Meritocracy is best defined in terms of three connected principles—hiring by merit, equality of opportunity, and fair reward. As a social ideal, it is popular with politicians and the general public but fiercely attacked by academics as unachievable, undesirable, or both. A first line of attack is that the arbitrariness of natural talent, combined with the formative role of the family, undermines the claim that people deserve the advantages that meritocracy might bring. A second claims that standards of merit are artificially constructed in ways that fail to track the real social value of goods and services, while enabling a highly educated elite to transmit their advantages to their children. A third asserts that a meritocratic society humiliates people who occupy low-skilled positions. This article responds to each attack, while acknowledging that meritocratic principles alone cannot serve as a full-fledged theory of social justice.
This article proposes a way of understanding meritocracy from retrospective versus prospective points of view. Retrospective meritocracy is static or backward-looking: Merit is based on an individual's characteristics or past achievements as representative of excellence or as desert for a position already obtained. Prospective meritocracy is forward-looking: Merit is functionally defined as the comparative contribution that an individual makes to a specified set of social objectives. I use formal models to show that these alternative conceptions have very different implications for meritocratic assignments of students to schools or workers to jobs and that they involve differing information needs for a policymaker. These different approaches to merit demonstrate how alternate versions of meritocracy may or may not be socially efficient. I discuss implications for the use of meritocracy as a desideratum for various public policy contexts.
This article distinguishes between “thin” and “thick” meritocracy in order to clarify contemporary debates about race, inequality, and equal opportunity. Thin meritocracy focuses exclusively on fairness at the point of selection—neutral rules and race-blind procedures governing the allocation of scarce opportunities. Thick meritocracy retains procedural neutrality while also addressing the formative institutional and relational conditions under which merit is cultivated. Drawing on economic, philosophical, and sociological perspectives, I argue that in a racially stratified society, exclusive reliance on race-blind selection risks legitimating inherited disadvantage. A defensible meritocracy must therefore be race conscious in diagnosis, race neutral in allocation, and relational in method. By integrating insights from Rawls, Miller, Markovits, Sandel, Anderson, and Sen, I propose a developmental ethic that protects standards while expanding access to the pathways through which achievement is formed.
Meritocracy is often seen as a hallmark of modern societies, yet the belief that those best suited to the task should govern dates back to classical antiquity. This article provides a historical perspective on meritocracy by examining the long preindustrial era, exploring both continuities and differences between past and present understandings of the concept and its practical applications. I outline the intellectual origins of the idea that “the best” should rule, tracing its development from ancient Greece to the Italian Renaissance. My analysis explores “pockets of meritocracy” that existed in medieval and early modern periods, showing that republican polities were, at least in principle, more open to the political advancement of commoners and that advancement based on merit was relatively more accessible in some specific groups and institutions—state administrations and the church. I conclude by suggesting the ways in which historical experience can shed light on contemporary debates and concerns surrounding meritocracy.
Meritocracy is self-defeating. The ideals that animate meritocracy—a principled commitment to fairness and a prudent concern for the general welfare—are worthy; and meritocratic critiques of the various aristocracies that meritocracy displaced are apt. But while meritocracy initially succeeded at correcting aristocratic unfairness and imprudence, its mature form undermines the ideals that it purports to serve. Today, meritocracy sustains unfair dynastic privilege and distorts economic and social life to elevate elite over shared interests. Mature meritocracies promote a distinctively meritocratic style of economic inequality and impose associated social and political maladies. Moreover, meritocratic inequality is an inexorable consequence of meritocracy’s successes and so cannot be overcome by ridding society of vestigial aristocratic elements or by other attempts to perfect meritocracy’s implementation. Rather, repairing meritocratic inequality and its attendant maladies requires a rejection of meritocracy itself.
Meritocracy has rightly received increasing attention among scholars in recent years, but relatively little has been written about its history. This article traces the history of the idea back to the eighteenth century when Mandeville, Rousseau, and Kant addressed it. Mandeville and Kant made the case for meritocracy; Rousseau worried about its negative social effects. This article sketches that debate, and I argue that Rousseau’s critiques were insufficiently considered by subsequent champions of meritocracy. I conclude with some discussion of a parallel debate that took place at the same time among the American Founders.
The articles in this volume, written by leading law professors, political scientists, and journalists, center on the impact of President Donald Trump on the U.S. Supreme Court and the impact of the court on the second Trump administration and on all Americans. President Trump has already appointed a third of the current court and may appoint more than half. Considering that the second Trump administration has sought to “flood the zone” with executive actions during its first 100 days, the court’s rulings have become massively significant for American governance and for the lives of people in our nation and around the world. The four sections of the volume consider the rise of the “Trump court,” the court’s recent rulings on judicial and executive power and on a range of basic rights, its standing in the public’s eyes, and how it stacks up against high courts in other democracies.
