Our Society unfairly privileges those who do well on tests. But could we learn more if we looked at those pushed to the margins of our educational institutions?

By Lani Guinier

UCLA students protesting California's Proposition 209 that gutted affirmative action when it passed in 1996.

The following is condensed from a speech by Guinier at the annual convention of the Wisconsin Education Association Council in 2001.

Iwant to talk this morning about the subject of a book I have co-authored called ãWho's Qualified.ä What does it mean to be qualified? And within that, how do we measure success in our democracy?

Surveys have reported that 75 percent of college students report that one of the major things they hoped to get out of college was the opportunity to make money. To be completely truthful, 60 percent say they want to make money and 15 percent say they want to make a hell of a lot of money. So we find that winning and losing is depending on how much money people make - and that becomes the value of success. We don't really talk about other values that measure the worth of a democratic society.

I'd like to focus on these other values and do so by looking at the so-called losers of society - because it is the losers who have the most to tell us about what is happening in the larger society. And the metaphor that I use for this paradigm shift is the miner's canary.

The miners used to take the canary into the mines to alert them when the atmosphere was too toxic for the miners. And the play that I am making is that the experience of those who have been left out - people of color, women, poor people, the disabled, gays and lesbians - is the experience of the canary. If we trap their experience, we can discover something about the atmosphere in the mine.

Unfortunately, our society takes the view that we don't need to worry about the losers; we just feel sorry for them. We pathologize the canary, as if the canary's distress is caused by the canary. And then the solution is to fix the canary - to outfit the canary with a little pint-size gas mask so it can endure the toxic atmosphere.

But we need to heed the signal of the canary and fix the atmosphere in the mines. Taking from the margins, we need to rethink the whole.

RETHINKING ONE'S TEACHING

Let me give you a relatively easy example. Uri Treisman taught calculus at the University of California- Berkeley and he noticed that his African-American calculus students were not doing as well as his Chinese- American calculus students and he wanted to know why. He went to his colleagues and asked if they noticed anything similar and they said they were not prepared, they came from single- parent families, and they were not studying. He decided not to accept the stereotypes of his colleagues without at least testing them and so he hired some researchers to follow around the African-American and Chinese-American students. It turned out that his colleagues were wrong - that the African-American students were actually studying harder than the Chinese- American student, if you count the time sitting in your dorm room with a calculus book open in front of you and studying. But the way the Chinese-American students were studying was to talk about calculus with one another, in their rooms, over lunch, on their way to the study hall, in and out of the library.

It turned out that the practice of engaging one's peers as a way of learning a conceptually difficult task was crucial to the mastery of calculus. It was the process of learning to ask questions when you don't know the answer. The Chinese-American students were developing that skill and the African-American students were not. So Uri Treisman decides he's going to fix the canary. He takes from what he's observed the Chinese-American students doing and he sets up a peer workshop where he gives the black students problems to solve, arranges the students around the table, serves food - because they've seen the Chinese- American students studying problems over lunch, which seems to create an informal atmosphere-and he brought recent past learners, people who had taken calculus and done well, to the workshops so that they would be available to answer questions. And he encouraged students to work through the problems collaboratively and to ask questions.

Within the first semester of the peer workshop, the African-American students' calculus low scores went up and by the second semester they were among the highest scoring calculus students in the class.

You might say he fixed the canary - except that at that moment, he had an epiphany. He realized the problem is not in the African-American calculus students, the problem was in the way he, Uri Treisman, the sage on the stage, was teaching calculus to all of his students. He was using the ãchalk and talkä method and his students were sitting there half-asleep, listening. He was not incorporating the insight of the Chinese- American students in his classroom - that the best way to master concepts is through a process in which students have to learn to ask questions when they did not know the answer and to be intellectually engaged with their peers. And he introduced those concepts into his class.

Treisman took from the margins to rethink the whole, which suggests that we can learn if we study the experiences of those we dismissed as the losers because they have insight into ways in which we are conducting ourselves that accurately affect everyone but visibly converge first around those who are the canary.

ADMISSIONS REQUIREMENTS

What if we were to rethink our assumptions in the context of standardized tests and admissions requirements? What would we find?

I have studied the LSAT quite extensively, and have also looked at the SAT. How well you do on the SAT is seen as a measure of qualifications, a measure of success, a measure of merit. What does that say about the assumptions that we hold in terms of what an educated person is supposed to be able to do?

Let's look at the findings of a study at the University of Michigan Law School, where they tried to see if there was a relationship between the incoming credentials of the law students and what the students actually did as lawyers once they had graduated. They studied all the classes of University of Michigan since 1970 and looked at the three measures of success: financial satisfaction, career satisfaction, and leadership in the community. (They picked those three measures because that's part of the law school's mission statement.)

