Low-income minorities have more to lose than gain from the woke war on standardized testing.
Opponents of standardized testing have a favorite go-to sample question from a SAT exam given in the 1980s.
Runner:Marathon::
a) envoy:embassy
b) martyr:massacre
c) oarsman:regatta
d) horse:stable
The question is held up as an example of cultural bias in admissions testing, evidence that the SAT discriminates against racial and ethnic minorities and low-income applicants. A white 17-year-old from, say, upscale Grosse Pointe, Mich., is more likely than his black counterpart from inner-city Detroit to choose the right answer (c) because he’s more likely to know that a regatta is a boat race.
It was based on such concerns that the University of California Board of Regents decided last week, at the urging of UC President Janet Napolitano, to stop using the SAT and ACT college admission exams. UC hasn’t led the effort to end the use of such tests, but given the system’s size and prestige, the decision is likely to give opponents of the SAT a strong boost. That’s unfortunate, because low-income minorities have more to lose than gain from the end of standardized testing.
It’s true that blacks and Hispanics on average score below whites and Asians on the SAT, but to claim the test is discriminatory is to ignore a host of other factors that are far more likely culprits. We know that study habits, as well as time spent reading books versus watching television, vary significantly among different racial and ethnic groups. We also know that black and Hispanic youths are far more likely to attend chronically failing elementary and secondary schools. Might any of this offer a more plausible explanation for the racial and ethnic disparities in SAT scores?
Even before entering school, some kids are already far ahead of others through no fault of their own. A landmark study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas found that the children of professional parents hear about 2,100 words an hour on average, which is nearly double the number of words heard by the children of working-class parents and more than three times the number heard by children of families on welfare. By the time a dentist’s child enters kindergarten, she’s heard an estimated 30 million more words than a poor child has.
Given these vast differences in upbringings, habits, attitudes and priorities across various groups, why would we expect to see anything approaching racial or ethnic parity in SAT scores? These disparities may become more apparent when we look at the test results, but that doesn’t mean the test is causing the results. And it doesn’t follow that scrapping the test will do anything to resolve the underlying disparities.
The SAT is designed to do one thing—assess high school students for college readiness—and there is wide agreement that it does this fairly well, regardless of the test-taker’s race. If the test was in fact biased against blacks or any other demographic group, it wouldn’t predict freshman outcomes—grades, completion rates, etc.—as consistently as studies going back decades have shown it does.
What about the sample SAT question above? Isn’t that evidence of the systemic social and economic bias responsible for these racial gaps? Hardly. For starters, questions that depend on exposure to a culture of white privilege are rare, not typical. And they haven’t proven to be much of a drag on the scores of other nonwhite groups, such as the low-income Asians who outscore middle-class blacks. Moreover, the largest black-white differences aren’t on the culturally loaded items but on abstract questions that test spatial skills and the like. In short, a lack of familiarity with sailing terminology isn’t what’s depressing black test scores.
The University of California system’s decision to scrap the SAT requirement is of a piece with a renewed effort to reverse the state’s current ban on race-based college admissions. In both cases, more racial balancing on campus is the goal, and objective admission standards stand in the way. But we know from more than four decades of affirmative-action policies that admitting students to schools where they are underprepared to handle the work leads to less college completion than we’d otherwise see. And California ought to know this better than most states; after it moved to a system of race-blind admissions in 1996, college graduation rates for black and Hispanic students increased dramatically.
We’d all like to see low-income minorities reach academic parity with whites and Asians, but lagging groups will have to get there from where they currently are, and getting rid of the SAT will only obscure where they are, not change the discomfiting reality.
This piece first appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal