Talent + Effort + Context

The premise of Jay Matthews’ recent op-ed in the Washington Post is an admirable and important one; namely, engaging in a close reading of the new MIT study that examines if famous exam schools like Stuyvesant High School are worth all the fuss. Matthews paraphrases the study’s central conclusion beautifully: “students who qualify for some of the nation’s most selective public high schools do no better academically than similar kids who miss the entrance test cutoff.” This offers us hope that smart kids will do pretty well just about anywhere. This is probably true as is Matthew’s brave assertion: “Test scores are often not the best indicators of school quality.” I could not agree more.

Test scores indicate individual students’ accomplishments at a given point in time. Test scores measure student content knowledge in individual subjects taught by stand-alone teachers, without any measure of how a school (namely, teachers, the physical place, or any other forces factor in) may influence student learning. The next logical step in Matthews’ thinking is that standardized tests—and therefore schools that rely on the results of such tests for admission—may not be any better attuned to intelligent students’ learning needs as other schools. I am not opposed to this assertion, but there is something gravely missing from this analysis: context. Matthews rejects test scores as indicators of school quality but offers no other way to assess how well a school is doing its job. Instead, he urges us to remember that “how much students learn at any school is dependent on their personal talent and effort, and not the name above the entrance or how many smart students it has.” I disagree: smarts and hard work certainly do matter quite a lot, but even the perfect combination of talent and effort may not be enough for success. Matthews’ formulation ignores the fact that any numbers of obstacles may stand in the way of students making the most of their innate talent.

Perhaps most troubling, however, is that Matthews ignores the importance of community in school. He seems to think that a student exists apart from her peers—impervious to the influences (both good and bad) of others. School, at its heart, is a social project, an institution comprised of individuals working together to educate the next generation, to prepare young citizens for productive adulthoods. This spirit may have been compromised in recent years, but Matthews seems to be all but giving up the idea that schools, as community institutions, should be held responsible for at least some part of educating our kids.