Education and the Tyranny of ‘Equality’

Do not sacrifice your children to the dogmas of democracy.

You are a highly intelligent person. Perhaps the reader will object: “You’ve never even met me! How do you know how smart I am?” Well, you are reading this, aren’t you? This shows that you are literate, which may not seem very impressive to you, but even in the 21st-century, literacy is not universal, so you’ve at least cleared that hurdle. However, beyond the mere fact of your literacy, there is also the matter of what you choose to read. An average person with a basic education could be assumed capable of reading at a functional level — he can read instructions or catalogs or whatever other written material might be necessary for his day-to-day life. However, most people do not read for pleasure, or in search of what we may call intellectual enlightenment. They don’t spend their leisure reading essays about social problems, and the title “Education and the Tyranny of ‘Equality’” certainly wouldn’t draw their attention.

You, however, are highly intelligent, or else you wouldn’t be here. Congratulations.

Katie Arnold-Ratliff is also highly intelligent, but that doesn’t mean she’s exempt from criticism, and her recent article for New York Magazine about the education of “gifted” children has set off a firestorm among those who, like you, are capable of reading a lengthy essay and discerning the errors of judgment therein. (Don’t you just love it when you encounter a fancy word like “therein”? All smart people do.)

Just How Special Are You, Genius?

One of the things every very smart person must learn is that high intelligence is not so rare that you can just walk around thinking everybody else is a dummy. Suppose that you are in the 98th percentile — the top two percent, IQ-wise — which means that in any random group of 50 people, only one of them is as smart as you. (Pardon the fifth-grade arithmetic lesson here, but some people who score very high in verbal intelligence don’t do so well in math.) Being at the 98th percentile means that you have an IQ of 130, which puts you in the cognitive elite, to employ a phrase used by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve (1994).

“The Controversial New York Times Bestseller” — the adjective “controversial” in that description rather understates the furor that erupted when it was published. At first, reacting to negative characterizations of The Bell Curve that appeared in newspapers and magazines, I was among those deceived into thinking it was some sort of racist pseudoscientific argument for eugenics. Then someone I’d encountered online (in those early dial-up modem days of the Internet) challenged me: “Have you read it?”

Oops. No, I hadn’t. Turns out that there was a waiting list for The Bell Curve at the local library. It was about a week later that I got the call to pick it up, then spent a weekend devouring the 800-page volume. However troubling some of the book’s analysis may be — particularly in regard to the hereditary influence on IQ — it certainly was not what its vehement critics claimed, and the “controversial” label applied to The Bell Curve has now baffled me for the past thirty years.

If you are smart enough to read The Bell Curve and comprehend it, there can be no doubt that you are a very intelligent person. Why would anybody be angry or insulted by arguments which are so highly flattering to them? It made no sense to me in 1994, and I still haven’t gotten over it — why were all these professors and pundits, possessing diplomas from the some of the most selective universities in the world, so outraged by the work that Herrnstein and Murray had produced? Leaving aside that mystery, we return to the point I was making before that digression: Just because you’re very smart, you shouldn’t assume that other people are dumber than you.

So, you’ve got a 130 IQ, which means you’re smarter than 98% of your peers. Testing in the 98th percentile in elementary school will get you a lot of extra attention. If you’re in the firth grade, attending a school with 100 kids in fifth grade, there’s probably just one other kid in your class that’s as smart as you — assuming that your school is average, that is. Maybe you’re living in an affluent community, attending school with the children of engineers and lawyers. Because children tend to resemble their parents in terms of IQ scores (whether from nature or nurture), a fifth-grade class in Palo Alto will have more 130 IQ kids than a school in the slums of Oakland. Either way, however, the kid who scores in the 98th percentile will be steered toward the “gifted and talented” program, which is the subject of Katie Arnold-Ratliff’s article. Having been placed onto this treadmill for high achievers, singled out for praise because of their brainpower, hustled through honors classes in high school, etc., these young geniuses might stride into adulthood full of arrogance. HUGE MISTAKE!

It’s a simple arithmetic problem, kids. There are about 340 million people in America, of whom about nine percent (roughly 30 million) are college-age. If two percent of those college-age youth have an IQ of 130, this means that your 98th percentile score puts you among some 615,000 kids as smart as you — or even smarter. If you attend a reasonably selective university (e.g., the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, with a 15% acceptance rate), there may be hundreds of kids on campus every bit as smart as you are. And then, when you graduate and move into the workplace, it’s important to keep in mind that, in the United States, there are about 170 million people ages 25-to-64, of whom 3,400,000 have an IQ of 130 or more.

You’re not that special, see? More than three million working-age Americans have an IQ score that puts them in cognitive elite territory, and this point needs to be pounded into the heads of “gifted and talented” kids, prone as they are to thinking they’re so smart that they might never encounter an intellectual equal.

