Competition

                I like to compete.  I like playing games where you can test your luck and your skill in friendly competition with other people.  I like winning.  But when winning means breaking the rules, buying recruits with shoe contracts or prostitutes, changing the tax code to favor the rich or asking Russian oligarchs to interfere in an election, winning becomes something more than just a game.  It becomes a disease that weakens the social and cultural bonds we share, and it is incompatible with democracy.  Democracy cannot survive in a system that is so wrapped up in winners and losers.  It cannot survive in an economic system where such a small percentage of the people accrue all the wealth.  And no system of education that is designed to perpetuate democracy can make competition its primary motif. 

                Following the disastrous implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), competition has become the central structural foundation of American education.  We pit students against students and schools against schools in an insane and utterly undemocratic search for the ‘best.’  The most salient feature of the carnage that NCLB has visited upon public education is testing.  We have created a system that spends more time testing than it does teaching.  In spite of ample critical evidence that shows that the single point, high stakes testing schools engage in is flawed, inaccurate and counterproductive, we keep pouring more money and more instructional time into tests.  We have constructed a narrative that we are helping students by making sure that everyone can ‘perform’ to the same standards, but the tests we use reinforce biases grounded in class, race and gender so predictably that it’s hard to miss the point that the testing is done not improve but to sort.  The real cultural narrative of competition in education is a narrative about who belongs and who doesn’t.  It’s a narrative grounded in already existing privilege.

                We have naturalized the notion that school is about finding out who the ‘smart’ people are so that they can be rewarded with money and power, but the tests we use to determine who is smart and who isn’t are always already heavily slanted in the favor of the wealthy and powerful.  In other words, the wealthy and powerful are where they are because they are wealthy and powerful and not because of any inherent intellectual skill they possess.  In exactly the same era that we introduced more and more testing to help students ‘succeed,’ social and economic mobility in America ground to a halt.  More than ever before in our history, the family you’re born into determines the eventual social status you are likely to attain. 

                Even if they were fair and accurate, even if they ‘worked,’ the testing we use is inherently undemocratic.  We live in a world that is heavily invested in elite institutions that can’t convince people that evolution or climate science is real.  We have less cultural consensus about the what is real and what isn’t than ever in my lifetime.  We have more information and less understanding of what it means or how to use it.  Testing students relentlessly has not made us smarter or more unified in our attempts to deal with the problems we face.  There is more evidence of magical and conspiratorial thinking receiving more exposure.  If you doubt any of this, explain how Trump became president.  A democratic education isn’t about grades, it’s about creating a diverse political culture that values and creates active participation and engagement.  Our educational system restricts participation and devalues the experiences of most of its citizens. 

                Testing can help diagnose problems and measure growth, but it cannot stand as a measure of student’s intelligence or worth.  As we careen toward a future that will upend our assumptions about work and ecology, we have to restructure education to value experiences and input of every student and citizen.  Radical democracy cannot succeed with an educated elite leading the masses.  We tried that, and it’s failing miserably.  Instead of pitting the students against each other for praise and privilege, we have to connect them to each other to create a political will that will produce action.  That’s not just idealistic, it is realistic.  Their fates are already connected whether or not they want to see it that way.