Richard Kahlenberg reviews a new book by Harvard law professor Lani Guinier, who argues that the SAT and other standardized tests for college admission are antithetical to democracy. Jeffrey Snyder of Carleton College says that Guinier’s arguments are misleading.
Guinier argues that the tests are reflections of affluence, not merit or character. They serve to reward those who are already privileged.
Kahlenberg writes:
“‘Democratic merit,’ Guinier explains, goes far beyond examining test scores to look at the skills and commitment among student applicants that our democracy requires. Invoking Harvard economist Amartya Sen, Guinier writes that merit is ‘an incentive system that rewards the actions a society values.’ Today, she says, our society should value people who combine two sets of attributes: (1) knowing how to solve problems, which requires not just cognitive skills but also the ability to collaborate with others, and to think creatively; and (2) a “commitment to building a better society for more people” rather than just pursuing one’s own selfish ends.
“Guinier argues that the heavy reliance on standardized test scores in college admissions is deeply problematic on many levels. The tests are designed not to tell whether an individual will contribute to the strength of our democracy but only how he or she will perform academically in the freshman year. “If all we cared about is how well you do in your first year of college, we would have college programs that last only one year, right?” she quips. And SATs don’t even explain first-year grades very well, she says, citing economist Jesse Rothstein’s finding that SAT scores explain 2.7 percent of the variance in freshman grades….”
“Finally, Guinier writes, the testocracy “values perfect scores but ignores character.” Indeed, because doing well on the SAT is seen as a product of talent and hard work, the winners often lack the sense that they owe anyone else anything. The old inherited elite sometimes recognized that the accident of birth triggered a need to give back. “The new elite, on the other hand, feels that it has earned its privileges based on intrinsic, individual merit,” Guinier writes, and therefore feel no “obligation or shame.”
Now that the SAT will be aligned with the Common Core, both directed by the same person, David Coleman, we can expect it to become “harder” and thus even more reflective of family wealth.
Jeffrey Snyder says that Guinier is wrong. Snyder says that critics of testing miss the point. All standardized tests favor those who have had greater opportunities because they are better educated and better prepared.
He writes:
The SAT, Guinier maintains, reflects the “values and culture” of “white, upper middle-class” students. Many scholars in the field of education readily endorse this claim. I know because I used to be one of them. Two years ago, though, after reading through the empirical research carried out by psychologists and psychometricians for a course I created on standardized testing and American education, I concluded that the charges of bias do not stand up to closer scrutiny. The overwhelming majority of leading measurement experts contest the notion that the SAT systematically underestimates the academic skills and knowledge of poor students and students of color. Indeed, Guinier is unable to provide a single specific example of racial or class bias on the test. Consider the fact that Asian Americans significantly outperform whites on the SAT. Is there nothing distinctive about the cultural heritage of Americans of Asian descent? Following Guinier’s logic, the tens of thousands of high-scoring first- and second-generation immigrants from India and China somehow share the “values and culture” of upper middle-class whites, even if they are working-class or their parents do not speak English as a native language.
The SAT is not the only measure where money matters. As University of California, Santa Barbara Professor Emerita Rebecca Zwick has shown, every measure of academic achievement is at least in part a “wealth test,” with higher-income students enjoying consistent performance advantages over their less well-off peers. On average, more affluent students have higher scores on annual tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind legislation; on tests with no coaching available such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress; as well as on high-school exit exams such as New York’s Regents Examination. The same goes for grade-point-averages and the ACT. So no matter the achievement metric, as a group, more affluent students always do better.
Just to be clear, for Guinier and many of the other most vociferous critics of standardized testing, the SAT is a meaningless metric. The only skills it measures are those necessary to succeed on the SAT itself. Access to test prep allows students to learn how to “game” the test and a white, upper-middle class cultural background somehow provides a key to unlock the test’s otherwise mystifying content. In her mind, nothing separates the high from the low-scoring students, apart from bank account balances and the color of their skin. But while the SAT has many noteworthy flaws (the essay section, for instance, is farcical and an insult to the craft of writing), it does a decent job fulfilling its central purpose, which is to measure “college-readiness.” Those students who do well on the SAT really are more likely to succeed in college than those who do poorly.
The school of thought that deems the SAT meaningless is deeply misguided. If you care about expanding educational opportunity for poor students and students of color, charges of class and racial bias turn out to be red herrings. And test prep is the biggest red herring of all. College admissions tests, by and large, register rather than create socio-economic and racial disparities. Weeks or even months of test prep are dwarfed by the lifetime of accrued advantages associated with wealth. Think high-quality nutrition and healthcare, as well as access to museums, travel, and extended social and professional networks. Consider too a dozen plus years of attending the best public schools or private schools with well-qualified teachers and a rigorous high school curriculum that includes a rich array of foreign language offerings, Advanced Placement courses and extracurricular activities. By the time they are seventeen, more affluent students are more likely to succeed on the SAT—and in college—because they have received better educations than their less well-off peers.
To deny the real differences in the linguistic, mathematical and analytical skills between the typical low-income student and the typical high-income student is inexcusable. The test prep industry and “biased tests” make for easy targets—but they distract us from the much more important inequalities that are embedded in our racially and economically stratified K–12 educational system. Across the country, for example, poor students and students of color are disproportionately overrepresented in the lowest academic tracks, and disproportionately underrepresented in “gifted and talented programs” and honors and Advanced Placement classes. We should concentrate on students’ broader educational trajectories, rather than obsessively honing in on the drama of college admissions. We need to stop thinking of college admissions as a point of departure and start looking at it as the culmination of a long journey.
