Meritocracy
BY MICHAEL CHENG '20
Back in the fall a Spectrum colleague told me that, supposedly, “people are moving to Lexington” out of a concern for how the expanding slate of wellness policies could affect academic quality. I want to set aside that statement’s validity (because I think it’s overblown at best). But the mere idea blew my mind. Because if we accept that statement for the sake of argument, then it begs the question: What is “Lexington” providing that Acton might be taking away?
Acton-Boxborough and Lexington High both attract and cater to the same group of upwardly-mobile, white-collar workers looking to give their kids a good education, a bright future—and a ticket to the Ivy League. The first wave of these knowledge workers arrived in the 1950s and 1960s as the highly-educated employees working in the tech industry on Route 128. They represented a broader trend across the country as knowledge workers became the lifeblood of the American economy.
Whereas much of the old elite was factory management, as factories moved overseas in the 1970s, the modern elites and upper-middle class increasingly became a professional class of knowledge workers—lawyers, doctors and software engineers. What they used to make a living wasn’t financial capital and material wealth, but “human capital” and “cultural capital”—skills, knowledge and information. Knowledge cannot be directly inherited, but only indirectly cultivated, and many of these individuals flocked to Acton-Boxborough, Lexington High, and other schools around the country in hopes of passing on their privilege.
The 1960s and ’70s also marked the rise of meritocracy, as colleges and universities turned to meritocratic admissions, and other industries followed suit. This was intended to level the playing field, but under meritocracy, social mobility has fallen and inequality has increased. Yale, which first implemented meritocratic admissions in the 1960s, today has more students from the top 1% of households than the bottom 60%.
According to Yale law professor Daniel Markowicz, what the knowledge economy and meritocracy have combined to create is an endless series of costly competitions, from admissions to kindergarteners to making partner at law firms, and even the wealthy worry that they or their children will fall behind. Because turning your skills into money requires your own, elites now work more hours than the working class. The system rewards a cult of productivity, and leisure becomes complacency.
Thus, one way that AB and Lexington prepare their students for elite institutions is not just by training them in civics and arithmetic, but in time management and constant productivity. Productivity is a skill just like writing, and it may be more coveted than any other trait in Markowicz’s conception of the working world.
Put another way, for those who are devoted to Markowicz’s competition, it is possible that the intense workload of AB’s courses and the culture of competition amongst AB’s top students are precisely what they were looking for. And in a nutshell, this is precisely the culture and the course load that Challenge Success would like to reject.
Challenge Success is an initiative out of Stanford University that seeks to “expand our notions of success” in school, from a mindset beyond grades and academic achievement; one of their common refrains is that many students are merely “doing school”—pressing for the grade rather than engaging. They have worked with districts across the country to disseminate evidence-based best practices, and to try and create supportive environments that promote creativity, resilience, and social-emotional health.
The Stanford researchers worked with the school to conduct a survey in 2016, which found that AB students scored poorly on their metrics. Homework was the biggest source of stress for both middle school and high school students, and nearly half of students were “doing school.”
Many of Challenge Success’s policies have been implemented in the time since: The high school has stopped releasing GPA distributions and capped the amount of AP classes a student can take at any one time, in an effort to reduce competition. The high school also moved forward with a block schedule featuring longer class periods in the hopes of boosting engagement. On the district level, the school has enacted later start times and—perhaps most controversially—enacted a district-wide homework policy that limited the amount of work that the school could assign.
The researchers at Challenge Success contend, and the school administration has said on multiple occasions, that there is no trade-off between rigor and rest. But for many in the community there is at least the perception of one. During a school committee discussion in April concerning social-emotional learning, one member lamented that this tension was “cleaving the district apart.”
This is a question of culture and values, and culture and values can be difficult to change. Last year, the school did a follow-up to its Challenge Success survey, and found that, although some quantitative metrics—hours spent on sleep and homework—have shown improvement over the last two years, the adjectives used to describe the school—stressful, competitive, challenging—stayed fairly consistent. In fact, one of the few changes in the adjectives was that this time 6th-8th grades reported that one of their primary sources of stress was “procrastination and time management.”
There is definitely a need to learn time management, and to learn the skill of productivity. But what Challenge Success is trying to say is that we may have taken this too far. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic laments that “[for] the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity,” while Buzzfeed’s Anne Helen Peterson describes how millennials have been “trained, tailored, primed, and optimized for the workplace...starting as very young children.” As Peterson details, this optimization has its costs, because just as productivity is a skill to be taught, so is the project of leisure, of knowing how to enjoy a walk with family.
On the other hand, the urge for parents to optimize is completely understandable. It arises from a place of love and anxiety, and from a fear of falling behind in an increasingly competitive landscape. Maybe there is no tradeoff between wellness, engagement and rigor—but am I willing to bet on that with my child’s future?
This is a question of culture and values—what values you optimize for, and what you are willing to throw under the bus. Many families moved to Acton to pursue a set of educational values. Now the town is pursuing different values--wellness equity and engagement—and these families have a right to look elsewhere.
This is a question of culture and values, but not just the values of students and families, but the values of elite society. At Acton-Boxborough, grades have become the standard for success; in white-collar America, productivity has become the measure of worth.
