A Critique of Andrew Sullivan on the SAT and Standardized Tests

Andrew Sullivan is a long-established writer who I respect for his blogging work in tandem with several large publications like The Atlantic and The New Republic.

But on March 5th, 2021, Sullivan published a piece on his blog The Weekly Dish titled “ Killing The SAT Means Hurting Minorities” in support of the college entrance exam. I disagreed with so many aspects of the piece that I could finally take it no longer. To me, the blog post represented quite a bit of people’s small imaginations they have for education at large. Standardized testing is a toxic addition to any educational system. Finland, though they are widely known as the best educated nation in the world, do not use standardized tests to get there. They have one for a child’s entire career, and it’s the matriculation system for future education. It may sound similar to the SAT, but I can assure you that the methodology and rationale is different.

This is just one of a series of critiques against Sullivan’s insistence not just on SATs but on standardized testing as a whole that American citizens seem painfully willing to avoid. In this post, I’d like to systematically go through some of his talking points and attempt to explain why they are wrong on very simple, reasonable grounds.

Sullivan’s thesis in the post is that the SATs are excellent methods for discovering minorities, as they do a better job of finding those skilled and educated Black or Hispanic students, for example, who come from lower class backgrounds. He spends most of his time attempting to explain the SAT and its significance in college acceptance as it has gone from eugenic underpinnings to “unbiased” and “objective” measures.

Standardized tests work in predicting academic and life success — better than any other measure we have

One of the reasons Sullivan may feel as if standardized tests predict success may come from a long history of determining that standardized test scores are largely predicated on socioeconomic factors. I suppose, given Sullivan’s background as a graduate of Harvard, he wouldn’t understand that.

They don’t measure moral worth. They are just predictive tools for economic success in the West — no more and no less.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. In my home state of Texas, students begin taking standardized tests in third grade. And those test score results determine plenty of aspects of education. In an egalitarian society like Finland, where 1/3 of students receive Special Education services before 3rd grade, many academic shortcomings are corrected before the situation is too perilous. In the United States, students often do not enter Special Education until it is too late, and by then (based on personal experience as a SPED teacher) the result is a horror show. No planning period, no lunch, two teachers in one room (sometimes three) and multiple subjects and grade levels to teach, from 7th grade math to life skills with a nonverbal student in a wheelchair. This happened. Selecting some students and not others for beneficial treatment is a moral statement.

The unfortunate reality is that it is very difficult in the United States for a student to enter gifted and talented programs if he or she does not do well on standardized tests. These gifted and talented programs provide more careful attention, creative lessons, and many more resources for students to explore their ingenuity with manipulatives and toys. Over time, as these forces create a positive feedback loop, (and if family finances continue to hold tight), students can enter advanced courses for college credit, and for chances at larger scholarships. Those richer minority students take the SATs and, lo and behold, they do well, but only because they had the backing for a decade and a half of public (or private) education. Those students are plucked from poor communities, while those communities receive nothing.

The tests are now better and less biased than they have ever been (and the tests themselves were never “eugenicist”; it’s the way they were once used that was).

Sullivan falls into the same trap as the trap he critiques. He believes that if we keep using these tests and work on making them better, the situation of poor minority education will correct itself. It is the act of giving tests themselves that is the problem. Giving a test reveals a school that does not know its students, or does not trust its teachers to make accurate assessments with grades. To be fair, teachers are encouraged to inflate grades and pass along students. I do not necessarily believe in the marker of grade either, as it is simply a way of categorizing a student and creating a virtual data set that makes the lives of administrators more lucrative and powerful in their analyses. Data sets and grades have slowly removed autonomy from teachers in classrooms and have pushed students to behave more like computers, only answering questions they are given, rather than ask the right questions on their own. The eugenic part of these tests now are not that they are supply based (tests that are better for white people than black), but demand based (encouraging all students to be one way). Human beings curtail their education to fall in line with testing. It’s turning people into robots who do better working with computers. And when robots eventually put us out of a job, because they can do robotics better than we can, we’re shocked.

A key moment in this debate came last year after the influential and massive California higher education system commissioned a deep, scholarly report on the SATs, conducted by their own academics over eighteen months. What the exhaustive study found was that the SAT remains the best measurement available to find capable students who are black, poor, or first-generation immigrant.

At first glance, this seems like a sound argument. After all, don’t we want to provide opportunities for minority students in as efficient a method as possible?

