In Closing (spring 2007)
Lani Guinier explores the meaning of merit
Photo by Rob Carlin
Distinguished scholar, teacher and civil-rights advocate Lani Guinier delivered a public lecture at Clark on Jan. 24, as part of the University’s recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Educated at Radcliffe and Yale Law School, Guinier worked in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice and then headed the voting-rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s. In 1998, Guinier became the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School. Prior to her Harvard appointment, she was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is the author of several books, and many scholarly articles and op-ed pieces. Her forthcoming book, “Meritocracy, Inc.: How Wealth Became Merit, Class Became Race and Higher Education Became a Gift from the Poor to the Rich, ” will be published by Harvard University Press in 2007.
Guinier is known for her unique and arresting insight into political reform and our democratic system. Her lecture at Clark on “Race, Class and Meritocracy” was no exception. Guinier called for a “critical reframing” of our understanding of academic merit and how it is measured. She focused on standardized tests, specifically the LSAT and its failings as a predictor of a person’s success in law school. Guinier discovered these failings after investigating why women at the University of Pennsylvania Law School were not performing as well as men, even though they had comparable entering credentials —including LSAT scores.
“The challenge I am making to our understanding of merit is not just about women in law school and whether the LSAT predicts success, it is about what the LSAT, the SAT, the ACT, the GRE actually do correlate with. If you know someone’s SAT score, you will know more about their grandparents’ wealth than you will know about their first-year college grades...And this is true about men and women, blacks and whites. It is not about race. It is not about gender. It is about having a test that you can train for like a game...If your parents invest in your performance on that test from the time you are born —by moving to a community where there are good schools, by exposing you to libraries where you are going to learn a larger vocabulary, by hiring tutors, by paying for test preparation —you are going to do better on these tests.”
In her examination of access to higher education, Guinier has made several visits to the University Park Campus School (UPCS), the public secondary school established by Clark and the Worcester Public Schools that focuses on academic excellence and preparation for college. Clark offers free tuition to UPCS graduates who meet the University’s admissions standards. Guinier credits UPCS and Clark with rewarding future accomplishment, not past advantages.
“I derive so much inspiration from what this University has done in terms of establishing a partnership with the local community and, in particular, helping to spearhead a public school where students have merit in terms of being admitted simply by virtue of living in the neighborhood...It is the school that is making a commitment to the students. It is saying, ‘We promise that if you come to this school, we will educate you.’ And it is the school that is saying to these students, ‘We will educate you by teaching you how to think.’”
Guinier praised UPCS and Clark’s work with the school for “building a learning community in which the school takes responsibility for educating its students ” and for focusing on the accomplishments of its graduates, not on its entering students. Recalling the words of Nobel Prize-winning economist and Clark honorary degree recipient Amartya Sen, Guinier reminded the packed audience in Atwood Hall that “merit is an incentive system to reward actions the society values.” She closed by challenging the audience to rethink merit as an incentive system “to reward action that we value in the future, not simply to reward the advantages that certain people have enjoyed by virtue of being born to the right set of parents in the past. ” CNdingbat.tif
View the video stream of this lecture online at http://www.clarku.edu/lguinier
|
 |
|
Clarknews Spring 2007
|
|
|
Lani Guinier |
|
