From The New York Times : For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are “a patently unfair system” because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. “This push on tests,” he told me, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”
The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained as we sat in his office last fall, is character — those essential traits of mind and habit that were drilled into him at boarding school in England and that also have deep roots in American history. “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”
The article goes on to describe how research has revealed that students who have what the researcher terms grit are more likely to succeed academically in adverse circumstances than those who have a higher IQ and score higher on achievement tests are. Duh huh moment for educators and the New York Times apparently. The 12 question test they developed to measure the grit of a student has proven a even a better indicator of which cadets at West Point will survive the summer training called “The Beast Barracks” than the military’s measuring system called the Whole Candidate Score.
I wonder if these researchers have ever been to a class reunion, or if they are parents. Or if they have ever had a job outside academia, where we see people who excel in spite of circumstances not favorable to them. How many of us have gone to a class reunion to find the best and brightest were not the most successful members of our class? How many parents have tearfully watched the child who struggles every day keep plugging away and come home with an honor roll report card? How many, many times have we seen the workhorse pull away from the sleek and finely bred racehorse in our workplace? Why does it require studies for these people to believe what common sense tells everyone else?