Dick Hubert’s Worldview: Do young people have a shot at the American dream?
November 20, 2024 at 11:53 p.m.
I’d like to involve as many Westmore News readers as possible in a grand experiment this week.
I’m hoping you will participate with me in a two-way dialogue as to how, as citizens, we can see to it that our country gives opportunity to the brightest and most inventive and most creative amongst us, regardless of where we were born, our economic status, race, gender, or ethnicity, or where we experienced our K-12 schooling and beyond.
For starters, I urge you to read an essay on class mobility in the United States by David Brooks in The Atlantic, the online and print magazine.
Here’s a gift link that will get you behind the magazine’s online paywall and enable you to read “How The Ivy League Broke America: The Meritocracy Isn’t Working. We Need Something New”
Some of Brooks’s arguments
Here are two key arguments from Brooks. The first involves his critique of a K-12 testing regimen that he insists is biased against young people who may not test well but have skills our society desperately needs.
“Today, even middle-school students have been so thoroughly assessed that they know whether the adults have deemed them smart or not. The good test-takers get funneled into the meritocratic pressure cooker; the bad test-takers learn, by about age 9 or 10, that society does not value them the same way. (Too often, this eventually leads them to simply check out from school and society.) By 11th grade, the high-IQ students and their parents have spent so many years immersed in the college-admissions game that they, like 18th-century aristocrats evaluating which family has the most noble line, are able to make all sorts of fine distinctions about which universities have the most prestige: Princeton is better than Cornell; Williams is better than Colby. Universities came to realize that the more people they reject, the more their cachet soars. Some of these rejection academies run marketing campaigns to lure more and more applicants—and then brag about turning away 96 percent of them.”
Brooks warns that this competitive rat race is detrimental to our society:
“But school is not like the rest of life. Success in school is about jumping through the hoops that adults put in front of you; success in life can involve charting your own course. In school, a lot of success is individual: How do I stand out? In life, most success is team-based: How can we work together? Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant—but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage.”
And then this:
“In short, the meritocratic system is built on a series of non sequiturs. We train and segregate people by ability in one setting, and then launch them into very different settings. ‘The evidence is clear,’ the University of Pennsylvania organizational psychologist Adam Grant has written. ‘Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.’”
There’s so much more in the Brooks essay. You will not be bored reading all of it.
The impact locally
Here’s how some of what Brooks is describing plays out in our little corner of the world.
In last week’s Westmore News, Sarah Wolpoff wrote an overview of the Blind Brook High School Drama Club’s production of “Ranked.”
As Wolpoff summarized the play:
“Edgy and angsty with hints of humor, “Ranked” is a dystopian piece that takes place in a world where the academic record of students is directly linked to worth in the social hierarchy. Every week, grade-influenced leaderboards are updated and publicly displayed, determining if students are “Above Average” or “Below Average.” The students doing well are awarded with popularity, fancy uniforms and access to additional resources, while the students struggling are cast aside as outcasts.
When ostracization and future opportunity is on the line, stress is high. Are families willing to cheat to ensure their children see success? You’ll have to watch the show to find out.”
Sadly, I missed the only two performances of the show last weekend, but I know that parents cheating so their children “see success” have found themselves in Federal Court.
Remember this scandal, as reported in The New York Times of Mar. 12, 2019?
“A teenage girl who did not play soccer magically became a star soccer recruit at Yale. Cost to her parents: $1.2 million.
A high school boy eager to enroll at the University of Southern California was falsely deemed to have a learning disability so he could take his standardized test with a complicit proctor who would make sure he got the right score. Cost to his parents: at least $50,000.
A student with no experience rowing won a spot on the U.S.C. crew team after a photograph of another person in a boat was submitted as evidence of her prowess. Her parents wired $200,000 into a special account.”
Remember the prominent parents who pled guilty and wound up doing jail time?
Is that one reason for the push to decouple testing from high school graduation requirements, as has been voted on this month in Massachusetts, and as our Regents are considering in New York?
As the Associated Press (AP) reported last Saturday:
“In the mid-2000s, a high of 27 states required students to pass an exam to graduate, according to the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. The states that still have them, for now, are New York, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, New Jersey, Texas and Virginia.
In New York, state officials (the Board of Regents) this month proposed a timeline to phase out exit exam requirements as part of an overhaul of graduation standards. Students would still take Regents exams in math, English, science and social studies, but beginning in the 2027-28 school year, passing scores would no longer be required for a diploma. The plan would give students alternatives like community service or capstone projects to demonstrate proficiency.”
Who is in favor of ending (and keeping) the required tests? As the AP noted:
“Financial support for the elimination of the Massachusetts test requirement largely came from teachers unions, including the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which contributed millions in direct and in-kind donations, and the NEA, which donated at least $500,000. On the other side, Bloomberg contributed $2.5 million to the campaign in favor of keeping the requirement.”
How do we assure that students who graduate from our schools have the basic skills to do math, read and write and create in a rapidly changing and technologically sophisticated world if a high school diploma no longer carries the quality standards it did in the past?
And how do we ensure that students in Port Chester, Mt. Vernon and Greenburgh have the same academic opportunities as students in Blind Brook, Edgemont, and Scarsdale, for starters? I ask that question because you can be assured that the parents in high performing school districts like Blind Brook will spend the money on their children to ensure they have the coaching, and the resources, to excel right on up the educational ladder.
Questions, questions
Back in 1997, the State of Vermont, in an effort to guarantee equal educational funding for K-12 schools in every village, town, and city, instituted a statewide school property tax (Act 60).
Can you imagine a statewide property tax in New York that would make sure that regardless of where they lived, every student in the state would be in a school district with the same economic resources?
What can we do locally to break down the class barriers between school districts to see that each graduate of our community’s high schools has the same shot at a successful and fulfilling career?
Our recent national election, and the number of voters who felt “looked down upon” and worse and voted for Donald Trump, adds fuel to the fire of this dialogue.
So, read the Brooks essay, and make any comments you feel relevant, and e-mail me at [email protected].
I’d like to continue with your thoughts in future columns.
Reflections on last week’s
writing and reporting
1) In last week’s edition I wrote of President Biden that he was “still worrying about letting the Ukrainians fend off the Russians by using American weapons against Russian military targets inside Russia.” Shortly after publication, Biden gave the Ukrainians permission to use our long-range rockets against Russian military targets in the East. The decision was made after Russia welcomed North Korean troops to join the war on Ukraine and after a blitz of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure. Where this will lead is unanswered at this writing.
2) After the deadline for my story on Charles Cohen losing his 975 Anderson Hill Road project to Fortress Investments in a foreclosure auction, Rye Brook Village Administrator Chris Bradbury answered a question I asked about who gets the benefits of a real estate transfer tax in Westchester County. His response: “The NYS Real Estate Transfer Tax goes to NYS. However, there are several cities in Westchester County which charge sellers a city transfer tax on top of the NYS Transfer Tax. They are Yonkers, Peekskill, and Mount Vernon.” So, not a dime of the $37.7 million Fortress paid for the 975 Anderson property goes to the Village or the Blind Brook School District.
3) Finally, last week, I misidentified the agency President-elect Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to run as Secretary. It is the Department of Health and Human Services.
Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.
Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.
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