So far as a first year doctoral student, I have written and submitted six papers for three separate courses. I have two that I’m working on this week/weekend, and I anticipate I will be writing another dozen or so by the end of the spring semester. As part of the “book smarts” section of this blog, I thought it might be worthwhile for me to share my original writing from my graduate school journey, along with whatever pieces I manage to dig up from old hard-drives from my college days. Perhaps this will help you gain some more insights into the academic life as a college student (full disclose: I went to a women’s college) and scholarly life as a brand new doctoral student in education. Additionally, perhaps this represents another avenue by which we can connect—you as the reader and I as the writer for now, but I certainly hope we can reverse the roles in the comments section, if you feel ready to engage :)

Without further ado, I present to you my very first doctoral seminar paper. Please note that no revisions have been made to this piece since its submission. This particular work was well received by my professor but it is by no means without fault (perhaps you can spot areas of improvement— I will very briefly “debrief” at the end by sharing some of the points of critique). I did not get a perfect grade, and no longer do I aspire to “please” my professors by writing what I think they want to read. Part of my journey as an emerging scholar is to develop my own voice and to remain authentic throughout my time as a student. For this first paper, I held back a little bit as I was feeling the waters and feeling a little uncertain still. I relied heavily on textual references as you will soon see. Also, there was a strict page limit on this paper (and this is true for all papers so far), so this version represents the condensed version (after spending perhaps more time cutting down my paper, from 6 pages down to 3 pages than actually writing up the paper— no joke! The revision phase is intense).

Examining Meritocracy through Various Lenses:
Deconstructing and Denaturalizing the Dominant Discourse

Meritocracy is both an idea and an ideology. The idea is one of equal opportunity, meaning that individuals advance in their education and career to achieve success, status, and power on the basis of their ability, skills, and effort. The ideology is the bedrock of American society; that is, the belief that such a fair system exists is engrained in the minds of Americans and is built into structures of schooling. Through the mainstream narrative, there are bound to be “winners” and “losers” due to inherent differences in merit within the population; failure to succeed is produced as individual choice, personal incompetence, or lack of will rather than attributed to disparity in material environment and/or circumstantial disadvantage. Accordingly, everyone has the opportunity to be represented in higher education and in the political landscape.

Historically, meritocratic ideals have served the interests of dominant groups in society. In this essay, both class-based and race-based perspectives will be utilized to re-examine meritocracy. Bowles and Gintis (1977), using economic data, disrupt the ideals of meritocracy in capitalist America by unveiling the hidden agenda of schooling and progressive educational reforms. They argue that individuals—regardless of their ability and years of schooling—are ultimately tied to their social class; social mobility through effort and increased “production” is, thus, an illusion created through a common sense culture by the “bourgeoisie,” who benefit from the obscured exploitation of the “proletariat” (Bowles & Gintis, 1977). With “schools [used] as an instrument of social control” (Kliebard, 2004, p. 80), students are tracked along class lines (but disguised as “needs”) and socialized into adult roles of varying status; thus, schools are among the oppressive capitalist superstructures that reproduce class inequality (Anyon, 1980; Tyack, 1974). Today, dimensions of social efficiency (namely, sorting) remain; many schools serving working-class families are still run like factories, which produces conformity and docility in students, represses agency, and perpetuates capitalist dominance (Au, 2011).

Critical Race Theory (CRT), AsianCrit, and LatCrit scholars underscore race in their explanation of the myth of meritocracy. These scholars converge in their belief that racism is systemic, but diverge in their theories of how race interacts with meritocracy. CRT scholars argue that, while in a post-slavery and post-Jim Crow laws era, African Americans have continued to be excluded and their knowledge is still marginalized in U.S. schools and society (Grant, Brown, & Brown, 2016; Woodson, 2005). Using the lens of “whiteness as property” (p. 52), Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) illuminate the illusion of colorblindness. For example, they describe the unequal allocation of “intellectual property” (p. 54), with higher tax-paying communities entitled to “higher property” (p. 54) schools that offer superior curricula denied to students of color in poorer communities. With whiteness also comes the “absolute right to exclude” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, p. 60) with modern forms of purposeful segregation of Black students through tracking built into schooling. This “white privilege” (Leonardo, 2004, p. 138) has resulted in today’s “achievement gap” in schools, disparities in special education programming (Sleeter, 2010), and differences in disciplinary protocols (Ferguson, 2010) all along racial lines. Similarly, Park and Liu (2014) unveil the deception of the colorblind anti-affirmative action movement, which uses Asian Americans as “racial mascots” (p. 45); through an interest convergence lens, they argue that negative action hurts Asian Americans because selective universities unofficially cap their enrollment while concurrently admitting Whites under a lower set of standards. Thus, the dominant-held narrative that affirmative action should be eliminated in the name of racial equity is masking the underlying framework that is perpetuating racial inequality and hegemonic hierarchies in higher education. Likewise, Solorzano and Yosso (2001) illuminate the whiteness of merit and expose the slanted playing field by arguing that the structures, processes, and discourses of graduate education and the professoriate privilege Whites and trivialize those in the “borderlands.” Progressing through the hierarchy of universities is more oppressive for Chicano/a students and professors, as they must acquire certain white “cultural capital” (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001, p. 464) such as by publishing in prestigious non-ethnic journals. Thus, the presence of White colleagues in academia is both “merited” and “natural,” but that of colleagues of color is deemed “foreign” (p. 486).

