Winner-Take-All

What do the Olympic Games, the recent ‘leaking’ of the CAPE 2008 examinations and admissions to ‘prestige,’ or more accurately, ‘privileged,’ educational institutions in Trinidad and Tobago (and elsewhere) have in common? They are all instances where ‘cheating’ – defined here as the use of an agent for enhancement of performance or public perception of performance that is not potentially available to all competitors – can be extremely beneficial to the individual, socially, politically and especially economically. Indeed, it is that the differential rewards between the few winners (and many losers), for what are often relatively minor (though by no means insignificant) differences in effort, ability and performance, are so staggeringly disparate – multimillion dollar endorsements, elite academic credentials and concomitant access to lifelong higher earning potential and further social and cultural capital that can in turn be exchanged and translated into economic capital – that drives the intense, unproductive, wasteful and in some cases illegal and dangerous competition that is a defining characteristic of “winner take all markets.”

Winner-take-all markets are characterised by Robert H. Frank and Phillip J. Cook, Professors of Economics, Ethics and Public Policy at Cornell and Duke Universities respectively, as markets in which rewards are allocated primarily (if not solely) by relative performance, rather than by absolute performance, and, in which butterfly-like effects translate initial small differences in performance, like a hundredth of a second or a fraction of a mark, into substantial differences in opportunities to earn and learn. In the case of professional athletes, such as David Beckham, Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant, the economic rewards and opportunities of being at the top of their fields are hundreds of times greater than an ‘average’ player and provide even greater opportunities to earn. For students seeking entry to elite, prestigious and high status universities the rewards are not only greater earning potential over their lifetime, but include access to networks of peers and associates who are tied into local and global networks of power and influence, and increased likelihood of gaining entry into prestigious, or high status graduate schools and higher starting salaries. At the local secondary level the same is (largely) true for students admitted to ‘prestige/privileged’ schools in that they increase the probability that they will successfully translate their relatively small performance differences on the SEA into substantial social and economic rewards and be connected to networks of powerfully placed peers. Prior success breeds later success via self-reinforcing, re-inscribing, positive feedback loops. What could possibly be wrong with this?

Winner-take-all markets arise in corporate and consumer (as opposed to producer) capitalist arenas where profit maximization logic and policies that place no restrictions on greed encourage individuation. When (free) markets work they (generally) allow the most talented people to meet the needs of the widest possible audience/consumers and to be commensurably compensated for their services. Participants compete, succeed, and are rewarded based on their absolute differences on performance standards. Winner-take-all markets however encourage and contribute to the growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor by hyper-compensating its top individuals, creating a self-reinforcing culture with increasingly higher and more difficult to obtain benchmarks with only minimal if any increases in value. Executive compensation packages and the outrageous salaries of elite sporting players, models, authors, actors, actresses, directors, lawyers and even academics follow the same pattern. The incentives to participate in these markets and the rewards of success are extremely attractive and psychologically motivating.

The reward structures of winner-take-all markets encourage competition. Such competition is important in attracting and retaining the best, brightest and most productive workers. The opportunity costs of this competition however are wasteful and unproductive patterns of consumption and investment which have serious social implications. According to Frank and Cook, winner-take-all markets attract too many individuals who over-estimate their abilities, competencies and chances of occupying top spots. They thus forego opportunities to make contributions and lead successful and productive careers in other fields/disciplines. The over-subscription of applications to business, medical, law and engineering schools and the shortage of teachers, nurses, agriculturalists and workers in the construction and hospitality industries are important examples. The long lists of students seeking entry to or consideration by elite primary and secondary schools, gatekeepers of cultural and social capital, are another. In all hierarchies, there is limited room in the upper echelons, and failure is more common and more likely than success. Failure in such competitive arenas often fosters feelings of inadequacy, frustration, regret and anger.