They found there was no relationship between entry-level credentials and income as an attorney. Basically everyone who went to University of Michigan Law School made a decent living. They also found that those with higher entry-level credentials and the highest LSATs were the least likely to enjoy their career or employment. The theory is that the test taking and the socializing effect of doing well on tests creates people who think there's only one right answer, that the objective is to find the right answer, that the right answer is in the mind of the text drafter.

But this process undermines creativity and it undermines problem solving ability, because the only problem you were trying to solve is how the mind works of the person writing the question, rather than looking at the various ways of solving the problem presented. But the most interesting finding is the relationship between high incoming credentials and leadership. Those with the highest LSAT and entry-level credentials were the least likely to become leaders in their community. The students most likely to become leaders in their community, other than those who had been out of school the longest, were the Black and Latino students who had been admitted under affirmative action, in part because those students who had been admitted under affirmative action were admitted based on their leadership skills and their leadership commitment. So part of what this study shows is that when you admit for a particular quality, you may find people who demonstrate that quality over time.

When you admit for the quality of doing well on tests, that quality doesn't have a particularly useful relationship to the real world. What the tests actually test is quick, strategic guesses with less than perfect information. That can be a useful power. When you don't have good information and you have to make an executive decision quickly, you often have to guess.

However, as a teacher myself, I am much more concerned with training people how to solve problems when time is not of the essence, how to create a situation in which they can get more time to get more information because the more information you have the better problem solver you will be. So, do research.

Many of my colleagues have great faith in the LSAT, number one because they did very well on it, and number two because we have almost a religious attitude toward testing. It's what I call the testocracy.

It turns out that many students of color do not do as well on the SAT or the LSAT; same thing with women, although the variation is not as strong. But it is also true in terms of class. Within each race and ethnic group, as your parental income goes up, so do your SAT scores. In fact, the SAT correlates more strongly with your parent's socioeconomic status than with your first year college grades. Indeed, it correlates strongly with your grandparents' socioeconomic status. It becomes a test of how much money your family has, how many resources your family has to prepare you to take this test.

What has happened is that the testocracy has been manipulated to reproduce and credentialize the social hierarchy. We haven't really interrogated why we value test smarts when they don't actually predict workplace smarts, or, what is most important to me, leadership smarts. Who is going to play a contributing role in a multiracial democracy to help all of our society solve complex problems?

10 PERCENT PLAN

A group of Black and Latino professors, activists, and legislators were concerned that if there were no affirmative action at the University of Texas - which had been sued in the 1950s because it deliberately excluded Blacks and Mexicans -the school would be resegregated. They started looking at the evidence that the LSAT actually does not correlate with first year law school grades and the SAT is not a strong predictor of first year college grades. There is a relationship but it is a modest relationship.

They looked at what does predict first year grades and it turns out that those who do well in school in one domain do well in another; so the best predictor of success, at least better than the standardized aptitude tests, is grades. They then introduced the idea of the 10 percent plan, which means that anyone in the top 10 percent of their graduating high school class, anywhere in Texas, would be automatically eligible to attend the University of Texas in Austin or the University of Texas A&M. They put this bill before the legislature and it passed by one vote.

That one vote came from a white Republican legislator who represented a West Texas constituency where none of his constituents have been going on to the University of Texas A&M or the University of Texas-Austin because he represented a poor and working class white constituency and they had not been doing well on the SAT either. Of the 1,500 high schools in Texas, 150 schools - primarily suburban public schools and independent schools around Dallas, Austin, and Houston - provided 75 percent of the first year freshman placement of the University of Texas in Austin. Once that information became obvious to this legislator, he supported the bill.

Texas now admits its class using many different vehicles, but particularly the 10 percent plan. The freshman class at the University of Texas has been able to retain the same number of Black students as when they were using affirmative action and has a higher number of Latino students and white working class students. By the way, the GPA of the freshmen who were admitted under the 10 percent plan is higher across racial groups than the GPA of the freshmen who were admitted using the SAT.

I am not here pushing for the 10 percent plan. That may work in Texas because of its demographics. But I am suggesting is that it is very important that we begin a much larger conversation about what it means to be qualified, and that we don't rely on a test or any of the uniformed and single devices to determine who is qualified to do complex tasks in a multiracial democracy.

This is a challenge about problem solving, this is a challenge about linking the values and function of education to the values and function of democracy. If we don't have an educated citizenry, we don't have a democracy. If we don't have people who have learned how to think critically, to ask questions when they don't know the answer, we don't have a functioning democracy. If we don't have people who are committed to becoming leaders in their community, we don't have a functioning democracy.

To me, the issue of qualification and the issue of the miner's canary is really an issue of how we are going to not only survive but also thrive in a multiracial democracy.

Lani Guinier is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Her latest book, coauthored with Gerald Torres, is The Miner's Canary (Harvard University Press, 2002)

Summer 2002