Re-examining meritocracy through these theoretical frameworks has prompted me to take less for granted with regard to U.S schooling. I now question whether meritocracy is the best system for all people. How would equality look in a different system? Is it equality as in “sameness” in the way that Eliot conceptualized democratic schooling, or is it equality as in “difference” with the underlying beliefs of developmentalists (Kliebard, 2004)? I am wary of associating “equal” with “same schooling,” as I question who ultimately gets to decide what students are exposed to and how they should learn. I also worry about capitalizing on students’ differences, given our history of discrimination and segregation legitimated with “objective science” and masked with empowering language like NGSS Lead State’s “making diversity visible” (as cited in Kirchgasler, 2017, p. 98). I, too, question the notion of diversity. The recent lawsuit against Harvard for racial discrimination of Asian-American applicants underscores how diversity means something different to different racial minorities depending on their interests. Whereas many admitted students of color justify affirmative action as “defend[ing] diversity” (Harris, 2018, para. 2), many Asian Americans denied admission counter with “discrimination in the name of diversity is wrong” (Harris, 2018, para. 10). The practice of affirmative action also warrants questioning, as it fails to uplift other marginalized groups, including LGBTQ individuals. As for my own practice, I now ask myself: when I am accommodating and differentiating instruction for students, am I responding to their differences or producing them?

References

Anyon, J. (1980). Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work. Journal of Education, 162(1), 67–92.

Au, W. (2011). Teaching under the new Taylorism: high‐stakes testing and the standardization of the 21 st century curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 43(1), 25–45.

Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1977). Schooling in capitalist America : educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books.

Ferguson, A. A. (2010). Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. Ann Arbor, UNITED STATES: University of Michigan Press.

Grant, C. A., Brown, K. D., & Brown, A. L. (2016). Black Intellectual Thought in Education : The Missing Traditions of Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain LeRoy Locke. New York: Routledge.

Harris, A. (2018, October 15). Harvard’s Affirmative Action Trial Gets Underway. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/harvards-affirmative-action-trial-gets-underway/572989/

Kirchgasler, K. L. (2017). Scientific Americans. Historicizing the Making of Difference in Early 20th-Century U.S. Science Education. In T. A. Popkewitz, J. Diaz, & C. Kirchgasler (Eds.), A Political Sociology of Educational Knowledge: Studies of Exclusions and Difference (pp. 87–102). Taylor & Francis.

Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum, 1893-1958. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (1995). Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education. Teachers College Record; New York, N.Y., 97(1), 47–68.

Leonardo, Z. (2004). The Color of Supremacy: Beyond the discourse of ‘white privilege.’ Educational Philosophy & Theory, 36(2), 137–152.

Park, J. J., & Liu, A. (2014). Interest Convergence or Divergence? A Critical Race Analysis of Asian Americans, Meritocracy, and Critical Mass in the Affirmative Action Debate. Journal of Higher Education, 85(1), 36–64.

Sleeter, C. (2010). Why Is There Learning Disabilities? A Critical Analysis of the Birth of the Field in Its Social Context. Disability Studies Quarterly, 30(2).

Solorzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2001). Critical race and LatCrit theory and method: Counter-storytelling. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(4), 471–495.

Tyack, D. B. (1974). Inside the system: the character of urban schools, 1890-1940. In The one best system: A history of American urban education (pp. 177–255). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Woodson, C. G. (2005). The Mis-Education of the Negro. New York, UNITED STATES: Dover Publications.

Quick debrief regarding areas of improvement and suggestions:

• By trying to include so many authors (for my references) in such a short space, the paper reads at times fragmented, trying to do too much. I absolutely agree with this point, but the truth is, I thought it was expected of us to reference all of the readings for a particular theoretical lens. Now I know.

• A suggestion is to aim a bit more for depth than amount of citations. Yes, this is what I will be doing for future papers!

• It is overall well-written, except for a few awkward transitions. There was one in the first paragraph, last sentence. I agree with this as well.

•  There was a suggestion to watch the first episode of Hasan Minhaj’s new show on Netflix— I think this is referring to the “affirmative action” episode of the show “Patriot Act.” I haven’t watched it yet, but it is on my list! Here’s a link to the episode on YouTube.