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CIAO DATE: 12/03
SAT Reform Fails the Needy
On The Issues
July 2002
The revamped SAT measures what students have been taught rather than innate mental ability. An SAT that focuses on raw cognitive processing power would give smart children who attend lesser schools an opportunity to shine. The new test does the opposite. Its focus on acquired skills gives an advantage to the usually affluent students who already attend the best schools.
Last month's reforms of the SAT—a new writing test, elimination of the famous analogy items, and the addition of higher-level math problems—signal an evolution toward an SAT that is more "aligned with curricula," in the words of the president of the College Board. Put more bluntly, the SAT is backing off its historic mission of measuring how smart students are. Before the process goes any further, now is a good time to ask who benefits.
In a sane world, testing what students have learned would produce one good result, just as the proponents of the reforms claim: It would change the incentives affecting high school curricula for the better. School systems that want to look good and parents who want their children to get high SAT scores would both have reason to seek beefed-up courses in history, mathematics, literature, and science.
We do not live in a sane world, however, but one in which educational elites believe—or feel constrained to say they believe—that Mayan civilization is as important as European civilization, in which many high schools spend more time on Harriet Tubman than on George Washington, and in which critical thinking is likely to be condemned as judgmental. As matters stand, the achievement tests that the College Board offers (SAT II) are taken by a self-selected minority of students and have not come under fire.
But as the SAT I that everyone takes moves toward content-based items, scrutiny will increase commensurately, and you can bet that the SAT's content will be found to be dangerously sexist, racist, and Eurocentric. The pressures to correct these defects will increase if it is found that the discrepancy between black and white scores is not reduced by a content-based test, and will reach fever pitch if the discrepancy increases—as it plausibly would because disproportionately more black students go to schools that do a bad job of teaching content.
Because the SAT is a national test (listen carefully, you in Washington who are eager for national testing), the influence of the educational elites and pressure groups will be great, the influence of ordinary parents minimal. Perhaps a content-based SAT I can be rigorous in math and science—just perhaps—but it cannot be rigorous in the social sciences and humanities. In the insane world of education we currently inhabit, the effects of a content-based SAT are as likely to degrade the curriculum as improve it.
The SAT's Original Mission
The sad part of this story is that the College Board is in the process of abandoning its original, noble mission: to give a leg up to bright students in lesser schools. As the College Board retreats from its concentration on measuring aptitude, the value of the SAT in the college admissions process diminishes.
For the vast majority of students, an aptitude score is redundant with the information provided by grades and recommendations. That's why one constantly reads that the SAT isn't important—it doesn't add much to the prediction of first-year college performance for the college-bound population as a whole. But a good test of aptitude is crucial for very smart youngsters who have few other ways to demonstrate how good they are. Intelligence tests, maligned because they fail to produce politically correct mean scores for different socioeconomic and ethnic groups, have an irreplaceable value for individual children within those groups: Just as their originators hoped, bright youngsters from bad schools can get higher scores than pedestrian students who have gone to terrific schools.
Bright black and Latino students in inner cities need a good aptitude test because As are so easy to come by in many of those schools that admissions officers rightly discount them. But at least bright black and Latino youngsters know that elite colleges will be eager to identify them even without an aptitude test score. A different reality affects the quarter of all high school students who attend public schools in small towns and rural areas. They are disproportionately the children of blue-collar workers, local merchants, and farmers.
Students in out-of-the-way schools seldom get the opportunity to take first-rate honors courses—their schools usually aren't big enough to support them. These youngsters have few opportunities to rack up glittering extracurricular achievements, for the same reason. But students with first-rate minds can ace an aptitude test anyway and get an admissions officer to pay attention to their applications from Podunk.
The more tightly the SAT measures what students have been taught rather than how much raw cognitive processing power they have, the more important a certain kind of school becomes—the kind of school the children of the affluent attend. Private or public, their schools are the ones that already do the best job of teaching content, and they are the ones that will be most responsive to changes in whatever the SAT tests for. A content-based SAT will make life harder for every bright child who goes to a lesser school while making life easier for children whose parents can get them into good schools. It will mock the goals that animated the creation of the SAT.
Charles Murray is the Bradley Fellow at AEI.
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