Good Morning Friends,

Today I would like to briefly talk about an article that appeared in the Feburary 8, 2010 issue of New York magazine. The article is either called The Myth of the Gifted Child, as it appears on the cover; or it is called The Junior Meritocracy, as it appears on the inside. I hate when they do that! In any event, the article was written by Jennifer Senior.

The blurb on the front cover reads: "If a four-year-old aces an intelligence test, she is often set for life. Trouble is that test is worthless." That is the point of the article, and let me say, that this article possesses personal meaning for me, but not in the way you might think.

It seems that almost every prestigious private school and selective public school in New York City requires standardized exams of some kind for admission into kindergarten. Yes, friends, kindergarten! Indeed, some schools giving such tests "... so much weight that they won't even consider applicants who score below the top 3 percent." and "... if a child manages to vault over it," [this threshold] "and in turn gets into one of these selective schools, it can set him or her on a successful glide path for life (p.28)."

Applicants might have to take the WPPSI-III. I don't remember what that acronym stands for but it is administered by the Educational Records Bureau, and for that reason it is known by many parents as the ERB test. Some schools may require the OLSAT test: Otis Lennon School Ability Test. Some may require the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, which cost $275 to take. And it seems that there is an overlapping testing regime to see which student qualify for Gifted and Talented programs in schools.

I went to a solid public elementary school where there was a G&T program. I was not in it but I remember there where kids who were. An announcement would come over the public address and some kids would get up and go off somewhere, if memory serves - right in the middle of some class with the rest of us ordinary students. I remember wondering, at times like this, where they were going and what they were doing and what was happening to them.

Anyway, parents might drill their four-year-olds to an hour or more at a time, getting them ready for the big test with practice exams, with the help of a $350 "evaluator," perhaps a psychology graduate student. Some of the tests are given by licensed teachers and focus on "school readiness." Some of the tests are given and evaluated by psychologists and focus on abstract thinking and conceptualization.

But, then again, all the tests are pretty much the same. No matter which test a child takes, odds are they will all be asked to "do something with triangles," as one professional put it.

Of course, failure to meet these thresholds "hardly spells doom," as the article put, because the very fact that certain youngsters find themselves in such contention shows that their families occupy an elevated class position to begin with. But to those lucky four-year-olds who make the cut, the added advantages "reverberate into the world beyond," since "acing" such exams often lead them into gaining admission into elite high schools such as Hunter College High, Trinity, Dalton, and others.

And from there, about a third or more of them go on to the Ivy League colleges, with all the promise that having those institutions on their resumes. These tests make allegedly quantitative, static, unchangeable determinations about a child's intelligence quotient. The article says that 110-120 is considered smart; 120 to 130 very smart; and a score of 140 or more, and people start using the term 'genius' and so forth.

The article never answers its implicit question: why is such a system in place. A question worth asking, especially since "Even administrators who use the exams - indeed, especially the administrators who use these exams - say they're practically worthless as predictors of future intelligence (p.30)." I.Q. is naturally fluid, in other words, and it can deteriorate if one does not keep his or her mind engaged.

In fact, David Lohman, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, who, in 2006 co-authored a paper called 'Gifted Today But Not Tomorrow?,' was asked: how many four year olds who scored a 130 or above would do so again as seventeen year olds? His answer was about 25 percent (p.31).

The article almost answers its own question when Jennifer Senior wrote: "Rather than promoting a meritocracy, in other words, these tests instead retard one. They reflect the world as it's already stratified - and then perpetuate the same stratification." You see, Senior goes right up to the edge but then turns away.

You know, I went to Rutgers University in Newark for a time. One year I stayed in a dorm with a young man from Canada. He had started college at sixteen. He was eighteen when I met him, and on track to graduate at twenty years of age. He was asked how he came to enter college at such a relatively young age.

He explained that there had come a point in his education when his performance deteriorated. In fact the words he used was that he was "failing" his classes. The assumption that he might have needed extra help or that he should have been switched to a remedial program was, apparently, never entertained. It was never assumed that he needed to "buckle down," and so forth, to master the material. Instead the assumption was made that he wasn't being challenged enough by his classes, that he was bored, unstimulated. The solution, to his teachers and parents, was obvious: he needed to be promoted.

You should keep this in mind in relation to how this government is handling the financial crisis, with respect to the figures who keep resurfacing in positions of authority in the Obama administration (figures whom a lot of people have said have demonstrably failed in previous positions of policy planning and who actually promoted policies that helped cause the crisis and so forth). How do they keep managing to turn failure into success? How do they manage such a trick?

I think what the experience of my friend shows, in connection with the insight into how the bourgeoisie educate their children provided by this article, is that the ruling one percent live in a marvelously sealed magical reality, in which failure equals success. Not only does failure equal success. Failure is not really failure in their world. Failure is not an indication that one is beyond his or her depth, but rather an indication that you are not being sufficiently challenged. You need a much greater challenge and more responsibility and authority, and you will surely rise to the occasion and realize your potential.

So, my friend had obviously had an established reputation for being "gifted" from an early age. It seems likely that he had taken some intelligence test at four years old or so, and that "objective" data was never questioned or revised in any way. High schools and colleges collude to maintain the illusion. I would refer you to an article in USAToday.com about Ivy League grade inflation.

www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002/02/08/edtwof2.htw

It's dated 02/07/2002. You may recall there was a grade inflation "scandal" at Harvard several years back. An analysis had found that eight out of ten Harvard students graduated with honors, and nearly half received A's in their courses.

A few more statistics from this article.

1966: 22 percent of Harvard undergrads earned As in their courses
1996: the number rose to 46 percent
1996: 82 percent of seniors graduated with honors

1973: 31 percent of Princeton undergrads earned As
1997: the number rose to 43 percent
1997: only 12 percent of all grades were below the B range

The article says that there are well documented cases of high schools doing this too.

The article raises and dismisses all kinds of reasons offered by professors - some with greater validity than others, while pointing out the most obvious one: "Families paying more than $30,000 a year for college education expect something more for their money than a report card full of gentleman's C's." By the way, "gentleman's C's" are inflated grades as well, are they not?

Okay. But read the article. It's very short and to the point. Now, with this crisis we're living through and with state governments slashing budgets, left and right, we can expect tuition and other fees to go up at colleges and universities, I would expect that we will see increasing pressure on grade inflation, as well as increasing pressure on content deflation, in terms of difficulty of the material offered in college courses.

Here's how I interpret the data given in that article. It is the unconsciously directed, institutional expression of the following anxiety: These kids can't be ordinary! They just can't be mere mortals! They are the future "leaders of the free world" in politics, "masters of the universe" in business and finance, and conquering warlords (no doubt as commissioned officers occupying strategic and tactical planning positions, far removed from the drudgery of actual combat) in the military. They can't be like the unwashed masses!

And I think this dynamic goes a long way to explain why it is that corporate CEOs and other top executives get astronomical bonuses and pay packages, that appear to be entirely unconnected with performance. The institutional dynamic is in place by the time they start kindergarten. Failure does not mean failure in the world of the ruling block.

Now, given what we know about grade inflation in high school (the aforementioned article refers to "well documented cases of grade inflation in high school; and while it did not say so, no doubt these cases mostly occur in the elite high schools, that serve as feeders for the Ivies) and college, we must consider what this means in light of the latest alarm bell to ring out of Washington that our education system is broken.

As you know, the Obama administration is putting pressure on state governments to, among other things, lift their caps on the number of charter schools they will allow, in order to get federal money. Let me just put the matter this way: Will the transfer of money from the public sector to the private sector lead to the dumbing down of America?