[Freddie deBoer] You Aren't Actually Mad at the SATs: you're mad at what they reveal

All of that is prologue to the bigger point: the controversy over college entrance examinations stems not from the examinations themselves, but from the fact that they reveal profound differences in human capital that make progressives uncomfortable. The SATs don’t create inequality. They reveal inequality.

Why do people have such revulsion towards the SATS? Because they produce unequal results; some students perform better than others on the test. Of course, this is the very function of testing, to reveal underlying inequality, in this case underlying academic aptitude or ability. In fact, the more valid a test is, the more powerful it is, the more inequality it reveals, as it becomes capable of demonstrating finer and finer-grained distinctions between test takers. Most people are bothered by this tendency to reveal inequality because of troublesome and persistent group differences. Traditionally the gender education gap was cited as a source of concern, but because the gender positions have flipped (outside of a few stubborn fields), most progressive people don’t care much3. The racial achievement gap, however, is still the singular obsession of the American education politics, policy, and research world, and despite periodic predictions that it will soon close, it remains stubbornly real. And that’s ultimately where the anti-SAT/ACT animus comes from: Black and Hispanic students significantly underperform white and Asian, and this is vexing for obvious reasons.

The racial achievement/performance gap is a curious thing even in the context of an American political discourse that seems to get more bizarre by the day. That the gap exists is, on balance, not controversial. Gaps in performance are observed on essentially every measured academic metric, though the size of the effects vary from context to context, and the general distribution is Asian American students at the top, white students next, then Hispanic, then Black. The Black-white gap in particular has shrunk from the era of (explicitly) segregated schools but progress has not been consistent or linear. Most people in academia and politics admit it exists: prominent Black politicians like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris reference it, every major think tank and foundation operating in the educational space identifies it as a major priority, and the NAACP used to address if often, though their Education and Education Strategy pages have recently disappeared so it’s hard to know where they stand now. These things are faddish but once upon a time every other dissertation written by someone getting a PhD in Education was about the gap. We can observe it even outside of reference to controversial tests, such as noting that the white high school graduation rate is 10% higher than that for Black students. The achievement gap is a thing.

And yet I also find a rapidly-congealing social prohibition against talking about these gaps in progressive spaces. If you refer to a racial achievement gap in a lot of liberal or left contexts now, you’ll find that people clam up fast and get visibly uncomfortable, even if you take pains to point out that an academic achievement gap does not imply an academic potential gap. People just don’t want to acknowledge that gaps exist at all; our racial discourse appears to have become such a blunt instrument that the acknowledgement of racial difference is controversial even when you preface discussion with the belief (that I hold) that the gap is the product of innumerable environmental and sociocultural factors rather than genetics or other inherent differences. Simply saying “Black students consistently score lower on tests like the SATs, have lower average GPAs, and have worse metrics on ancillary concerns like truancy” - again, Barack Obama’s position, Kamala Harris’s position, Corey Booker’s position - is enough for people to start launching into harangues about the inherent violence of those comparisons. People just do not want to talk about this stuff.

The rush to rid the world of the SAT is based on this dynamic. Because Black and white students are not equal in academic preparedness, and because we have failed to close the gap in a half-century of concerted policy effort to do so, we must eliminate the tools that reveal it, such as the SAT. Similarly, the movement to shutter gifted and talented programs4, due to the racial inequalities therein, demonstrates an attempt to shut down those structures that make educational inequality visible. It should go without saying that this will not doing anything to close the gap in actual ability.

Footnotes from original not preserved.