School accountability policies are central to current education reform efforts, and most of these policies prominently focus on race- and income-based achievement gaps. Recently, though, discussion of gender-based achievement gaps in schools has emerged in research and policy discussions, so accounting for gender-based achievement differences in existing accountability policies may be an inevitable next step. In this article, I offer a brief background on the origins of school accountability as an education policy priority and review the evidence on its effects. I then discuss gender gaps in education and consider how they stand apart from gaps based on race and socioeconomics. I speculate about the possible adverse outcomes and potential benefits of including gender differences in present school accountability policies and offer concluding recommendations about using these measures in school accountability.
Girls' math and reading scores declined more than boys' during the pandemic, but these gender differences varied substantially across communities. Using test score data from roughly 7,000 U.S. school districts, we investigate how local context shaped these patterns. Community socioeconomic resources buffered children against the negative academic consequences of the pandemic, and these protections were substantially stronger for girls than for boys. In high-resource communities, pandemic disruption had little differential effect on girls and boys, while in low-resource communities, disruptions produced larger academic declines for girls than boys. This resulted in gender gaps shifting toward boys on average, but especially in low-resource settings with high levels of community disruption. These patterns suggest that the gendered allocation of resources is shaped by family and community context, perhaps because gender norms-which shape expectations, opportunities, and resource allocation-are more deeply activated in conditions of disruption and resource scarcity.
Boys lag girls on several important measures of educa-tional achievement and engagement. They begin school with weaker early literacy and self-regulation skills, perform worse in reading but not in math, and are more likely to exhibit behavioral problems and to drop out. These patterns are durable, widespread across countries, and largest among students with the greatest learning and behavioral challenges. This arti-cle synthesizes findings from major U.S. and interna-tional assessments-the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class; the National Assessment of Educational Progress; and the Program for International Student Assessment-to document where gender gaps are largest and how they have changed over time.
Attempts to explain gender differences in postsecondary enrollment and completion have focused almost exclusively on students' academic performance and experiences in middle school and high school. Our analysis shows that elementary-grade test scores are also an early indicator of postsecondary outcomes. We examine the relationship between third-grade test performance and students' college outcomes, focusing on variations by gender, race/ethnicity, and free/reduced-price lunch eligibility. We establish how the gender gaps in college outcomes that favor females relate to early-grade academic performance and show the extent to which third-grade test scores are predictive of college enrollment and degree completion.
I draw from several decades of work as a psychologist- in clinical and consulting practice, on staff at a boys' school, and conducting research studies-to offer a set of observations about boys' education. I argue that despite a long history of poor outcomes, schools have neglected to ground their approach to male students in sound developmental science. In my initial research, boys across the globe were clear about the primacy of the student-teacher relationship for their learning. In a follow-up study, I learned that these relationships are particularly vulnerable to break down due to normative cultural stresses and teachers' reactions to boys' resistance. Yet it was also clear that the teacher bears primary responsibility for the working alliance. Finally, I learned that it is in these relationships that boys can best learn critical skills of accountability and moral behavior.
I elucidate the educational and occupational struggles of boys and men using an evolutionary framework. This perspective is useful in explaining boys' relative disadvantage in language and reading development and their advantage in visuospatial and mechanical abilities. I show that classroom settings and the behavioral expectations of formal schooling are more of an evolutionary mismatch for boys than girls because of sex differences in physical activity levels and social relations. This results in boys being disproportionately identified as having behavioral difficulties. Further, there are universal preferences that influence occupational choices: More men than women, for example, show an interest in working with things, and these interests align with boys' and men's relative strengths. I argue that secondary schooling does not fully capitalize on boys' evolved capacities to help prepare them for the modern workforce, and suggest how schools can adapt to better accommodate boys' strengths.
The efficacy of single-sex education for boys has been a focus of scholarly inquiry for decades. The consensus has been that the all-boys format does not boost academic achievement for boys, on average. In this article, I suggest that the scholarly consensus may be mistaken or at least misleading. I argue that while some boys' schools are successful and others are not, the all-boys format creates opportunities to educate differently. But when teachers are not trained in boy-friendly instructional strategies, nothing good happens and bad outcomes are likely. I consider some characteristics of a successful boys' school and the prospects for boys' public schools in the United States.
Male students graduate from high school and enroll in college at lower rates than females. Male participation in the workforce has also declined over the past several decades. We present evidence on changing workforce demand and participation that highlights how opportunities for female-dominated employment have outstripped those for male-dominated occupations. We also show how several of the high-growth occupations that do not require a BA fall under the category of career and technical education (CTE), suggesting that CTE has a role to play in improving outcomes for males. We conclude with four implications for policy and practice: (1) scale successful models, (2) support areas shown to benefit male students, (3) use CTE to connect applied postsecondary education to employment, and (4) use CTE to connect males to occupations with high demand or strong compensation, including jobs in which males are not well represented, like education and health care.