At every stage in a winner-take-all hyper-competitive ecosystem participants are subjected to increasingly challenging selection/elimination contests. The successful survivors of these successive sieving processes move on to the finer meshes, and potentially greater rewards. This situation of increasingly demanding selection tasks and substantial difference in rewards for small differences in performance creates conditions for sustaining an escalating arms race. Competitors must make ever increasing investments of time, energy and resources in order to achieve even marginal improvements in performance, most will not achieve the highest levels of success and will have lost valuable opportunities and resources that could have been utilized more productively elsewhere. The cultish and expensive phenomenon of extra-lessons is an illustrative example. Such investments are ultimately unsustainable and wasteful. However, in a system that rewards proximal relative performance, these marginal differences are significant and the unsustainability overlooked or ignored. Those who are able to invest in this way are usually those who already have advantages in other areas, namely economic, social and cultural capital. Such arms races in social spheres are exclusionary and re-inscribe, re-produce and further widen and deepen the pervasive inequalities between those with and those without. Other participants seek out alternative strategies to give them competitive advantages and keep them from falling even further behind.

Cheating, in one form or another, occurs in all markets, but is endemic in winner-take-all markets where the potential payoff for not being caught more than mitigates against the risk. Athletes seek out novel means to increase their competitive edge without being caught, often at some risk to their personal health. In the case of CXC, cheating is also endemic from the perennial problem of the leakage of examination papers/questions, the compromised integrity of the School Based Assessments, Internal Assessments and oral examinations to the attempted use of other student strategies such as copying or crib sheets. Small differences in performance however can mean the difference between a scholarship, studying regionally or internationally and completely different sets of opportunities.

The practice of local government assisted secondary schools selecting “the twenty percent” that they are legally entitled to under the Concordat is another form of cheating in the winner-take-all market for secondary education. Annually, advocates make the pilgrimage to these quasi-religious, quasi-educational institutions to perform the ritual of offering the child’s name and number, hoping to give them even some small advantage in the exam that would measure their value and secure their future. Principals and boards offer sometimes complicated justifications for choosing the 20 or so students (out of lists exceeding 300!) based on the principle of “maintaining the individual (read religious) characters” of the school. Some choices are perhaps easier than others, some candidates luckier.

This practice is outdated, unjust, wasteful, unethical and discriminatory. This particular aspect of our winner-take-all educational economy does more real harm to our students, our educational system and our society than any perceived potential good. It unfairly denies those with legitimate claims to secondary school places in the schools that they have chosen and qualified for while simultaneously privileging a select subset of the national community for receiving a critical social good in disproportionate relation to their own performance. Like the leaked CAPE papers offered for sale, this practice subverts and undermines the confidence in the integrity of the examination process, sustains and reinforces educational and social inequalities and implicates adults in facilitating the unfair practice. For those who don’t know the rules of this perennial game; those who have no advocates who speak on their behalf in order to access these cultures of power, privilege and prestige; who are conditioned to implicitly trust that the system is completely ‘meritocratic’, just enough ‘earn’ their places on merit alone, to be grateful enough never to ask embarrassing questions, to speak for those for whom no one speaks.

Another consequence of winner-take-all markets in education is the concentration of talent in a few elite institutions. As I have journeyed across Trinidad over the last eighteen months or so, visiting, observing and evaluating secondary teachers (and their students, administrators and school cultures) I have come to appreciate that the quality of teachers and teaching is relatively consistent across the island (though student performance is another matter). In all schools I have found ‘good’ teachers and ‘not quite so good’ teachers. What is striking though is that in all cases the government assisted schools that I have visited have classes that are too large or overcrowded to easily and meaningfully support the type of teaching and learning experiences being advocated by professional and teacher educators and supported by the overwhelming research in the Learning Sciences. In every government assisted school I have visited the learning environment is designed to support teacher dominated transmission and modeling as the primary day-to-day instructional strategy. Many of the government schools on the other hand are not the criminal breeding grounds that they are often made out to be in the media. Rather, many students and teachers work extremely hard under better (classroom and administrative) conditions for learning and have achieved the highest degrees of success. Graduates of these secondary schools sometimes have had richer more diverse educational experiences than their privileged peers. I often wonder what would happen if our educational talent was more evenly and fairly distributed across schools?

