A reader remembers that when David Halberstam used the phrase “the best and the brightest,” it was not praise. It was an ironic reference to the seemingly brilliant Harvard graduates at the State Department, the National Security Council, and the think tanks who got us into the war in Vietnam.
You often hear education reformers, including President Obama, talk about how we must have the “Best and Brightest” from the most elite schools enter the teaching workforce to improve education.
I always want to say to say to them, the phrase “Best and Brightest” doesn’t actually mean what you think it means.
When David Halberstam used the phrase “Best and Brightest” for his book on the Vietnam War, he used it ironically to show how these so-called geniuses from the so-called elite colleges took the nation down the path of an insane policy that cost many lives. Even when it became apparent the policy wasn’t working, they continued to double down on it, throwing more soldiers and more money into the conflict, rather than admitting they had been wrong about the whole thing to begin with.
The parallel between the geniuses, the so-called Best and Brightest, in the Kennedy and Johnson administration who brought us the Vietnam War and the Best and Brightest in the Bush and Obama administrations, in the think tanks and non-profits who bring us education reform is striking. It is true that lives are not being lost due to the failed ed policies the reformers continue to pursue, but lives of students certainly are being worsened by these policies, futures, minimized. And as with the Vietnam policy, the reformers refuse to admit when the policies fail – merit pay doesn’t work, sure let’s try it again anyway! Teacher evaluations tied to test scores is untested – sure, let’s give that to the whole country even though we don’t know how it will play out!
I think you can extrapolate the “Best and Brightest” comparison to the rest of the culture and society as well. It is the “Best and the Brightest” that our so-called elite universities have to offer who have brought us such wonderful innovations such as collateralized debt obligations,securitization, Too Big To Fail Banks and all the other things that helped bring about the ’08 collapse (and will undoubtedly help bring about the next one too.) The Best and Brightest have brought us the idea that GMO is the way to feed the world, monocropping and corporate farming is the only way society can grow its food.
Frankly I think we need fewer “Best and Brightest” in our society and more people with the humility to say, “You know, maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am, maybe I shouldn’t hoist my untested policies upon the entire nation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Best And Brightest Elite Leaders —
(you do the acronym …)
Really good one …
Reblogged this on Kmareka.com and commented:
Diane Ravitch reminds us about the origins of “the best and the brightest” — it probably doesn’t mean what you think it means.
I’m on break from a “Professional Development” session from the makers of Paul Vallas’ new textbook (chosen w/o teacher input) and appalled by the patronizing tone of the meeting. We’re being read children’s books and shown PDF’s of an ABC chart of vocabulary words and a web of setting details.
It occurred to me that these consultants can’t be blamed– they have no idea who they’re talking to.
That auditorium is filled with America’s elite corps of teachers. Its Green Berets of education. The teachers in that room are many steps beyond these very basic tols of engagement and are already demonstrated success stories of not only using what consultants like to call “best practices,” but translating them successfully and vibrantly into working models of education in classrooms that experience the strongest headwinds against success in the country. 99% free lunch. Corrupt local government. Connecticut’s dirty secret of a chasm of racial and economic division.
For all of our various faults and failings– none of us is perfect…we could still walk into any average classroom and appear to most observers to be the *best and brightest.* I’m proud of what I do here– but I can think of a dozen teachers who teach better than I do just around the halls of this one falling apart building beset on all sides by urban blight. It’s not a miracle– it’s skill, dedication, hard work, and love that makes successes happen here.
Soldiers in the thick of battle get honored. Firefighters braving a backdraft are lauded. Peace officers earn respect walking and driving America’s toughest beats. Maybe even a free coffee at a friendly corner bodega.
What do teachers get? Consultants, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, and “Won’t Back Down.”
Joe,
What if the teachers took a leaf from the reformers’ playbook, organized, and took control of the meeting–call it the “teacher trigger”–then lectured the leaders of the meeting about their patronizing tone, and how dare they bring this pap to some of the best teachers in the nation?
Diane
Reblogged this on extracreditlifepoints and commented:
So I guess I would qualify as one of the “best and the brightest.” Diane gives us the history of the phrase, and good reason to question whether the people we assign this term to are really who we need in schools.
