With high-stakes testing disputes still at flood level, you’d think “meritocracy” – as it has been perceived – would be the least debatable squabble in education circles. “Take out your dictionaries, class.”

A small but significant spat has erupted in Britain recently about the meaning of the word “meritocracy,” according to British word buff Michael Quinion. “This word is very widely used, even more so in the United States than in Britain.” Will dictionary lexicographers be summoned to court? Not likely. “It is usually employed in the sense in which (Labor Prime Minister) Tony Blair seems from his speeches to have meant it – a social system which allows people to achieve success proportionate to their talents and abilities, as opposed to one in which social class or wealth is the controlling factor,” he explained August 19, 2006 on his worldwidewords.org web site

Well, his example seems to parallel current dictionary meaning: “An elite group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent rather than on class privilege or wealth.” While “meritocracy” is widely used in the U.S., the “ability and talent” factor of the definition has been skewed favoring academic performance and rewards. In his prominent book “The Big Test – the secret history of the American meritocracy,” for example, Nicholas Lemann provides historical documentary and politics behind the origin of the now renowned “scholastic aptitude test” (SAT), used by U.S.colleges and universities to filter high school graduates. “The American meritocracy,” said Lemann “set up as a system for everybody and fueled by powerful rhetoric about equal opportunity, blended this into this idea the distinctive national obsession with success.” The result, he said, was “that the meritocracy began to look more and more like a means of handing out economic rewards to a fortunate few. Rather than being about public service for the elite and expanded opportunity for the mass, it was about opportunity to join a prosperous elite.”

In her new book “Generation Debt – why now is a terrible time to be young,” Anya Kamenetz noted “class” differences in the mad dash to success. “I certainly accept the arguments that rise of feverish competition for selective college admissions among an increasing number of Americans, which has helped drive up the price at the highest end, is no more than a mechanism for the reproduction of privilege.” With this understanding, said Kamenetz, a recent 2002 Yale grad, “The so-called meritocracy that I was so proud to be a part of has really come to measure SAT tutoring, museum trips, music lessons – and, not least, the property taxes that parents are able to fork over to live in good school districts or tuition for private schools.” With the decline in “need-based financial aid” she pointed out, “Academic competition is becoming a game that the ruling class plays largely against itself, like tennis.” Already, we’re beginning to hear a synonym for “social class or wealth is the controlling factor” sneaking in the back door.

“Attempting to address the ‘brain drains’ of college-educated workers, a dozen states, including my home state of Louisiana, followed the lead of Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship, offering free admission at state universities to all in-state high school graduates with certain grade point averages – regardless of need,” said Kamenetz. However, studies show these programs are disproportionately serving students who could afford full tuition. “The increase in merit-based aid means students who don’t need them are often getting discounts, while low-income students, for whom small grants might determine whether they attend school at all, aren’t getting them.”

When the federal government gets out of the grant business, she noted, no one else looks out for equal access. “The money distributed by colleges themselves has grown laughably lopsided. In the second half of the ‘90s, institutional awards to families making $100,000-plus grew by 145 percent, while awards to families earning less than $20,000 grew by just 17 percent. Need-blind, indeed!” 

Having interviews in gathering spots with many of her single peers, Kamenetz found a lot of similar patterns among young women college graduates. “Loan debts in tens of thousands of dollars, about working their way through college for six years at $9 per hour, parents’ divorces or job loss that derailed their own dreams, about mounting credit card debt that kept them up at night, degrees – even advanced degrees – that led nowhere, long searches for unsatisfying jobs, layoffs, underemployment, flat incomes, no health insurance, no retirement plan, no paid vacation, unaffordable housing, moving back in with mom, turning 30 with negative savings and no assets, putting off marriage or kids because they couldn’t afford them.” The author’s candid snapshots were not exactly what U.S. meritocracy marketers had in mind promoting their “knowledge economy.”

In their book The Meritocracy Myth, authors Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller of the University of North Carolina – Wilmington elaborate on the “American Dream” aspect of meritocracy. “According to this ideology, you get out of the system what you put into it. Getting ahead is ostensibly based on individual merit, which is generally viewed as a combination of

factors including innate abilities, working hard, having the right attitude, and having high moral character and integrity.” From several studies they noted, “Americans not only tend to think that is how the system should work, but most Americans also think that is how the system does work. McNamee and Miller challenge these assertions, referring to this gap as “the meritocracy myth.”

While educrats are forever arguing data from plentiful education studies, that’s not the case with federal “income” and “net worth” data (minus “offshore” shenanigans). Yes, the income gaps continue to widen, not level the playing field. The authors use the familiar charts, reminding us the top 20% of households’ income comprise a whopping 49.7 % of total available income. The bottom 20% makes up a paltry 2.8% of total income. Combined, the top 40% household incomes make up almost 70% of total income. Within “wealth and net worth” (total assets) groupings, “the richest 1% of households (99th – 100th percentile) account for nearly a third of all available net worth.” In comparison, the bottom half (50%) of households account for only 2.8% of “all available net worth (property, stocks, savings, etc.).” The charts used were from 2001-02. With even more tax breaks for the wealthy and CEO salary/stock options increasing, current data reflects continued widening gaps within the socioeconomic divide.

“In the race to get ahead,” said McNamee and Miller, “it is possible and all too common for meritorious individuals to be ‘all dressed up with no place to go’.” For the past 20 years, the “growth” jobs in America have disproportionately been in the low wage service sector of the economy. “At the same time, more Americans are getting more education, especially higher education,” they asserted. Utilizing other sources, the authors added, “Simply put, these trends are running in opposite directions: the economy is not producing as many high-powered jobs as the society is producing highly qualified people to fill them.”

“We do not suggest that ‘merit’ is a myth,” they asserted. “Rather, we argue that meritocracy – the idea that societal resources are distributed exclusively or primarily on the basis of individual merit – is a myth. It is a myth because of the combined effects of non-merit factors such as inheritance, social and cultural advantages, unequal educational opportunity, luck and the changing structure of job opportunities, the decline of self-employment, and discrimination in all of its forms.”

Lexicographers aside, who coined the word “meritocracy” to begin with, and how did its definition become a two-headed coin? “It’s especially interesting,” said Quinion. “Not only do we know who coined it, but he’s still very much around to argue about it.”

Michael Young “invented” it in 1958 in his book “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” according to Quinion. Young had pointed out in an article in the Guardian newspaper last month that he had intended a prophetic satire on what might happen if we placed gaining formal educational qualifications over all other considerations. “This, he had argued, would lead to the permanent rejection of anybody who was unable to jump through the educational hoops, including many otherwise able working-class men and women,” wrote Quinion. It would also result in the rise of a new exclusive social class as discriminatory as the older ones. “So the word as he used it,” claims the British wordsmith, “was not a positive one, but deeply negative in its implications for the future of society.”

The word “merit” having “negative implications”? Yikes! You could imagine lexicographers pulling their hair out. A recent Webster’s dictionary included in its definition of meritocracy the example, “The dean believes the educational system should be a meritocracy.” Uh, the cows are already out of the barn.

Sounds like it’s time to add Meritocracy 101 to the curriculum.

This commentary on "meritocracy" was recently published in EducationNews.org.  Dan Pryzbyla can be reached via email at [email protected].