The practice of chronological age grouping combined with increasingly challenging and consequential competitions for high status social goods in a winner-take-all economy also wastes talent by narrowing and reducing opportunities for those who develop at different rates through rewarding precocity and punitively punishing children with slower maturation cycles. As Alan Gregg argues, “…once you have most of your students the same age, the academic rewards…go to those who are uncommonly bright for their age…in effect, you have unwittingly belittled man’s cardinal educational capital – time to mature.” The research literature is clear that for students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds, the challenges associated with being a late bloomer become almost insurmountable. Furthermore, early ability is not always a good nor necessarily the best indicator of future accomplishment and success. Our practices by which we choose winners in the educational marketplace and reward precocity mean that annually for several decades we have been wasting the talent and potentials of an untold number of students, placing them at a severe social disadvantage and consigning them to futures filled with unnecessary anxiety, insecurity and uncertainty, those for whom being ‘bright’ enough simply isn’t good enough. The National Open School initiative is a step in the right direction as are any attempts to loosen chronology’s collar in schools by integrating the grouping of students by age and subject matter with a grouping by interest and proficiency within the formal curriculum. Unfortunately I know of no such attempts being made in Trinidad or Tobago at present.

Contests have always been a means of demonstrating prowess and proficiency. They have also always been political too in the sense that to the winners went a disproportionate share of valued social goods including power, prestige and influence. At present the rewards are disproportionately concentrated in so few heads and hands as to be obscene. Never has the incentive to circumvent the traditional routes of disciplined hard work, ethical investment and continuous moderate gains through cheating been greater. In the ancient world, sporting contests allowed warriors/soldiers to simulate and demonstrate skills that would be valuable in defending their community. Cheating could place a community at risk for conquest. The same applies to educational arenas, except that the risk of conquest comes from within the society itself in addition to the reduced ability to successfully manage external threats. As educational psychologist Jerome Bruner reminds us “when any group is robbed of its legitimate aspiration, it will aspire desperately and by means that outrage the broader society, though they are efforts to sustain or regain dignity.” Winner-take-all markets, hyper-competition and cheating all work in different ways to deny many their fullest dignity. Educational discourse in Trinidad and Tobago often seems to vacillate between periods of crisis, moral panic and indifference, much of what passes for analysis is shallow, vacuous, self-serving and uncritical, some of it downright dangerous. As Princeton philosopher Kwame Appiah writes “What makes oppression possible is that there are people who profit as well as people who suffer. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, as George Bernard Shaw observed shrewdly, is a policy that will, at least guarantee you the vigorous support of Paul.” In Trinidad and Tobago, many Paul’s are powerful advocates for their own self-interest over and above the interests of the society. It is extremely difficult and psychologically painful to acknowledge one’s privileged position(s) from which one’s benefits derive and then to have it called into question, to acknowledge one’s complicity in the oppression and sufferings of others. It is almost impossible to work to transform a system of oppression from which one or one’s close associates derive important benefits to a more pantisocratic system in which power and the benefits that derive are shared more equally. Nevertheless, it is a task in which we cannot afford to fail. If we are to tackle the problems and tasks placed before us as participants in history’s future unfolding rather than as mere spectators or tourists (or worse), we must choose to engage with questions such as those posed by Lloyd Best’s Moses’ conundrum, where he asks, “How does a nation revise the perspectives of the desert so as to form fertile empirical judgments of what is required by the Promised Land?” It is a task that will raise many uncomfortable, unsettling, disturbing and perhaps dangerous questions. But this is a conversation for all of us. The dialogue has been opened…