The superintendent of schools for West Windsor and Plainsboro*, New Jersey, was doing something laughable. That I knew from Twitter. He wanted to dumb down the high-school curriculum, turn it all touchy-feely. He was devaluing effort and achievement. He was proposing no-homework days, limits on Advanced Placement classes, an end to midterms and finals. He was introducing moronic everyone-gets-a-trophy reforms in extracurricular activities, not just tolerating but encouraging mediocrity in the school’s music program—“a right to squeak” initiative.
And, Twitter informed me, his reforms had opened a telling divide, pitting the complacent and entitled white establishment that supported the pro-mediocrity reforms against hard-working, pro-excellence upstarts. These were mostly first- and second-generation parents, largely Chinese and Indian, many of them with jobs in software and technology. It was like the setup of a righteous comedy from the eighties. (I don’t want to say “Revenge of the Nerds,” but you get the idea.)
I’m a sucker for this kind of education smackdown. My ideas about schooling are pretty old-fashioned. Unlike the Deweyan progressives who’ve long dominated American education, I think drill and memorization are not just effective but entirely consistent with deep, holistic understanding. The only thing I’m sure I learned in my desultory high-school years is the sonnet prologue to “Romeo and Juliet,” which a frightening ninth-grade English teacher demanded I memorize, or else. I can still recite it, and do. (For some reason, knowing it by heart has not prevented me from understanding it.) I think the rigorous teaching of academic subjects is teaching “critical-thinking skills,” and teaching critical-thinking skills without those subjects is nuts. And I sure don’t like the idea of bougie New Jersey residents using a regime of enforced mediocrity to kneecap enterprising Chinese immigrants. So when I first took in this controversy, in its Twitter form, my instinct was to join in the sneering at those soft-headed preppies and educrats afraid of a little rigor, a little homework_._
Then I remembered that I have children, too. They’re not in high school yet. The older two are only in grade school, but grade-schoolers get homework now, and my fourth-grade daughter has already done more homework this school year than I did in any year of high school. And one thing I’ve learned about grade-school homework is that it’s a bitter scourge. The parts of your home life it touches, it poisons. I hate it.
But mine is a measured, self-critical hate. I’ve seen the studies that say grade-school homework is useless, but, precisely because I want these studies to be dispositive, I doubt them. I’d prefer to see my daughter drilling long division unto mastery instead of pondering the cognitive mysteries of Common Core math, whose deep inspiration seems to be Cubism. (“Now hold your worksheet up to a shattered mirror. Solve the problems from the perspective of the several shards.”) But what do I know? Maybe the built-in perplexities, the Common Core jostlings of the usual problem format, are the best way. Maybe the spiritual and mental anguish they cause is making my kids smarter, better students. Maybe this homework I hate is really necessary pedagogically.
All I can say is it better be, because the costs it imposes are real. And I’m not talking about lost time playing video games, or how it forces me to be a Bad Cop when I really want to be a Cool Dad (though scolding your kid for bewailing a homework assignment you’re secretly bewailing is something you have to get used to). When I order my daughter to quit dawdling and start her writing practice, the mechanistic paragraph she’s expected to generate in response to some question or prompt, the thing she’s normally in the middle of doing, the activity I’m typically interrupting for the sake of her language education, is reading.
If homework causes me this much unhappiness now, how much worse is it going to be when my kids get to high school? I find myself hoping that, in the five years until my oldest enters ninth grade, the structure of academic competition that they’re fighting about in the West Windsor-Plainsboro district will have collapsed everywhere. Part of this is a simple, slothlike desire for ease and convenience: I don’t want to work that hard! I don’t want to fight anymore! Part of it, I suppose, is insecurity: Maybe my kids aren’t A.P. material. Maybe their specialness won’t be visible to the test-graders and other gatekeepers of the standardized meritocracy.
But mainly I’m starting to resent the prospect of having my family life colonized and deformed by a system that, though it works through educational channels, doesn’t serve educational ends, or exacts extreme costs in exchange for a meagre educational payoff. By “system,” I mean the protean blob of institutions that ushers teen-agers from high school to college. The system consists of bodies like the College Board, which administer A.P. courses along with the S.A.T. and A.C.T. and prep classes and practice books and tutoring services and other means by which anxious students distinguish themselves from one another. And it’s the college guide and college-ranking industries, the latter inaugurated as a fateful gimmick, with massive consequences, by a second-tier news magazine.
But the core of the system lies inside the colleges themselves, an admissions process fuelled by the same anxieties it generates, and controlled by its own hermetic logic. Our best guide to the policy quandaries playing out in New Jersey isn’t John Dewey or Diane Ravitch or even Amy Chua (of Tiger Mother notoriety), then. It’s Kafka.
Consider, for example, how the lives of ambitious high-school students changed when admissions offices started emphasizing extracurricular activities, in the eighties and nineties. The innovation seemed like a humanizing one, a softening of the hard emphasis on G.P.A.s and S.A.T.s. Deans of admissions would build better-rounded entering classes, filled with kids who, in addition to their stellar grades and test scores, had shown “character” and “leadership” at the soup kitchens and dance recitals mentioned on their résumés, er, applications. And it was a standard these kids could meet not through the amoral lottery of genes and talent but from a kind of moral striving, “voluntarism” in both the philosophical and the soup-kitchen sense. This innovation would reward conscious effort, in other words—grim, unflagging exertion, and time, lots of time, and driving, miles and miles of it, as desperate kids and parents scrambled about like Joseph K., hoping to survive the process that they woke to find themselves enmeshed in one fine morning, all to prevent a dire verdict from an unseen bureaucrat.
