RE: Wondering What Happened to Your Class Valedictorian?
There is a growing trend among teachers that I have noticed lately. If an author writes a book on education or someone makes a well-produced video, some teachers are more apt to think that they are hearing or listening to is truth. With little research done on the information they are consuming, teachers are blindly following ideas that do not hold much water in terms of truth. I have seen this time and time again with articles being shared on Twitter.
This post focuses on one instance of this in particular. Namely, this recent Time article on high school valedictorians.- “Wondering What Happened to Your Class Valedictorian? Not Much, Research Shows” (http://time.com/money/4779223/valedictorian-success-research-barking-up-wrong/).
There are other variants such as:
- “Why valedictorians rarely become rich and famous — and the average millionaire's college GPA was 2.9” (http://www.businessinsider.com/why-high-school-valedictorians-dont-become-really-successful-2017-5)
The videos starts with a simple question about what ever happened to the high school valedictorian.
I looked up Karen Arnold from Boston College to find her original research... from 1993 (http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED368304.pdf). Although her research was published in 1993, the students involved were from over ten years earlier in 1981. I wasn’t even born when this study started.
Surely, this phenomenon has created other such research over the years. However, I have yet to find any other such research related to valedictorians. Although, I do admittedly need to look more.
As mentioned in the video, Arnold “followed 81 valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward”. Not only were the supposed valedictorians NOT actually valedictorians, only a small number (51) held that “honor” and the rest were salutatorians or "top honors students". This is odd given that the title of the article strictly mentions valedictorians.
The video states “but, when it comes to changing, running or making an impact on the world, none of these high achievers took on those feats”.
How is "changing, running, or making an impact on the world" even judged? Based on the data from Arnold’s research (see below), most of those careers (if not ALL) have an impact on the world in my opinion.
Sure, they might not be “rich and famous”, but is this something that schools are striving to do? Is that the only measure of success? A snippet from the study shows a more human side to the students.
The researcher that the Time article was based on noted that the "valedictorian" received insufficient mentoring from faculty on choosing a career properly. Yet, the video or related article make no mention of this. "People feel like valedictorians can take care of themselves," Arnold said, "but just because they could get 'A's doesn't mean they can translate academic achievement into career achievement." This being conveniently left out spins the story a different way.
The video then shows the following statistic.
While that might be true, what is the socioeconomic status of those students before becoming millionaires? Did those students already have money?
Simply put, students coming from money have a leg up on students that do better than they do in school. The following articles showcase this point quite well:Please note: I don't think there should be class rank or valedictorians and the traditional grading system is entirely archaic, but cherry-picked data is not data. The author of the article reminds me a lot of Malcolm Gladwell. He's a great writer that chooses specific data to tell his overly simplistic and easily digestible story rather than being anything remotely scientific.
A healthy dose of skepticism and following the old adage of “if it sounds too good to be true...” can go a long way for our students and teachers. We just need to be able to see through it no matter how much it matches our worldview.