Opinion: In pushing kids into career pathways, Georgia’s on wrong track

Jane Robbins is an attorney and senior fellow at the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank.

A resident of Georgia, Robbins co-authored the APP/Pioneer Institute report, “Controlling Education From the Top: Why Common Core Is Bad for America.” She is a graduate of Clemson University and Harvard Law School.

In this column, she raises concerns about pigeonholing students through the use of aptitude testing, a practice she warns can narrow a child’s options and future rather than expand them.

Robbins also questions state Senate Bill 401, which she says introduces career counseling too early in a child's education.

By Jane Robbins

Public education nationwide is largely being converted into a job-training operation. Politicians of all ideological persuasions have adopted the view that the point of education is to endow students with “in-demand skills” required by the jobs that will exist in a managed economy. So the best thing for children, they argue, is to set them on career paths – at an early age – so they can be better trained for their future jobs.

Liberals do recognize another purpose of education: to use classroom content to instill in students a progressive worldview. But the Republican and liberal views ultimately dovetail into the goal of shaping individuals to fit into a pre-existing structure, whether corporate (fascism) or governmental (socialism).

Many conservative commentators, such as the late Peter Lawler of Berry College, have warned of the folly of replacing genuine education – which is essentially the search for truth – with mere workforce-development. Beyond the arguments made by Dr. Lawler, one might question how the government can know what skills will be in demand in the future – the USSR tried this, without notable success. But equally troubling is how the workforce-development model plays out for individual students.

A common element in this model is establishing "career pathways" for K-12 students. Georgia has established 17 career clusters from which high-school students choose as a basis for their career-tailored classes. Building on the dubious assumption that most teenagers know what they want to do for a living, the Georgia Legislature is now considering driving the career-choice mechanism down to 6th grade.

The legislation at issue, SB 401, would impose career counseling – including career-aptitude tests – on 11-year-olds, and require them to have formulated an individual graduation plan before they complete 8th grade.

Although it may seem pragmatic to identify a child’s aptitudes early on, the unintended consequences could harm children and their futures.

The danger is that such aptitude-test results may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For 6th-grader Mary, the results may ingrain the belief that her path has now been ordained, and she has little choice but to travel it. If the “scientific” test says she should become a lawyer (or a secretary or an accountant or whatever), the pressure is created for her to head in that direction – even if, despite her “aptitude,” she would be better off elsewhere.

A 2002 Japanese study demonstrated the power of such "scientific" data. Female students who took a psychological test were given bogus findings that they were either introverted or extroverted. In subsequent interactions with others, the students tended to behave in accordance with those phony findings, despite their actual personalities. Mary might similarly conform her plans to misleading aptitude results.

The effect on Mary’s teachers may lead to equally damaging outcomes. The Orwellian student longitudinal data system will inform all her subsequent teachers about her aptitudes and weaknesses. So the teachers’ perhaps subconscious tendency will be to nudge her in the predicted direction and away from others that don’t align with the “science.”

There is strong evidence that teacher expectations substantially affect student outcomes. In 1966, Harvard professor Robert Rosenthal found that when teachers expect students to be successful, they are more likely to be successful. Rosenthal gave elementary students a test disguised as a tool for predicting intellectual gain, and then told teachers that certain randomly chosen students had placed in in the highest-performing category. Eight months later, "those students from whom the teachers had been led to expect greater intellectual gain showed a significantly greater gain in IQ score than did the control children."

Rosenthal later elaborated on the findings: "[If Billy is believed to be stupid and the teacher asks him questions,] and Billy doesn't answer quickly so they say, well, OK, Helen, you tell us what the right answer is. Not much time was given to Billy to answer. On the other hand, if Billy's one of the kids for whom there's (sic) favorable expectations and there's a long pause . . . it's almost as though the teacher were thinking, wow, Billy is sure a thoughtful kid and gives more time to reply."

This is what can happen when a child is designated to be "good" or "bad" at a particular discipline. He comes to believe it, and so do his teachers. And if a teacher and the student himself believe he has less aptitude for more challenging areas of study, the danger is that he will be discouraged from pursuing them. Would Ben Carson have become a neurosurgeon under this system?

Aptitude tests can be useful at certain stages of individuals’ studies or careers. But when the government uses them with the workforce-development model of education, both society and students can suffer.