From p. 46 of ‘The Bell Curve’

Are You ‘Gifted’ Like Katie Arnold-Ratliff?

You, dear reader, are probably smart enough that you were “gifted and talented” once upon a time. You know that this distinction is not really worth all that much in the grand scheme of things, and therefore have the experience and maturity not to get too worked up about who is and is not chosen for “gifted and talented” classes. This means you’re a heck of a lot more mature than Katie Arnold-Ratliff:

Being “gifted” — and by that I mean smart — has been woven into my sense of self for so long that it has become one of the surest things I know about myself. I was reading at age 4. And though I hated math by kindergarten, I excelled in art, reading, and writing, and every teacher loved me. It was not surprising to me when, in third grade back in 1991, I was invited to take a test to determine whether I should move to a school across town — the school for really smart kids, as I precociously told relatives, neighbors and strangers at the grocery store. Nor was it surprising when my parents told me I had been accepted to that school’s Gifted and Talented program. There, in grades four, five, and six, I had the kind of public-school education that many parents dream of, filled with discovery, creativity, and nerdy magic. …

That’s the first paragraph of her New York Magazine article and by simple arithmetic, it is possible to deduce that if, like most kids, she was eight years old in third grade, Ms. Arnold-Ratliff was born in 1983, the year I graduated from college. This means that I was “gifted and talented” long before she was ever born, and excuse me for not being impressed with her credentials. I should mention, by the way, that in contrast to her self-description (“every teacher loved me”), I was an inveterate discipline case in school. Being a trouble-maker meant getting paddled back in those days, and I had such a knack for mischief that I got five licks from our assistant principal on the very last day of my senior year of high school. Well, let’s keep slogging through this:

We went tidepooling on the coast, prodding shy sea stars with our fingers, and made papier-mâché dioramas of the titular fruit from James and the Giant Peach. We reenacted the Battle of Lexington and Concord using balled-up paper as bullets and argued about national politics. (Memorably, one debate about George H.W. Bush’s 1988 pledge “Read my lips: no new taxes” ended in shouting.) We went on class camping trips designed to teach the value of emotional risk-taking, pushing ourselves on night hikes to walk solo through a pitch-black tunnel to our teacher on the other side. Our classrooms were always a merry mess of paint and construction paper. I spent most of my in-school silent reading hours with the class copy of The New Yorker. My teachers, thrillingly, asked a lot of me academically, and in return, they gave me the latitude to follow my curiosity. I remember these years as some of the most invigorating of my life. …

Are you grinding your teeth in rage, dear reader? Is Ms. Arnold-Ratliff’s warm nostalgia for her “invigorating” years as a gifted schoolgirl getting on your last nerve? Be patient and endure the suffering, as we must continue reading:

For nearly a century all across America, shrewd parents have known that the best first step in a child’s academic life is to get them into a gifted program, like the one I attended, where they can have an academic experience that is stimulating and confidence-boosting, that sets them apart from the pack. They understand that a Gifted and Talented, or G&T, program in elementary school broadens a child’s intellectual horizons, which then places them on a course toward honors classes in middle school and AP classes in high school. All of this culminates, finally, in the strategic launch of the child toward “a very good college,” maybe even one in the Ivy League. The first plotted point on the ascent is vital — it’s what makes the rest possible. …

What part of “bullshit” do I need to explain here? Ms. Arnold-Ratliff’s notion that getting into the gifted class in elementary school is a necessary precursor to advanced education (and that this has been known by “shrewd parents” for “nearly a century”) runs hard aground on the fact that such programs did not exist in most of America until the 1970s. It was when I was in sixth grade that our principal at Lithia Springs Elementary School, Mr. Gilliland, decided to provide an hour of after-school instruction (on statistics, of all things) for us “gifted” kids. Being singled out for an extra hour of schoolwork wasn’t exactly my idea of fun and, when I was invited to join a similar program in middle school, I turned it down. But enough of my experience, let’s see where Ms. Arnold-;Ratliff is going with her argument:

Many of these shrewd parents also know that in many parts of the U.S., G&T has a race problem. As of 2022, roughly 60 percent of American students enrolled in a gifted program are white, though recent data shows that white children are only around 40 percent of the total public-school population — a disparity that has been in place for as long as G&T has existed. The gap is apparent in New York. Recent figures on the city’s kindergarten G&T enrollment indicate that white and Asian students are vastly overrepresented relative to their proportion of the city’s student body. The Anderson School, a citywide K–8 gifted institution, barely cracks double digits for Latino students and admits even fewer Black students; the stats for another K–8 citywide gifted school, NEST+M, are no better. The trend continues in high school. Of the 781 students accepted to the highly competitive Stuyvesant High School last year, eight were Black. Among the city’s other eight specialized high schools, 3 percent of offers went to Black students while 6.9 percent went to Latino students. Combined, Black and Latino students make up roughly two-thirds of the city’s public-school population. …