The school has decided it has different values, but America remains the same. The school believes that Challenge Success will serve students better in the long run, but first America may have to change.
AB is willing to make that bet.
Acton-Boxborough and Lexington High both attract and cater to the same group of upwardly-mobile, white-collar workers looking to give their kids a good education, a bright future—and a ticket to the Ivy League. The first wave of these knowledge workers arrived in the 1950s and 1960s as the highly-educated employees working in the tech industry on Route 128. They represented a broader trend across the country as knowledge workers became the lifeblood of the American economy.
Whereas much of the old elite was factory management, as factories moved overseas in the 1970s, the modern elites and upper-middle class increasingly became a professional class of knowledge workers—lawyers, doctors and software engineers. What they used to make a living wasn’t financial capital and material wealth, but “human capital” and “cultural capital”—skills, knowledge and information. Knowledge cannot be directly inherited, but only indirectly cultivated, and many of these individuals flocked to Acton-Boxborough, Lexington High, and other schools around the country in hopes of passing on their privilege.
The 1960s and ’70s also marked the rise of meritocracy, as colleges and universities turned to meritocratic admissions, and other industries followed suit. This was intended to level the playing field, but under meritocracy, social mobility has fallen and inequality has increased. Yale, which first implemented meritocratic admissions in the 1960s, today has more students from the top 1% of households than the bottom 60%.
According to Yale law professor Daniel Markowicz, what the knowledge economy and meritocracy have combined to create is an endless series of costly competitions, from admissions to kindergarteners to making partner at law firms, and even the wealthy worry that they or their children will fall behind. Because turning your skills into money requires your own, elites now work more hours than the working class. The system rewards a cult of productivity, and leisure becomes complacency.
Thus, one way that AB and Lexington prepare their students for elite institutions is not just by training them in civics and arithmetic, but in time management and constant productivity. Productivity is a skill just like writing, and it may be more coveted than any other trait in Markowicz’s conception of the working world.
Put another way, for those who are devoted to Markowicz’s competition, it is possible that the intense workload of AB’s courses and the culture of competition amongst AB’s top students are precisely what they were looking for. And in a nutshell, this is precisely the culture and the course load that Challenge Success would like to reject.
Challenge Success is an initiative out of Stanford University that seeks to “expand our notions of success” in school, from a mindset beyond grades and academic achievement; one of their common refrains is that many students are merely “doing school”—pressing for the grade rather than engaging. They have worked with districts across the country to disseminate evidence-based best practices, and to try and create supportive environments that promote creativity, resilience, and social-emotional health.
The Stanford researchers worked with the school to conduct a survey in 2016, which found that AB students scored poorly on their metrics. Homework was the biggest source of stress for both middle school and high school students, and nearly half of students were “doing school.”
Many of Challenge Success’s policies have been implemented in the time since: The high school has stopped releasing GPA distributions and capped the amount of AP classes a student can take at any one time, in an effort to reduce competition. The high school also moved forward with a block schedule featuring longer class periods in the hopes of boosting engagement. On the district level, the school has enacted later start times and—perhaps most controversially—enacted a district-wide homework policy that limited the amount of work that the school could assign.
The researchers at Challenge Success contend, and the school administration has said on multiple occasions, that there is no trade-off between rigor and rest. But for many in the community there is at least the perception of one. During a school committee discussion in April concerning social-emotional learning, one member lamented that this tension was “cleaving the district apart.”
This is a question of culture and values, and culture and values can be difficult to change. Last year, the school did a follow-up to its Challenge Success survey, and found that, although some quantitative metrics—hours spent on sleep and homework—have shown improvement over the last two years, the adjectives used to describe the school—stressful, competitive, challenging—stayed fairly consistent. In fact, one of the few changes in the adjectives was that this time 6th-8th grades reported that one of their primary sources of stress was “procrastination and time management.”
There is definitely a need to learn time management, and to learn the skill of productivity. But what Challenge Success is trying to say is that we may have taken this too far. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic laments that “[for] the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity,” while Buzzfeed’s Anne Helen Peterson describes how millennials have been “trained, tailored, primed, and optimized for the workplace...starting as very young children.” As Peterson details, this optimization has its costs, because just as productivity is a skill to be taught, so is the project of leisure, of knowing how to enjoy a walk with family.
On the other hand, the urge for parents to optimize is completely understandable. It arises from a place of love and anxiety, and from a fear of falling behind in an increasingly competitive landscape. Maybe there is no tradeoff between wellness, engagement and rigor—but am I willing to bet on that with my child’s future?
This is a question of culture and values—what values you optimize for, and what you are willing to throw under the bus. Many families moved to Acton to pursue a set of educational values. Now the town is pursuing different values--wellness equity and engagement—and these families have a right to look elsewhere.
This is a question of culture and values, but not just the values of students and families, but the values of elite society. At Acton-Boxborough, grades have become the standard for success; in white-collar America, productivity has become the measure of worth.
The school has decided it has different values, but America remains the same. The school believes that Challenge Success will serve students better in the long run, but first America may have to change.
AB is willing to make that bet.