Our elite leaders want others to be like them. In education, they want schools to be what they knew them as. They want all public schools to be like the Scarsdale NY, Weston CT, Riverdale OR, Chappaqua NY, and Briarcliff Manor NY schools that “24/7 Wall Street” named as the wealthiest schools in the country. They like charter schools because they see them as private schools for poor kids. Why not try to spread a little Dalton or Friends Academy love?
Remember, our first Black president did not go to school at Stevenson HS in the Bronx; he attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school. Arne Duncan did not go to Dyett HS in Chicago; he went to the University of Chicago Lab School. What do they know?
The problem that they continue to ignore? It’s the economy stupid! Or in this case it is the socioeconomic status that provided the opportunities our elite had. So lets examine (again with the help of author William Deresiewicz).
They are groomed. To get into the elite universities and colleges they must be more than intelligent, well tutored, test taking sheep. They are groomed to be leaders. They can’t have just belonged to student government; they had to have been president. They had to be first violin. They had to be captain of their teams. As Deresiewicz puts it, “ You have to come across, in other words, as an oligarch in training, just like the private school boys of a century ago.”
They cant just take required courses. They can’t take courses they may be passionate about. They can’t do experiential learning (unless convinced it helps their interview process). They must take as many AP courses as possible and score as many “5”s as inhumanely possible (again with tutoring). Some even take the SAT in 7th grade to be recruited in high school.
This process has been speeding down a slippery slope for decades. The competition has grown exponentially and parents have been using nitro-injected engines to get their “race to the toppers” across the finish line first. Race To the Top was created by Harvard grads who knew what many had to do to get in. Even the name of the law smacks of the process.
But what of the excellent black sheep? Many have become the best teachers in the best schools trying to help those in the herd see a different path. Others just work as hard as they can to accelerate the shepherding into the Ivy corrals. It is hard to stay the black sheep in the high-pressure environment of these competitive schools as a teacher, counselor, parent, and especially student. Crazy begets crazy as many will attest to. Deresiewicz tells us the following:
- Parents refuse “to allow their children to go on a field trip, because they couldn’t afford to lose a day of academics” – with “a lot of kids agreeing with them.”
- “It doesn’t matter if your parents aren’t crazy…because the environment is. Other people’s parents are crazy, so the whole school is crazy.”
- Most “teachers are trapped in the system.” As their schools “ give the parents what they want, no matter what’s good for the kids.”
Here is the upshot of all of this. These elite public and private schools have been, for generations, producing students who grow up to be corporate and political leaders “constructed with a single goal in mind.” Sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens describes it thusly, “Affluent families fashion an entire way of life of life organized around measurable virtues of children.” “They are not simply teaching to the test, they live it.”
What of their personality traits? William Wordsworth’s famous line, “The child is the father of the man,” says a lot about who we grow up to become. They become what they were made to be in their childhood (which now extends into extended adolescence). Alice Miller tells us in The Drama of the Gifted Child that many parents have made perfection the goal (see Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) with the following results. Their child gives them what they want…or tries. The demand is constant and ongoing. What the child does is never enough. “What, only an A-?”
What happens to this child as an adult? They swing back and forth between what Miller calls “Grandiosity and Depression” or as Deresiewicz calls it “Hotshit/piece of shit”. They create a false self to cover much of this up. In the policy world it comes across as “other directed”, maybe philanthropic or as misguided reformism. However in fact what this covers up is an anger, a cynicism, a “Hobbesian competiveness”, a careeristic attitude combined with a false sense of duty that they call leadership.
As a result, they see education through that prism. To many it has become as one student told Deresiewicz, “not far from game theory, an algorithm to be cracked in order to get to the next level.” People don’t go to schools to learn. They go to climb society’s ladder.
Is it a surprise therefore that when the children of this system grow up, that they create data based “measurable virtues” for our children and VATS or APPRs for our teachers? Is it a surprise that they measure students and teachers using algorithms as if it was game theory…with students, parents, and teachers in communities not as well off as theirs as the pawns to be sacrificed as they continue to climb their ladders of success?
DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing 
My son went to Cornell University, but became a public school teacher. Originally, he was planning to enter law, but really wanted to teach. Two interesting things happened to me and him at that time. First, during a parent weekend sponsored by his fraternity (whose alumni include some of the most important leaders of this nation), I began a conversation with the parent of one of his friends. Compared to the other parents, I was just a “lowly teacher.” She was interested in the fact that I was a teacher for some reason. Of course, I went on my unusal rant about the problems of education at that time (2005). I talked to her about the ridiculous amount of testing I had to plan for every year as a test coordinator. I described how the tests did not at all match the curriculum. She said little but at the end said to me that I might not like her once she told me her occupation. She was in charge of the testing unit for CTB/McGraw Hill which published the interim assessments we were administering at that time. I asked her if any teachers were in her division. Her answer was no. All her executives and writers were young and graduated from the Ivy League schools. She said those who ran McGraw Hill told her that they did not feel any teacher had the type of caliber to work for them. By the way, she told me her salary was $500,000 a year.
Obviously, Cornell, being an elite Ivy, had no teacher education program. Therefore, I advised him to apply for the Teacher Fellows Program run by TNTP. I knew that the Fellows were always impressed by candidates from the Ivy League with the type of credentials my son had. I knew several Fellows and they told me how he should answer the interview questions in order to be chosen for the program. All he had to say during the interview was that poverty had nothing to do with low achievement and that a teacher was 100% responsible for the success of high need students. At first, he did not want to give such answers. He told me he did not want to lie. After all, his father spent his whole career, at that time, working in high need schools. He even accompanied me to those schools many times when he was growing up. I said to him that he needed to just give their correct answer, get into the program, have them subsidize his Masters of Education, and get into the classroom. I knew that after the first two years of his teaching career, he would have no more dealings with them. By the way, he taught his first couple of years in a high needs school. He was then excessed from the school and ended up, because he is a great teacher, in one of the best schools in New York CIty where he continues to be a successful teacher who believes what I believe. He teaches the gifted and he understands that giftedness not only comes from ones innate ability, but from an education-rich and supportive family that gives such children the type of experiences to help them reach their full potential. Many of his students are creative artistically and musically. They did not acquire these skills from the test prep factories we call public schools.
What a wonderful story. My daughter also went to Cornell, class of 2006. She is now a clinical psychologist. We must have done something right. Our kids are not examples of those we both know exist. Their peers are. And you should read my post about being a teacher in a group of (professionals).https://dcgmentor.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/respect-code-switching-and-the-art-of-teaching/
I remember that post — and I’ve been quoting/paraphrasing it too. I’m retired to blogging and social media advocacy, and get tired of academic sort of colleagues asking me what and where I teach. The “world” sounds good to me — more polite than some alternatives.
That post does fit with the others ~ there’s a very good series in them and, no doubt, others as well. Although not elites (just “coulda/shoulda been contenders”), it also addresses attitudes held by more than a few academics.
I read you loud and clear.
Yes, I felt the same way in Cornell as you felt at that dinner party. My son graduated in 2008. The article really hit home with me. Yes, to be a successful teacher of high need students you have to be firm yet fair. I had standards, but if a high need student had difficulty, I always gave them a way to make up the work.
Funny that you said that.. When I was asked at an interview for two words that described me as a teacher, they were, “tough but fair.”