Is our culture's obsession with educational grading a sign of its democratic deficit?

This post connects with an earlier one questioning the view that 'Talent is Scarce'. Educational systems, particularly those in Britain and America, are more and more focussed on, and driven by, the awarding of grades for every kind of achievement. The key success indicator for secondary schools here in the UK, the one that decides how far up the comparative league tables they come, is the proportion of students who gain 5 GCSE passes (including English and Mathematics) with grades of A*, A, B or C. Passes at D and E actually count against the school, even though they are passes for the individual. For sixth forms and colleges it is A level successes, measured not just in passes, but in grades. Primary school children are assessed in English, Mathematics and Science as being at different levels, some being seen as 'below the average for their age', others as above. Educational providers in the post-compulsory sector following OFSTED inspections are awarded a complicated array of grades, including 'outstanding', 'good', 'satisfactory' and 'unsatisfactory'.

Now, no one would disgree with the idea that we need systems for assessing whether or not individuals are suitable and qualified to work as plumbers, brain surgeons, solicitors, airline pilots, car mechanics, teachers or gas engineers, but it is not immediately obvious why within those systems we need a range of different grades. What is wrong with simple pass or fail outcomes?

One possible answer is that grading provides a reassuring justification for the obsessive 'over-selection' that our system engages in, as pointed out by Richard Sennett, referenced in my earlier post. The numbers project a veneer of objectivity to relatively subjective, unreliable and sometimes invalid assessment and marking processes, and thus assure us that the selection processes for which the grades are used - getting into or failing to get into university, or getting or being rejected for a new job or promotion, or in the case of educational institutions the chance or not to access special funding streams, are also objective and so seem to have been fair.

'Fairness' is stated by all parties to be a key objective of current political activity, but as it is not a well-defined category, it needs an apparatus which dresses up these imprecise processes as objective and not subject to potentially partial judgements by individuals, however expert or distinguished. It is felt that without this apparatus, these decisions would depend rather too clearly on the decisions of individuals and return us to a system of patronage, bribery, corruption, etc, in which to look for any notion of fairness would be beside the point. The argument therefore goes: we need fairness or at least an appearance of fairness, so we need a technical apparatus - examinations, grades, rubrics, transparent assessment criteria, etc - to eliminate as far as possible favouritism, any form of prejudicial discrimination or corruption, so that we can all be satisfied that access to jobs and professions is (a) fair and (b) only admits people with the requisite competences and skills.

A system in which access to all professions, jobs, exam success, universities, was governed entirely by 'pass/fail' outcomes, would be one that demanded trust in the systems and the people working within them. And for me this is the connection with the democratic deficit. Onora O'Neill, in the Reith lectures she gave in 2002, demonstrated clearly how systems characterised by bureaucratic accountability assume low trust and actually intensify low levels of trust between individuals, and by individuals in public institutions and in the society as a whole. This lack of trust breeds the cynicism which leads first to democratic inertia and then increasingly to loss of faith in the democratic ideal itself.

Talent is not scarce: most people can do most jobs

At a lecture called ‘The Social Craftsman’ given at University College London in November 2009, the eminent sociologist Richard Sennett argued that ‘Talent is not scarce: most people can do most jobs, given appropriate training and support, and therefore our obsession, particularly in the UK and the USA, to organise education primarily as a winnowing process, using continuous testing to weed out the few from the many, is wasteful to the economy as well as unfair in social terms.’

He started by asserting that successive governments in Britain and the US have effectively taken the view that ‘low-level’ jobs can be exported without damaging the economy, including service jobs such call-centre jobs as well as manufacturing jobs.

Robert Reich’s 1991 book The Work of Nations, articulated this view: ‘We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century,’ Reich noted. ‘There will be no national products or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will be no national economies, at least as we have come to understand the concept. All that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who comprise a nation. Each nation’s primary assets will be its citizens’ skills and insights.’* Accordingly, developed societies need only foster ‘symbolic analyst’ jobs within their economies.

In Sennett’s view, this analysis initially appeared sound partly because of the exploitative, even imperialistic, way both the UK and the US think about foreign markets. The policies of our governments betray a restricted, static, non-developmental, non-social view of employment in relation to these lower level jobs. And what people in these foreign ‘client economies’ are achieving for themselves through these employment opportunities suggests this view is mistaken.

It is now clear that many people doing these jobs in other countries use their employment to build skills (starting often with learning English) and progress from being employees of a British company to employees of a local company to perhaps starting their own business, all a result of using their work to develop their skills. Sennett believes that almost all work, at whatever level, has this developmental potential – at least in principle – and that not seeing this is a serious and persistent mistake of UK and US employment and educational policy.

Sennett characterises the debate on how ‘skills’ are acquired as an ongoing argument between ‘endogenous’ theories of skill acquisition (in which learning is seen as a largely technical process common to all people and all contexts) and ‘cognitive situated’ theories, which see learning as deeply interconnected with the existing knowledge, understanding and motivation of each individual, and different in different contexts too. (He himself, ‘like any good Marxist’, he said, supports the second view.) We persistently try to ‘cut’ ability and talent much too finely, usually by using the blunt instrument of standardised testing in some form. His view on this is radical – he argues that most people can actually do reasonably well at most jobs – it’s only misleading test results and historic class prejudice that make us think differently.

In Britain and the US, it suits us to assume that talent is scarce and that it is therefore critical to identify the supposed one person in 20 who is capable. But in fact talent is not scarce. Most of the other 19 are just as capable in most circumstances, given the opportunity, educational support and the right social networks. Prevailing assumptions, however, lead us effectively to dump the 19, and to see the low status jobs they get (if they get a job at all) as not worthy of enriching with opportunities for professional or personal development.

We have limited awareness of, and generally little interest in fostering, the social and developmental dimensions of employment. Policy mostly ignores the potential of any work experience, provided it is sustained, to support the development of craft, social, civic and professional skills (understanding these in the broadest sense). The effectiveness for the economy of ‘just in time’ working patterns – repeated changing of jobs, short-term team working followed by dispersal, serial employment rather than sustained employment or careers – is exaggerated, while the disadvantages and costs of continual flexibility and volatility are systematically underestimated.

The net effect of this is that the UK and US exemplify a type of capitalism that (despite its rhetoric) is uninterested in developing human capital. The persistent idea that bankers and others in high-paid, privileged roles are by definition much more talented than those in lower status roles is an underlying cause of the recession and likely to mean that even after the recession, high unemployment and/or a significant ‘Macjob’ sector will continue to be toxic features of our economy, sustaining the vicious circle they are symptomatic of.

At the end of the lecture I asked him for his view on the idea that while too much testing was creating problems for sustained learning, at least it meant that there was less scope for discrimination in terms of access to jobs and higher education, Sennett responded with a story: one year during his stint as admissions registrar for Harvard University, an error in the admissions procedure allowed 90 students whose grades were clearly ‘not good enough’ to enter the university. All of them, he said, graduated brilliantly.....
* Reich, Robert B., (1991) The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves For 21st Century Capitalism

Richard Sennett
Born Chicago, 1943, studied piano and cello until hand injury in 1963
Attended University of Chicago & Harvard University, Ph.D. in 1969
1970s: Co-founded New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University
1980s: Advisor to UNESCO, president of the American Council on Work; teaching at Harvard
1990s to present: Divides time between New York University and the London School of Economics
Work: Social analyst interested in how individuals and groups make sense of material facts about where they live and the work they do
Books include: The Corrosion of Character, 1998, how middle-level employees make sense of the ‘new economy’
Respect in a World of Inequality, 2002, effects of new ways of working on the welfare state
The Culture of the New Capitalism, 2006, an over-view of change
The Craftsman, 2008, investigating the processes and work contexts which support people to develop the highest level of skill.

For more see http://www.richardsennett.com/