Memories of Mr. Gilliland’s statistics lessons come flooding back, and not in a good way, but why is it that we must be lectured about these particular statistics? Is this particular “disparity” actually a “race problem”? And if so, why? Somehow the first premise of this implied syllogism — Ms. Arnold-Ratliff’s assumption that any such statistical “disparity” is evidence of oppression — never gets the kind of scrutiny it deserves. As much as this annoys me, however, still we must keep reading:

These disparities have helped to make G&T a perennial subject of debate, particularly in New York City, where it has bedeviled mayors for years. At the moment, the city’s families with school-age children are waiting to learn how Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to reshape (or extinguish) G&T, an issue he touched on during his campaign. While he has made plain his distaste for pre-kindergarten G&T testing and feels the third-grade entry point is more logical (Mamdani himself is the product of a specialized public high school, the Bronx High School of Science), thus far no action has been taken.

Some parents I spoke to have already washed their hands of the whole G&T business, refusing to participate in what they view as a corrupt system of segregation. But countless others still place significant stock in the G&T designation and what it offers and are comfortable relying on cognitive testing, should it be required, to determine whether a child qualifies. …

Do you get it now? The whole point of this article — its raison d’être, to use one of those fancy phrases that smart people love to encounter when they’re reading — is to address the anxiety of parents in New York City who are waiting to see what the new mayor is going to do about gifted-and-talented programs in the city’s public schools. Unless you’re a member of that targeted readership, you probably don’t give a damn. There are two kinds of Americans — those who live in New York City, and those who hate the people who live in New York City — and you’re probably like me, sick of those New York sons of bitches who think the world revolves around their city. Nevertheless, we have not yet reached Ms. Arnold-Ratliff’s payoff paragraph:

For decades, people in favor of G&T have promoted the notion that we can put a concrete number to a child’s intelligence, that the smartest children need extra enrichment or acceleration to reach their potential, and that we can measure the beneficial impact of that enhanced learning on the children who receive it.

There is just one problem: Not a single part of this story is true. …

If that doesn’t make you angry — if you’re not fighting an impulse to hurl a molotov cocktail into the offices of New York Magazine — I don’t know what to say.

Having begun by singing the praises of her own gifted-and-talented childhood, we see that Ms. Arnold-Ratliff then devoted a paragraph to the statistical “race problem” of such programs, before proceeding to denounce three “notions”: First, she contends, it is incorrect to believe that a child’s intelligence can be stated as “a concrete number”; secondly, it is wrong to think that smart children “need enrichment or acceleration”; and thirdly, it is untrue that gifted-and-talented classes have any “beneficial impact.”

Having passed the 2,500-word mark already, I won’t go point-by-point on these claims, except to say that scoffing at the value of IQ testing (“a concrete number”) is one of those luxury beliefs common among affluent liberals who have been so long immersed in a privileged environment that they often take for granted things that should never be taken for granted. It should be obvious that I am not particularly impressed with the general quality of gifted-and-talented programs offered in American public schools. Making “papier-mâché dioramas of the titular fruit from James and the Giant Peach”? What kind of educational “enrichment” is that? As much as I disliked being compelled to stay after school for Mr. Gillilland’s lessons about statistics, at least there was practical utility to those lessons, unlike most of what Ms. Arnold-Ratliff describes as her “invigorating” childhood experience.

When I was a small-town reporter covering local schools in Georgia some 35 years ago, I had the opportunity to observe the “Let’s-Make-Learning-Fun” fallacy of modern education in action, and am therefore not surprised to encounter people who are vastly ignorant and simply cannot think clearly, of whom Ms. Arnold-Ratlff is a near-perfect example. Well do I remember the blabbering about “critical thinking skills,” etc. that accompanied the hollowing-out of rigor in the public-school curriculum, as if the mere incantation of those phrases was magical. Teachers spoke disparagingly of “drill-and-kill,” by which they meant that old-fashioned methods of memorizing facts and improving skills through repetition could be cast aside in favor of allegedly “creative” ways of teaching. Stipulating that learning the old-fashioned way is probably not any child’s idea of fun (and it’s certainly not “creative”), there is ultimately no substitute for it, if the objective of education is to produce students who possess a mind fully-stocked with necessary facts and capable of applying those facts in a pragmatic way. Furthermore — and this is crucial — because adult life is full of tasks that are unpleasant but necessary, the rigor of an old-fashioned education helps prepare children for the unavoidable difficulties of adulthood.