Or consider the most recent development in the college-application process, another ostensibly kind and humanizing change that will extend the reach of the admissions office even further into the lives of high-school students and their families, and the culture of the schools themselves. I know about it because my wife is a counsellor at a large Bay Area Catholic high school, where she and her colleagues limit college counselling to juniors and seniors. To parents and kids, this policy says, “Two years of freaking out about college is enough. Relax and be a student for now, not an applicant.”
The online application that most American colleges have used in recent years, known as the Common App, abets counsellors in setting limits on the anxiety. Since the Common App is just a virtual application, there’s no need for students to start filling it out until admissions due dates are approaching, typically early in their senior year. Last fall, however, a group of eighty colleges and universities—dominated by the most prestigious schools in the country, including every member of the Ivy League—announced plans for a new online admissions protocol serving their schools alone. This new protocol will take the simple, sanity-saving limit observed and imposed around the country by high-school counselors—to whom students and parents are real people under enormous stress, and not just names and attainments in a database—and trash it.
The group calls itself the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success, though among counsellors it’s known, simply and more ominously, as “the Coalition.” For the Coalition student information will no longer just be entered into the data fields of a virtual application. Instead, it will be uploaded to a “portfolio.” And the key feature of this portfolio is that students can open an account and start filling it up with their achievements in ninth grade. In the present environment, of course, “can start a portfolio in ninth grade” will mean “must start a portfolio in ninth grade.” It’s here where the precise valence of the term “access” gets a little murky. Who, in other words, is getting improved access to whom? Through its new, considerate, easy-to-use technologies, the Coalition will give kids fuller means, over a four-year span starting in ninth grade, to mold their teen-age selves according to the implicit and explicit and imagined preferences of, well, the Coalition. Maybe, after reading Kafka, we can seek further guiding insights into the college-application process from Foucault.
How much has the Coalition thought about the disciplinary logic of its innovations, about the explicit and implicit ways in which it will be projecting a specific model of human being to which teen-agers, quite reasonably, will feel obliged to conform? According to the Times’ Frank Bruni, selective colleges have begun to look inward, ask themselves if admissions really has to be like this. But, from Bruni’s (largely sympathetic) reporting, it’s clear that this effort of institutional self-reflection has been shallow and self-serving. Every change described in Bruni’s piece shows that colleges are addressing the disaster they’ve made of the admissions process by expanding that process, assuming greater influence over the lives of high-school students.
Take extracurricular activities, for example. As Bruni notes, even colleges admit that their emphasis on extracurriculars has spawned a culture of “résumé padding” at once cynical and exhausting. Since they introduced this criterion largely to solve a data problem, to prod otherwise similar applicants to distinguish themselves from one another through moral grunt work—that is, since the admissions office created this problem in the first place—the sensible and morally responsible thing would be to ditch extracurriculars. They’re a charade. The colleges admit this.
Instead, according to Bruni, colleges will now try to “figure out which students’ community-service projects are heartfelt and which are merely window dressing.” In other words, they will use extracurriculars to stake even deeper and more specific disciplinary claims upon the malleable selves of their applicants. Ambitious ninth graders will soon be straining to embody (their imaginary projection of) a college bureaucrat’s idea of heartfeltness, and private admissions consultants will soon be coaching their clients on which extracurriculars give off that authentic heartfelt smell. And which extracurriculars will pass muster under this new regime? And by what subtle means will heartfeltness be discerned? What new and more exacting model of self, in other words, will colleges be urging their teen-age aspirants to approximate?
College administrators, for all their apparent soul-searching, seem to have thought very little about these oblique but ethically grave and, for families, extremely consequential matters. Then again, you wouldn’t expect them to. The admissions office isn’t a Paris salon. It’s not the philosophy department. It’s just part of the system, earnest functionaries with tons of applicants to sift through, indeed more applicants all the time, since students who are more worried than they’ve ever been are applying to more schools than they ever have. The college-admissions apparatus is just doing what a system would. It’s building an interface and maximizing inputs. It’s enhancing the flow of data, the resolution. It’s aiming for greater granularity. And, if there’s a problem with the system, the solution that naturally occurs to it is: more data, more inputs, more system.
Which brings us back to the West Windsor-Plainsboro district, whose immigrant families are perhaps justified in feeling more anxious about the future, more vulnerable to the whims of the world economy, than its established white families. But how much of this increased anxiety is necessary and organic to the economic factors typically mentioned, and how much of it grows from something else? What’s different? Why now? It’s not as if the finest students had no way to prove their excellence until recently, and, it’s worth noting, the children of Chinese immigrants were known to work hard and learn math even before the era of suicide clusters in affluent high schools.
What’s different—enough that one (Chinese-American) parent can now reasonably call the school district’s academic culture an “arms race”—lies in the colleges themselves, especially selective and prestigious ones. For the last thirty years the machinery of college admissions has solved the administrative problem created by America’s surfeit of smart and eager high-school students by inventing new, pedagogically empty ways for them to compete with one another, laying out new grounds on which they might fight one another. This solution is now its own expanding web of problems, to which the system it came from is currently hatching an ambitious new set of solutions.
*An earlier version of this post misidentified the New Jersey school district where an education debate has been ongoing.
