When the Pineapple Races the Hare . . .

Note: if you haven't been following the story of the New York State test that offered the Pineapple and the Hare story, followed by questions, this won't make sense.  (Actually it will, but not as much sense.) The gist of it is that the test borrowed a story from Daniel Pinkwater, changed a few details, and then asked questions about it that baffled eighth graders taking the test.  New York announced that the questions related to that passage wouldn't count towards students' scores.  Critics say this shows the flaws in standardized testing.  I say it makes perfect sense, and here's why:

 Once there was a huge capitalist democracy that included a lot of children, some of them well-off, some of them poor, and most of them somewhere in the middle.

 "Hey," said the parents with a lot of resources, "how about our kids have a race?" Now, the children of the parents with a lot of resources, as you know, came to school with pretty good early literacy skills, numeracy skills, books at home, health care, financial stability and more. Or, as the sociologists like to say, capital: financial, human, social and cultural. The poor children, as you also know, had less of all these things.

Most of the American public bet on the poor children because America is a land of equal opportunity, in which any child can rise to the highest peaks of achievement simply through will-power and dedication. (The best-off parents bet on their own kids -- sending them to private schools, skillfully manoevering them into top-notch public schools, paying for summer camp, etc. etc, but when it comes time to answer the questions, remember that this is extraneous to the story.)

The race started and there was a lot of cheering.  "We're number 1!" the spectators shouted. "Just look at what happened to those European Socialist democracies -- stagnation! Deficits! Vacation time and welfare and wine and cheese and, um, um, well, look at the stagnation and deficits!" "USA! USA!"

 The well-off children streaked out of sight. The poor children looked out the window. They played with their friends on the playground. They squinted at the blackboard. They doodled and said "I don't know".

Everybody knew that in some surprising way this had nothing to do with the political choices that shaped their circumstances and that still, somehow, America was the land of equal opportunity and they would end up winning the race. Nothing of the sort happened. Eventually, the well-off children took the winners share of the spoils, while the poor children lost all around.

The capitalist democracy ate the poor children and said it was all their fault anyway.

Moral: The Pineapple and the Hare story is no more absurd than the notion that standardized testing leads to equitable outcomes for America's children. 

(Credit goes to Daniel Pinkwater for the original story of the Eggplant and the Rabbit.)

I just want the opportunity to have a choice

The New York Times reports that increasing numbers of New York City parents are forking over their dollars to companies that prep 3 and 4 year-olds for the city’s gifted and talented assessment test. I read this with considerable dismay but little surprise. Parents waste money on silly ideas, and perhaps in a few years I’ll be laughing at this as hard as I did at the Baby Einstein refund news. What really caught my attention was not the fact that parents are doing this, but the way parents talked about it.

One mother, Melisa Kehlmann, is quoted as saying “I just want the opportunity to have choice”. Her language struck me as perfectly capturing the problem.

The premise of “choice” is that it provides opportunities to parents and children that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Parents with money have always had ample choices and ample opportunities, and school choice is supposed to make comparable opportunities available to families who cannot afford to pay for them. Choice, in short, is supposed to create opportunities. “The opportunity to have a choice”, however, correctly structures the situation: Having a choice presupposes opportunity. The fact that parents are paying to have their children tutored for the gifted and talented assessment is yet one more piece of evidence that school choice only gives some people – those who already have some purchase on opportunity – a choice.

This is deeply problematic in a liberal democracy based on the idea that all people are rational choosers, with an equal right to determine the course of their own lives. Choice is supposed to be a right, and Ms. Kehlmann’s rhetoric captures this too. Her opening words “I just want . . .” imply that this is a plea for minimal basic rights. It is a phrase that one often reads in accounts of people struck by misfortune, famine or natural disaster, for instance, and usually a request for the bare necessities. One usually hears it in sentences like “I just want food for my baby”, or “I just want a roof over my head”. Nothing fancy, not organic baby food or an entire house, just sustenance and shelter. “I just want the opportunity to have a choice” is comic, given the context. “I just want” to pay to give my child a better chance to get into program that is supposed to be merit based strikes me as a plea along the lines of “I just want a Manhattan townhouse and a place in the Hamptons”. And yet, the rhetoric is accurate, inasmuch as choice is, after all, supposed to be a basic right.