Far be it from me to engage in an ad hominem attack on Ms. Arnold-Ratliff, nor to tease the reader with the thrill of encountering a Latin phrase like ad hominem. We just love our Latin phrases, don’t we? It’s show-off stuff for the alumni of gifted classes (and it was all I could do to resist the temptation of throwing in some show-off French by writing frisson instead of “thrill”). I don’t wish to indict Ms. Arnold-Ratliff personally, to mock her credentials as if such mockery refutes her argument, but she did lead her article with personal anecdotes on the subject, didn’t she? So the fact that she majored in creative writing at Mills College, then got a master’s of fine arts (MFA) from Sarah Lawrence University, before spending more than a decade on the staff of Oprah magazine … Well, maybe that’s relevant, I don’t know.

As an alumnus of Mr. Gilland’s statistics lessons, I might be somewhat qualified to criticize how Ms. Arnold-Ratliff handles statistical evidence about the value of gifted education, or the validity of IQ testing. However, my main point — past the 3,000-word mark now, so it’s about time I got there — is how a fanatical devotion to Equality distorts the way many Americans think about education. Every time I invoke the word Equality (with a capital “E,” denoting its quasi-religious status), it is necessary to point out the difference between this concept and what most ordinary people mean when they use the same word. Unless you’re an intellectual, or a doctrinaire “progressive,” you’re likely to use equality as a synonym for fairness. That is to say, we think of equality in a procedural manner — if everybody has to deal with the same rules in an open process (in school, at work, in a courtroom, etc.) then we are being treated equally. The government treats as equals, in that we are all obliged to follow the same process in terms of filing our income taxes, or getting a driver’s license, and so that this basic fairness becomes the meaning of “equality.”

Many of my highly intelligent readers have probably studied political science well enough that they know the difference between this kind of procedural equality and the radical egalitarianism I mean to signify by Equality with a capital “E.”

The radical egalitarian is not satisfied by a fair process, but insists that there must be an equality of outcomes between certain categorical groups. What he fails to recognize (or refuses to admit) is that there could be any actual differences between groups, such as might explain disparities of outcome that could be seen as objectionable to anyone who expected everyone to get a similarly sized slice of the pie. The radical egalitarian believes there is something wrong — something unfair -- if the average Asian student taking the SAT scores 632 in math while the average black student scores 454.

Trust me when I say that I’m much closer to the lower end of that comparison than I am to the upper end, despite Mr. Gilliland’s intervention. Some of us just don’t have much aptitude for math, but because I’m white, nobody ever told me that my deficiency in mathematics made me a victim of oppression, which is what the readers of Ms. Arnold-Ratliff’s article are expected to assume when they read her article about the alleged “race problem” in gifted education — “a corrupt system of segregation.”

When I speak of the Tyranny of Equality in education, what I mean is the way beliefs like this distort everything about the school system in 21st-century America. It’s not just gifted classes, it’s not just about the maniacal obsession with racial identity and statistical disparities between groups, it is absolutely everything.

My late Aunt Barbara was a much-beloved biology teacher in LaGrange, Georgia, and by the time she retired, she was bitterly disillusioned by the games school administrators had begun playing with academic honors. The question of who would be the valedictorian at one point came down to the grades students had received in her class, and she found herself pressured to lower her standards — which she absolutely refused to do. And so it was that the school began to recognize multiple students as “valedictorian,” which absurd practice has been continued ever since.

The pressure of democracy on education is always toward lower standards. Parents believe themselves to be owners of the school system (“I pay my taxes, don’t I?”) and this proprietary sensibility leads them to think they are entitled to whatever outcomes they desire for their children. This entitlement mentality among parents inevitably has a destructive effect on the curriculum and pedagogy of the system, and that destruction is hastened when the employees running the school system have a similar sense of entitlement. No matter how tough-minded a school superintendent may be, or how devoted he is to standards of educational excellence, it is impossible to avoid the pressures of democracy — the everybody-is-equal, give-me-what-I-want mob mentality — when most parents and teachers have succumbed to this mindset.

Having raised six children to adulthood, and having made enormous efforts to spare them from exposure to the evils of the government school system, I have quite radical ideas about the nature of these problems, which are systemic, and not episodic. Nothing can be done to fix the problem within the existing framework, and there is no likelihood of a “burn-it-to-the-ground-and-start-over” approach being implement. Therefore (or, ergo, for you Latin-loving types) the best thing any parent can do is to keep their children as far away from the public school system as is possible.

Sorry it took me 4,000 words to get down to brass tacks — GET YOUR KIDS OUT OF PUBLIC SCHOOL! — but thanks for your patience. Sometimes I just need to rant.