Should Admission to Exclusive Public Exam Schools Be Based on Race and/or Socio-Economic Status and/or Intellectual Merit or Something Else?
Egalitarians support fairness; so what is fair in this case? Hint: It's something else!
Where I live in Boston, as in many other cities, there are a few so-called public ‘exam’ schools (in Boston it’s for grades 7-12). These schools (like the one in the photo above reported on here) only admit students who meet certain criteria. Formerly the criteria were a) getting a qualifying score on an exam and b) having sufficiently good grades in school and c) being a resident of the school district. But now these criteria are very controversial because of disagreements about what is fair with respect to different races and ethnicities and socio-economic classes, etc.
No wonder the exam school admission criteria elicit so much emotion!
These schools are designed so that their graduates, just because they graduated from such a prestigious exam school, will have a much higher chance of getting admitted to a top-tier university or college and hence of getting a top-paying job and hence of enjoying a higher standard of living with more wealth, greater health, longer life, more time for enjoyable things such as traveling or engaging in a fulfilling hobby, etc. This is one main reason why parents want their children admitted to these schools. There may be other reasons for some parents, such as wanting their child to get a better education: to learn more, to develop their minds and skills more and so on.
The fundamental problem with these schools is that they exist within, and help legitimize, the class inequality that is the basis of our society: that a few people—the haves—enjoy unimaginably great wealth and power and privilege while the rest—the have-nots—get to fight over the crumbs and are treated like dirt by the haves. In Boston, like other U.S. cities, very few of the students are from families that can be considered among the haves, meaning among the ruling billionaire plutocracy with the real power in society. Almost all of the students, despite the fact that their family wealth varies a good deal, nonetheless have parents who are not in the ruling billionaire plutocracy and are seldom even close to that circle of power and wealth and privilege. Almost all of the students are among the have-nots, even if some don’t think of themselves that way.
On what basis should we judge the exam school criteria?
From the point of view of the have-nots, the chief need is to abolish class inequality, to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor. This would mean having the economy be based on the egalitarian principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.” As I prove here, this is what the vast majority of people actually would love, even if they currently think it is impossible to achieve.
Therefore, the basis for judging if a proposed set of criteria for admission to an exam school is a good one or not should be whether it helps the have-nots abolish class inequality. This in turn requires solidarity among the have-nots, which in turn requires not having admissions criteria that produce resentment or hostility between some have-nots and other have-nots, either along race lines or any other lines.
The exam schools are designed to be divisive, no matter what the criteria for admission are
The difficulty, of course, is that any set of exam school admission criteria will make it more likely for some have-nots and less likely for others to be admitted; this means that virtually any set of criteria will result in resentment of some against other have-nots. The root of the problem is the class inequality itself, since what is at stake here is the student’s future in life: rising higher up or falling lower down in the class inequality hierarchy of our society.
Let’s not have exam schools in the first place
From the point of view of the chief need of the have-nots—to have the solidarity it takes to abolish class inequality—it would be much better not to have these exam schools in the first place. It would be much better if every school provided an excellent education to every student, with classes that taught, say calculus, to students who were prepared to learn calculus and classes that taught, say algebra to students who were prepared to learn algebra; and with classes that required reading long novels and writing about them to students who were prepared to do that, and with classes that required less reading and less writing for students who were prepared only for that, etc. This way, students could be in more challenging classes for one subject and less challenging classes for another; and they could get prepared over time to take more challenging classes if they wished. They would not be limited by what school they were in to being stuck in all low-challenging classes.
Schools should refute, not promote, the elitist lie underlying class inequality
It would also be much better if schools refuted (as I do here) the elitist lie that so-called blue collar jobs were for people with less intelligence who deserved a low standard of living, while so-called white collar jobs were for people with more intelligence who deserved a higher standard of living. Schools could refute this elitist lie in many ways, including by making the course content reflect the truth, which is the opposite of how schools operate today with so-called vocational schools stigmatized as being for the less intelligent students and so-called academic schools touted as being for the more intelligent students.
What I propose here would not cost any more than the status quo. It would solve the unsolvable problem of how to have a fair (and mutually agreed by ALL the have-nots to be fair) set of criteria for admission to the exam schools. The reason the ruling class never entertains such a proposal is obvious: it would create greater unity among the have-nots, instead of the disunity that the current debate about exam school admissions criteria perpetuates.
Technical note: In the last paragraph, the hyphen before the words "and mutually agreed by.." should be replaced by a parenthesis, in order to make the entire sentence more easily intelligible