A relentless focus on the need for children to be sucessful at “doing school work” and test-taking” has become a distraction from any real effort to address the inequities that are known to bear not just on school performance but much else.
Everything depends on the public schools that prepare the majority of students for life. If they do their job the way they did when I was a kid then the tests are tangential and can be helpful to students who have learned in spite of external obstacles.
But it appears that the construction, administration, and use of standardized tests is very different today than it was back then.
Standardized tests tend to sort students by socioeconomic class. They are inherently culturally biased. I thought we knew this back in the ’70s! There is a whole body of research supporting this assertion. We know standardized testing has its limitations. Men tend to out score women on the SAT; yet women do better in college. Asians out score their social rankings because their parents are highly invested in pushing their children. They scrimp to pay for tutors. I know a Ft. Lee ESL teacher that made more money tutoring evenings and weekends than she did in the public schools. We have all heard of the “tiger moms.” I fought for my ELLs when I knew they were being falsely profiled based on standardized testing. My district at the time eventually gave me the benefit of the doubt when they saw a knew a student’s potential better than a test score. This was especially true in the old days in the high school when tracking of students ruled. We must fight for students to gain access to opportunities instead of putting them in a failure box and shutting the door. I believe in access, equity and excellence for all.
Jeffrey Snyder: ‘while the SAT has many noteworthy flaws (the essay section, for instance, is farcical and an insult to the craft of writing), it does a decent job fulfilling its central purpose, which is to measure “college-readiness.” Those students who do well on the SAT really are more likely to succeed in college than those who do poorly.”
“In 2004, economist Jesse Rothstein published an independent study that found only a meager 2.7 percent of grade variance in the first year of college can be effectively predicted by the SAT.” — Lani Guinier
Predicting just 2.7% of the grade variance (and for just the freshman year) is a “decent job”?
Where? In Blunderland?
“Adventures in Blunderland”
In Blunderland, a decent job
Is having tea with hatters
A joy to simply hob and nob
And talk of nonsense matters
“Parrotocracy”
Parrot what they say
On every testing day
Echo back
Their lovely fact
In formal testing way
Jeffrey Snyder is putting faith in David Coleman? Hello, GATES foundation. I just read his review: I found it a pompous attempt at the takedown of an intelligent woman. I will have no faith in testing until ed reform long gone.
I don’t think he is wrong. What I heard is that those who have had the opportunity to receive a rich and “rigorous” K-12 educational program are definitely at an advantage. Their analytical skills have been honed to a level difficult for those from underprivileged backgrounds to achieve. Since we know that IQ is not immutable, why should those who have been well prepared by virtue of their background not do better? My students in my lower socioeconomic high school were generally not as well prepared as the students who attended schools in well off suburbs. They were reading books that I had used with my middle school students in an upper income suburb. However, it is when we assume that no one who has not been exposed to a top notch education is doomed to mediocrity that we fail. Those students from that low income community are not done unless we make them feel like they are. Even forgetting the nonacademic factors that make them a credit to society, I want them to attend community colleges and continue to grow either through vocational and/or further academic classes that may someday lead to a four year degree.
2o2t,
“Since we know that IQ is not immutable. . . ”
And just what is IQ???
“The test prep industry and “biased tests” make for easy targets—but they distract us from the much more important inequalities that are embedded in our racially and economically stratified K–12 educational system.” I think they are both right. Once upon a time there were jobs for people who didn’t want to go to college and they worked, made a middle class wage and sent their kids to college. Now for many reasons, parents can’t afford to send their kids to college and students have to incur huge debts. SAT’s and ACT’s do correlate with success in college, but only to a certain extent. Many students who don’t test well are discriminated against, but so are low socio-economic class students (mostly minorities) who don’t live in places with the best schools and don’t have the parent support they need to do well in school or do well on SATs etc. We need to focus on improving education for all AND better assessment of college readiness.
” We need to focus on improving education for all AND better assessment of college readiness.”
Yes to the first half of that statement and NO! to the second half if that assessment (and or preparation for an assessment) is supposed to be carried out by the public schools.
“The school of thought that deems the SAT meaningless is deeply misguided. If you care about expanding educational opportunity for poor students and students of color, charges of class and racial bias turn out to be red herrings.”
The red herring is indeed all the ancillary/secondary concerns as mentioned.
“The school of thought that deems the SAT meaningless” is not “deeply misguided” but is the main/primary problem with the SAT and any other standardized tests, their inherent epistemological and ontological errors which render all standardized tests “COMPLETELY INVALID”. And if they are COMPLETELY INVALID then ANY RESULTS ARE INDEED MEANINGLESS. Noel Wilson has proven so in his never refuted nor rebutted complete destruction of educational standards and standardized testing “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
“But while the SAT has many noteworthy flaws (the essay section, for instance, is farcical and an insult to the craft of writing), it does a decent job fulfilling its central purpose, which is to measure “college-readiness.”
In my opinion, the correct statement is that SAT does a decent job in predicting readiness for taking further tests in US colleges.