If you have value and you strive, you will be rewarded. Inequalities become more bearable if it is assumed that each person gets what they deserve, and it is the market that places each person in their place. If this is not the case, it is because there are those who alter how the market works. This way of thinking legitimizes the world we live in, and, above all, it guides reform proposals: more market.
The educational system is a central part of this understanding of society: merit (talent + effort) is rewarded in school. Thus, the most meritorious will have better educational degrees, higher grades, will be in more difficult and better-remunerated careers. Everyone wins. The winners of this race, for the fair prize they receive. The losers too, for they ensure that the best will occupy the most valuable positions in society. The competition around merit orders and coheses society, with its winners and losers; we all win.
Let us set aside the resentment this could generate in the losers, and what it could be explaining the rise of right-wing populisms. We will focus on verifying whether the educational system really responds to merit, or if there is something more. In Figure 1 we observe the percentage that has repeated at least one course by the time they reach fifteen years of age, according to the mother’s level of education and the level of literacy (competence) in mathematics.
Supporters of the idea that school is organized around merit may find in this graph evidence in their favor: the higher the level of competencies, the lower the percentage of repeating. This is seen in the line of each color, that is, for each level of the mother’s education, higher mathematical competence is associated with a lower repetition of a course. This is the lived experience of many merit-associated individuals: they have lived in their classroom, in their school, that those who were good at mathematics repeated less. This is what we technically call intragroup variability. To the extent that there is school segregation by social origin (Spain is one of the countries where it is highest), there is a tendency to cluster more people with the same level of maternal education in the same centers. The everyday experience is to move along one of the lines.
University-Educated Mothers, Children Who Repeat Less Often
Therefore, within the same social origin there is indeed merit. A repetition rate of 70% can be reached through very different paths depending on the mother’s educational level. If the mother is university-educated (master’s or bachelor’s), their repeater children sit at the lowest level of competence in PISA (below 358 points). Conversely, when the mother did not finish ESO (or EGB), the level of the repeater children lies higher, between 358 and 420 points. We notice that the repetition rate sits “out of sync by a level” of competencies between the children of university-educated mothers and those of mothers with no studies. That is, coming from a family with a low educational level is a burden that weighs on competency levels. If the intragroup difference can be talent + effort, the difference between groups of social origin is reproduction: in the educational system, social inequalities of origin transform into merit inequalities, such as repeating a grade.
“Families with higher educational levels manage to cushion the risk of repeating a grade even when their children’s academic performance is very low.”
Spain is among the countries where repeating a grade by social origin, at equal levels of competence, is highest. Without judging the effectiveness of repetition as an educational policy, these data reveal the social inequality it generates. From the personal perspective of passing through the educational system, given that there is some social homogeneity in classrooms, it is true that merit is rewarded with educational success. The equation merit = talent + effort holds. But when we look at how society as a whole functions, educational success reveals itself as a hidden form of inequality of opportunity. Now the formula is merit = talent + effort + social origin.
The merit is the personal experience of social reproduction. That is why social reproduction enjoys such legitimacy: the third term of the equation is not perceived. The survivor bias helps to explain the strength of meritocracy as an ideology: “If I escaped social reproduction, anyone can do it,” without taking into account that the probability of early educational abandonment among youths from families with no schooling is around 30%, while among those from university-educated families it is less than 5%.
In short, talent and effort can explain differences in educational outcomes within the same origin. But one must also consider that there are differences according to social origin. The meritocracy as ideology forgets the third term of the equation, turning arbitrary inequality of starting conditions into purely individual merit. It is an ideological alchemy in which the arbitrary inequality of starting conditions morphs into individual responsibility.
In collaboration with the “la Caixa” Foundation
