Weirdo Teacher 03: On Sorting and Ranking
Marking, streaming, and ranking as social tools
Advanced General Basic
I say that I didn’t know what we were doing in school – i.e., why we were learning about kinds of rocks, for example – but I did notice one thing that was happening. Perhaps because my allies in grade school had been those kids who shared my love for fucking around and laughing, and because the kids who disliked me in school tended to be the kids who got good grades and commendations and admiration, I really noticed when we began to be streamed.
They’ve changed the name of this process since, and it gets smushed around into different configurations, but streaming is still one of the main things that schools do – a process that everybody must go through and that contributes to our self-identities for better or for worse. I think if we’re investigating education and how it works, we should pay keen attention to the impact of systems everyone experiences.
Streaming
The streams we were put into back in the 1980s were called “advanced” and “general.” It was basically a sorting of students into the kids who got As and Bs (and could go to university) and those who got Cs and Ds (who could go to college, the trades, or elsewhere). We could choose to go against the suggested stream, but the suggestion carried weight. A third level was called “basic,” and it was pretty separate. It was, in my impression, partly special education and partly a subtle invitation for kids seen as discipline problems to drop out.
I didn’t choose advanced; despite my being a totally indifferent student, it was expected by my parents. I wasn’t paying much attention when the decision happened, nor did I notice it much in grade 9, when kids were still together for things like gym class and homeroom. But in grade 10, I noticed that certain guys just weren’t around anymore. It was as if we had gone to different high schools. When I did run into some of them in the hallway, it was a little awkward, like something had changed. I can picture the facial expressions from two of these moments surprisingly vividly, and I remember my own confusion about what had changed.
And I’ve felt the impact decades later, when guys I know and like are defensive AF about their not having gone to university. I tell my students all the time how my generation (which often includes their parents) were sold a notion that university was the only good option – and how bankrupt that notion was and is. Many of my friends who went to university would return to school later to learn “something usable,” whether that be a craft or a trade or a professional program.
Things have reconfigured a bit since: the trades are venerated now by more people, because the pay is good and jobs are findable. Colleges and universities have teamed up and partnered so that a student can enter college but move into university if needed or desired. Currently, where I live, the streams still guide/push/prepare students for university or college, but the streaming situation is changing even as I type – I believe they’re going to wait till after grade 9 now? We’ll see.
How Many Flaws Can Exist in the System Before It’s Not a System?
Systems are insanely complicated, but I think any quick look reveals huge problems in our current system’s structure. Post-secondary education has improved in some areas, especially in accommodations for students with special learning needs (because Human Rights), but there is still no actual coordination between the folks deciding what happens in grades 1 to 12 and what happens after. Universities declare every year that high school grads are not ready for first year according to their standards, but nobody has set up a way to coordinate this; hell, universities barely have to explain themselves at all (if they had to they would need to admit that “researchers” are not automatically any good as “teachers”).
We like to tell students that X is the path to Y, but our advice is always based on a fuzzy sort of hopefulness and an impression formed a decade or more earlier. And there is zero connection between what education assumes is the way forward and what corporations want to do. What program in school is supposed to prepare students to work in an Amazon fulfilment centre? Or to be a lifelong gig worker? I suspect that the impulses of Education versus the impulses of Capitalism break down simply because the first aims to build Society, while the second will happily dismantle it for profit. I don’t think anyone really wants to admit that.
There may be something peculiar about me that demands sensible predictability in order to steer students in their life choices – maybe I’m too uptight about that, maybe ours is as close to being an actual system as it can be. But I struggle with it, and I would like the conversation to be louder.
I’m not down on post-secondary education at all – if I had it my way schools would be free until you wanted to stop going. We know now that our minds are not done developing until we’re in our mid-20s. Why stop actively developing them at 18 (after which, in Canada, it becomes an unregulated and for-profit deal)?
Pretending
In so many places in our adult lives, we pretend we have a system that makes sense and must be conformed to, but in that system are logical leaps and magical assumptions we just gloss over to maintain the pretence.
Here’s an example: we have a system in Canada for choosing our leaders, and we are proudly able to vote in it. But the system we vote in is nonsense; one can become a leader by running a canny, well-funded popularity campaign in a contest in which, too often, no one is expected to tell the truth – or even demonstrate basic capability! You do not need to know how a province works AT ALL in order to be put in charge of it. That’s a bit funny, innit?
Here’s another: all of the schooling in the world will not get you the upper crust job you want, if you do not also know how to play the social games involved in being popular, interacting with people, forming alliances, and conforming to fit in. If schools were really guiding kids into their desired jobs and futures, business classes in high school would teach golf.
There’s a whole ‘nother level on top that is totally unavailable to outsiders. Rich “society” parents know how to make sure their kids are on the success track, and it involves private schools with international baccalaureate and AP classes (the new “advanced”), membership at a country club, and whatever other training makes someone desirable to the other people in the upper crust.
We pretend to have one system, but what we really have is a multitude of ways to sort people, and to weed people out of contention for the most lucrative spots.
Why? What For?
Bumping into the funny, bad kids who’d been sorted “down” into the “general” stream made me feel really gross. Even the two terms we were sorted into back then – “general” and “advanced” – gross. It was very clear that we’d all been rated, and invited or disinvited into tiers, all while being told it was just about aptitude, just about “fit.”