The best practices in education today would be getting rid of the Rhee’s, Klein’s, Duncan’s, consultants, et alia. Of course this would be a start.
The key to understanding the best and brightest mentality is to understand what it means to be a technocrat. The technocratic mindset feels at home in governmental, corporate, and foundation bureaucracies. We see it in extreme form wherever there is an unbalanced, half-brained thinking that works only with what it knows and understands already. It recruits the best and brightest, but filters out anyone who would challenge its narrowly defined assumptions. It seeks to dominate or destroy what it cannot control. It therefore sees the lively, eccentric, and unpredictable as a problem to be eliminated. It revels in the general, and is allergic to the concrete. It cares about the abstract and quantitative and regards the qualitative as soft, unmeasurable, and thus irrelevant. It lives within a rigid template of reality, in its own mirror world, and anything that doesn’t fit gets chopped off.
They see themselves as “impatient optimists” who develop elaborate and fundamentally wrongheaded, if not delusional, strategies to change the world for the better by some limited metric of their own contrivance, but too often create even bigger messes than the one they hoped to clean up. This is the mindset that supported, for idealistic reasons, the invasion of Iraq and is also the mindset that makes it impossible for those who have it to see that they were wrong. It’s the mindset of economists who believe in things like perfectly competitive markets and have a hard time understanding why reality won’t conform to their theories. Technocratic thinking starts with an abstraction, and then insists that the world conform to it, and if it won’t do it willingly it will use force.
And technocratic projects are always naively, if not cynically, “data driven”. Naive because technocrats don’t understand the limitations of the impoverished interpretive framework they use to find meaning in the data, and they don’t understand how irrational interests shape their supposedly rational methods. They are cynical when they know their interpretations of the data are arbitrary or manipulated to serve agendas other than to speak truthfully.Technocracies recruit people and who are Hi-IQ, and are very articulate. If they have risen to positions of leadership, they have displayed an aggressiveness and confidence in promoting the technocracy’s mission. They are the best and the brightest, they know better, and they are contemptuous of anyone who disagrees with them, especially if they are “soft” humanistic types who reject their basic assumptions
They have their arguments, and some of them are very clever if you accept their basic assumptions, but how do you talk to someone about an alternative vision that embraces the beauties of red and green and blue when they are colorblind and think that anybody who isn’t is crazy?
“It is true that lives are not being lost due to the failed ed policies the reformers continue to pursue, but lives of students certainly are being worsened by these policies, futures, minimized.”
Maybe lives aren’t being lost, but careers are being destroyed…For most teachers I know, teaching is so much more than just a job. It’s our identity.
I have met many students and professors at “elite institutions” who were devoted to an intellectual or artistic field or to social service. Their goal was not to get rich or seize power. They were able to admit to faults and mistakes. So, I’m reluctant to equate these institutions with the snobbery that often surrounds them.
That said, I find the “best and brightest” rhetoric offensive. It reminds me of the rhetoric surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Before FEMA even appeared on the scene, a number of people were volunteering to take in hurricane victims. Unfortunately, the hurricane victims had no way of knowing this.
At the time, David Passey, a spokesman with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, applauded the volunteers’ initiative. “That kind of system, individual to individual, is a great way to go,” he said. “There are a lot of great Americans out there.”
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/9/1/92544.shtml
When speaking of “great Americans,” Passey wasn’t referring to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, or Stanford graduates. But he was committing the same error (or almost the same) that President Obama et al. commit when referring to the best and the brightest.
Just as you can’t rely on individual generosity for a hurricane relief mission, so you can’t rely on Ivy graduates for improvement of the schools. Yes, it was kind of people to open up their homes, and yes, some Ivy graduates enter teaching with every intention to stay and do good work. But you can’t count on any of these people to be there for the long haul.
You need to provide reliable systemic support over time. Without that, initiatives come and go; false heroes pop up and then disappear.
Not all technocrats are idiocrats.
Idiocrats are people with 1-dimensional value systems.
It’s the idiocrats who are dragging us down into idiocracy.
And sadly, they never outgrow nor recognize it.