The Gifted & Talented and the Rest of You
A college-or-nothing bias blinds us to students' other options
Here’s something I’ve noticed that happens in education journalism rather frequently: a study, announcement or original piece of reporting comes out, causing quite a stir. A scrum forms around the issue. Major outlets provide additional reporting that either confirm or contradict the substance of the original item. Other journalists or academics take to the op-ed pages to provide commentary and counter-commentary and counter-counter-counter commentary. Twitter does its thing. Pissed off parents weigh in. And, just to round things out, a teacher or student pens a heart-forward first person piece. This goes on for about a week and a half, or at least until someone takes his shirt off at a school board meeting, or a prude wigs out over a novel, and then everyone starts talking about something else.
Two of these scrums happened in September and October when New York City mayor Bill De Blasio announced he planned to end the city’s gifted and talented program, and when the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “A Generation of Men Give Up on College.” The various headlines about those two issues should give you a pretty good idea of the contours of the debates:
It should be obvious why these two stories warranted so much coverage, yes? In the largest school district in the United States, an academic program for preternaturally intelligent children — which advocates tout as an engine of social mobility for poor students while opponents deride as another means to racially segregate students in an already shamefully segregated district — is on the chopping block. And at the college level, a record number of males are failing to graduate from college, and account for the lion’s share of an alarming enrollment decline that shows no sign of stopping. Most appear to view this widening education gap as a harbinger of future economic, social and political troubles, and some see this as the natural result of a public education system that works against boys’ impulses from as early as kindergarten.
Clearly, these are two important stories with consequences that extend far beyond the school house (or campus.)
Or not? Their import starts to fade once you do a little counting. Of the million plus children in NYC schools, about 425,000 are elementary students. Of that total, about 16,000 are in the gifted and talented program -- less than 3.5 percent. For perspective, consider that there are almost 5 times as many K-5 students with special needs city-wide (and -- here’s a fun one -- about as many Dominican-born ELLs who attend public schools in the Bronx alone.) Now, I’m not (strictly) suggesting that the amount of coverage an education story receives should exist in proportion to the percentage of students it effects — if that were the rule, we’d never know who won the national spelling bee — but when the research on gifted and talented programs reveals they don’t even work all that well, then this volume of coverage makes you wonder if there’s something else going on.
The scrum around the college enrollment gap gets us closer to what that something is. The gap — women make up 60% of all college students, men make up 40% — and the inevitable outcome of that, should the trend continue — two females earning a college degree for every one male — appears less alarming when you count something else: the percentage of jobs that require less than a bachelor’s degree, which appears to be at least 60%.
On its own, perhaps that data point doesn’t assuage concerns about millions more American men entering adulthood without degrees, given what we know about how much a bachelor’s degree is worth in terms of future earnings, and what it entails, more generally, for their quality of life.
But some rather astonishing recent findings from a study out Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce called “The College Payoff” complicates our long-held assumptions that more education automatically equals more earnings. From the report: “16% of high school graduates, 23% of workers with some college and 28% of associate degree holders earned more money than half of all workers with a bachelor's degree.” The report takes care to note that a constellation of factors including gender, race, industry and location also play a role in earnings, but states rather forthrightly: “The simple advice to high school students to ‘go to college’ no longer suffices.”
On top of that, the rising problem of “degree inflation” -- requiring a degree for jobs that don’t really need one, and never needed them -- and the millions of perfectly employable individuals the practice has left without work is finally permitting employers, and crucially, high school guidance counselors, to say what has been a heresy for well over 20 years: college degrees are overrated.
That Georgetown study was published in October. Kind of a heartening report, don’t you think? Sort of casts the college enrollment gap in a different light, yes? After all, hordes of men forgoing college doesn’t appear so alarming when you recognize the labor market has provided other career pathways available to them (that also don’t require going into crippling debt.)
But guess how many of the media outlets with consistent education coverage ran a story about “The College Payoff” study.
One. Behold:
Pardon the cynicism, but it’s no surprise that the media paid such disproportionate attention to the gifted and talented foofaraw, and worked itself into such a lather over the college enrollment gap. Negative stories, as a rule, earn more clicks and shares, and negative stories that tap into rancorous culture war divisions that confirm your feelings about the loathsome fools living in the other half of America are also lucrative, especially if they “start a conversation” (read: generate more content), or even if they overstate a problem. And these two stories, touching as they do on current squabbles about gender parity, racial equity, income inequality, school segregation, our (supposedly) broken school system, and -- perennial tropes, both -- lost boys (who ultimately pose an existential threat) and brilliant ghetto kids (whose success will deliver us from our sins), provide no shortage of righteous dissatisfaction at what the other tribe’s up to. But as long as our for-profit journalistic model depends largely on ad revenue, that will never change. Say la vee.
What’s a bit more surprising — but definitely fixable — is the other bias revealed by the lopsided coverage of September and October: the media’s blinkered, meritocratic view of education, which privileges college degree-attainment at the expense of other, perfectly viable — though less “respectable” — post-secondary paths such as military service, certificate programs, trade school and community college. This limited view undoubtedly comes from the college-for-all ethos (college-or-nothing?) that began during the No Child Left Behind era and has, to be sure, successfully produced many, many college graduates from historically marginalized groups who might never have even thought to attend college, but has also created many, many more students from those very same groups who have left college early with only a handful of credits and tens of thousands of dollars of student debt. And is it facile of me to speculate that this meritocratic view has become the default outlook of American journalists? And that this is the natural result of a profession that has transformed from a corps of working class schmos to a group of elites with fancy degrees? For whom the meritocracy has paid off in spades, and for whom the question — why wouldn’t you go to college? — might be as silly as its answer is obvious?
Balanced coverage of the myriad paths available to students — from kindergarten all the way past high school — might answer that question, and not just for those journalists, but, more crucially, for the readers. Gifted programs and selective high schools are fine and, yes, often boost poor kids up a rung or two on the socio-economic ladder (as do stellar scores on the SAT), but bright poor students who do not attend those are not fated to sit bored in chaotic, overcrowded classrooms taught by teachers who only have low expectations. They are not consigned to lead meager lives. A life lived outside elite institutions is still a life well lived, ICYMI. Nor are students who do not enroll in or finish a four-year degree necessarily destined for an unhappy, low-wage life. They are not failures. They are not a national emergency. But where are their stories?
I’m not saying we shouldn’t concern ourselves with academically gifted children, or, for that matter, the social, political and economic implications of millions of men deciding to forgo college (and trying to determine the origins of why that path didn’t pan out for them in the first place), but even-handed coverage might allow us to worry a little bit less, and recognize that things aren’t so dire as they sometimes appear.
Above image: “School’s Out”. Allan Rohan Crite. Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The Gifted & Talented and the Rest of You
I think the situation for young men is a lot more serious than whether they get a degree or not. Gun violence and opioid addiction and overdose are having a terrible impact on young men and their families and communities. We are failing to educate these men and they are suffering a lot. They are unemployable. They are miserable. Remember what political scientists started to call these: deaths of despair. It's gravely serious. We need to course correct in education immediately. It's not okay.