Okay, pretend with me for a minute that it makes sense to sort children into future options based on their grades and their behaviour. Why are ranked tiers and social esteem tied to them? If the world needs people to fix things, clean things, or work in factories, why the disrespect? Why on earth does anyone need to feel bad about themselves in order to take a job? And why should kids who do well with the “academic” stuff deserve to be set apart and above the others? Why must one “fail to achieve” something in order to qualify for a certain kind of job?
I think it’s pretty obvious that all of that serves to sort us, and to keep us divided. We were faced with this class issue bluntly when COVID hit in 2020, when the difference between who could stay home and who could not was made clear. Market speculators, who are acclaimed, rewarded, and indulged? Not needed. Cleaners, cashiers, factory workers, and personal care workers? Absolutely essential to keeping society running. It turned out that the management class was redundant, after years of making others so.
In fact, if the management class were truly important, we would have seen clear plans and communication for how to manage and get through a global pandemic. We did NOT see that. Governments showed an inability to plan, to coordinate, to predict, and to communicate once too many things went wrong, because they’d siphoned off and pruned our systems for profit (e.g., hospital bed shortages were manufactured, not natural.) If CEOs and MBAs were as capable as is indicated by their pay, we would have vaccinated the planet and not just the people nearby, which might have stopped all of this a year ago. (I do believe society has and had enough great thinkers to do that job; sadly, they are incentivized against cooperation, against honesty, against communication by the system that rewards them.)
And where did the rewards of the period fall? Stay-at-home speculators who already had money were rewarded for playing games on their computers (moving money around cleverly) at historically high levels. The “essential workers” were demoted back to nobodies after three months. Their “hazard pay” for grocery workers was removed despite the hazard remaining, and nobody bangs on pots for nurses anymore.
Don’t Rank Me
About 15 years ago, I enjoyed a book by Robert Fuller called All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity, in which he outlined a way to look at the insidious use of ranking in society and provided a term (“rankism”) to describe a final outstanding inequity unaddressed by civil rights thus far. Ranking people, he said, was a scam.
There are lots of hierarchies whose only purpose is to justify privileging one group over another. Then, high status is used by the creators of these fabricated hierarchies to rationalize the privileges they've arrogated unto themselves. Contrariwise, the inferior status of the less powerful is invoked to justify their on-going exploitation. The irony is that while the less powerful are forced to serve as benefactors to those of higher rank, they are routinely depicted as dependent and inferior.
The book hit me hard, and gave solidity to something that had always bothered me: I hated feeling ranked – high or low. I didn’t want a waiter to treat me like I was more important than I was; I didn’t want peers to suddenly blank me in order to kiss the ass of a more highly-ranked person who’d entered the room; I couldn’t stand it when adults talked to kids without respect. I had always refused to take my place in rank-systems. When guided to “dress professionally” to access power, I just couldn’t. I require that people allow me my personal style, full stop. I’m compulsive about it, which is never good, but it’s pretty hardwired. I undermine and make fun of rank whenever possible. Rank and adherence to it seems unexamined, and deceitful, and unhelpful. More pretending.
Back to Streaming
If it were true that streaming was about finding capabilities and guiding students towards fulfilling roles as adults, the event itself would feel like Talking Hat Day at Hogwarts. It would be a celebration. It isn’t. It’s a whisper campaign, and after it’s done, plenty of participants feel either lucky or ashamed. Plenty of students and parents fear that some door has been closed, and plenty of friendships from grade school are practically ended.
And all of that happens, really, to protect the invisible and inequitable systems that ride on top of the one most of us live in. If it were up to me, I’d get rid of it. I contend that there’s no educationally valid reason to stream. It serves invisible systems, it serves power, and it severs huge parts of society from each other, for no good reason.
Trabian Shorters suggests that what he calls “asset framing” could be a key to societal health:
Asset-framing is a direct expression of the love doctrine, right? It is defining people by their aspirations and contributions, before you get to their challenges. So whatever is going on in someone’s life, you don’t ignore it, but you don’t define them by the worst moment or the worst experience or the worst potential; none of that. You have to look past their faults, to see who they really are.
So much of the important work being done in schools is based on love: helping students find their place in life while maintaining and growing confidence and capability is 80 percent of my job, maybe more. Anything counter to that is my enemy.
I do not have any solid ideas about how you could go about fixing this mismatch of intentions, but talking about it honestly has to be part of it.
I believe strongly that education should have a founding principle like doctors have – perhaps even the same one, if I understand it correctly: first, do no harm. Streaming does plenty of harm and I don’t see how it is very useful in any honest way. Offering choices and properly educating individual students would be better.
I am sure there are a million aspects of this issue I’m missing. Feel free to share them in the comments section; I will be happily educated by you. But we need to talk about this.
For Myself…
I found a teaching niche that allows me to teach individual students as they need to be taught, and allows me to not participate in the cartoon meat-grinder industrial complex (see video below) – and it feels good. Respect for the inherent dignity of students is possible (even under streaming), and if we can grow that idea, perhaps one day those students will make it normal and widespread.
Next time: Learning disabilities are what now?
Thank you for reading A Different Fish. If you like it, please share it.
-jep