What Top Chef has Over the Elections, and Education

The new season of Top Chef starts in one week. By that time the world will know who our new president is, and I’ll be quite glad to be back to serious television.

In short, Top Chef strikes me as the more legitimate competition. In both television series, competitors wrest for a prize–culinary repute on the one hand and political power on the other. In Top Chef, however, the competitors spend a fixed amount of time responding to specific challenges, relevant to the wished-for job. They must rely on their own talents which, however well-boasted such talents might be, will be tested and evaluated by qualified judges. If your chicken piccata is made with bread crumbs, Chef Colicchio will tell you it’s not good enough and that any chef worth his salt knows that you only use flour for that dish. Last season, when competitor Spike used frozen scallops in a challenge and defended it by saying that it was in the restaurant’s walk-in and therefore the owner of the kitchen was to blame for having such low quality ingredients in the first place. The owner, Chicago icon Rick Tramonto, fired back that purveyors deliver sub-par foods all the time and only a rubbish chef would send rubbish out of his kitchen. At the end of the series, regardless of how staged it all seems or how many advertisers are slipped into challenges, the viewer can sleep soundly knowing the competitors were tested with thoroughness and relevance.

In presidential elections, however, the “challenges” are empirically miles away from the presidency.  What does a pseudo-debate in which candidates from both sides dance around each other’s policies and ideas have to do with getting politics done for the country?  If Top Chef were run like an election, competitors would submit a video claiming the right to compete, spend weeks debating each other about how to best prepare one dish over another, and direct viewers’ attention to pictures of past dishes they made, and maybe even a menu or two.

No one would watch it.

And yet the country is gripped by this presidential election. I’m all for passion in politics, and by that I mean rigorous assessment of politicians abilities and ideas, not a televised mock interview based on twisted track records and rhetoric. At least Top Chef demands some culinary proof. When it comes to the presidency, we have to choose a candidate without so much as tasting a spoonful.

Our schools, too, can learn something from this tension between Top Chef and Top Chief.  At times it seems like we settle for the appearance of achievement rather than learning.  Appearance of achievement comes in the form of standardized test scores and other seemingly factual assessments.  In reality, such scores are as manipulable as language.  It’s illusory assessment.  If you’re a state trying to boost math scores, the solution is simple: make the test easier.  Math teacher friends of mine say that’s exactly what New York did a number of years ago.  Whether it’s cooking or politicking or teaching, we all have a commitment to ensure that the assessments matches the job.  This begs the question: Since we have a show dedicated to cooking and bevies of shows for the presidential race, how far away are we from the next great reality TV show, Top Teach?

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