But what about all those other students?

What happens to all those other black, poor, or first-generation immigrant students?

Efficiency in education does not lead to a robust society. In Finland, the choice to continue education is the student’s and family’s to make. Many leave after a thorough, rigorous, and loving primary education to receive hands-on, productive, engaging vocational training. Their tests are not paper-based but based on apprenticeships and demonstrations. Finland does this for every child. For those who seek a higher secondary education, very good then. They have the right to receive yet more intensive, close-knit studies.

America has had too long a habit of drawing on efficiency and utility for education. Rather than bolster up these minority students who do not test well, we have an epidemic of service jobs, a gig economy without benefits, an unskilled labor force that cannot compete with automation, increasing drug use, and alienation from a feeling of uselessness. We cannot even get the Democratic party to increase minimum wage. Is an SAT really going to fix all these problems? Maybe instead of a standardized test, we should be asking ourselves, “Why can’t education be beneficial for all?”

Instead of putting our money where our mouth is, our share of public funding for education has fallen since the 2008 financial crisis. As usual, ordinary citizens pay for private mistakes…

And if we were really interested in education for all, we would have noticed the SAT’s “objective” measurements revealing a problem in critical reading a long time ago. It is shocking to see how, in the time of broadband internet, smart phone usage, and financial decay (2007–2016) how critical reading has taken a nosedive. But rather than asking the larger and systemic questions, Sullivan is defending the right to take a test.

But why the racial differences? Here’s what the UC report blames: “systemic racial and class inequalities that precede admission: lower high school graduation rates for Under-Represented Minorities, lower rates of completion of the A-G courses required by UC and CSU, and lower application rates. The most significant contributor was … a result of failure to complete all required A-G courses with a C or better.”

In other words, the differences begin much earlier than college, and are hard to fix thereafter. If you want to increase black and Latino representation in higher education, tackle the real problems, not the fake ones. Insist on higher standards from the very beginning in our failing schools; find ways to strengthen the stable nuclear family among blacks and Latinos, which is by far the most significant advantage Asian-American kids have; challenge the street culture that tells minority kids that reading and studying is “acting white”; make the SAT mandatory for everyone, make it easier to take, and make it free:

This argument is the common conservative one. Even Andrew Yang posts about families, forgetting I suppose that across the world many women are marrying later and having children later. Or they are having children without marrying at all.

In key countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, the precipitous rise in mixed families does not equal a precipitous drop in educational standards.

“Challenge the street culture” sounds like a writer who has never been to such a street in his life. This is such a dated argument that hardly needs any explaining. Teaching at a Title I school like I have reveals a set of students who have bigger problems than school.

“Higher standards” is a typical catch phrase in public education. Thanks to “No Child Left Behind” and “Rise to the Top,” standards have been “higher” than ever. As a teacher, you can raise standards all you want, but “rigor” means nothing if students have no buy in. Finland’s egalitarian society works well to explain just how little good education means just emphasizing education. Children in Finland spend less time at school, not more, and they have less homework when they get home. Rigor is beside the point. They spend plenty of time outside, they are active, and they enjoy their lives in robust social networks with their friends and family. Finland understands that good education only arrives when every other need is satisfied. Their teachers, however, are the pinnacle of rigor, as they are in one of the most trying positions in the country (on par with lawyers and doctors). They all have Master’s degrees and go through a robust training process before entering the classroom. The vast, vast majority of teachers in the United States are not that. In some places, like California, they are taking people off the street to be Special Education teachers. In Dallas ISD here in the state of Texas, they are importing teachers from the Philippines to teach in schools nobody else wants to.

Standardized testing has always been a progressive idea. It disrupts class and race, unseats entrenched privilege, and offers the poor and the marginalized their best chance of social mobility.

This reeks of someone who is totally out of touch with American education. Considering he did not even go to primary school in the United States, it is not surprising. Now, understand that you do not have to have personally taken part in something to critique it. But a “progressive” idea? Hardly. In the United States, students take more tests than ever, and each one takes time away from proper time spent learning in engaging environments. The SAT may be one test, but in American education, students take tests from their teachers, MAP tests, TELPAS tests for ESL students, district assessments provided across school districts, Advanced Placement tests in the Spring, the STAAR state test (in my state of Texas), not to mention a practice STAAR test in February to prepare for the actual one. They take tests to qualify for special education, or for Gifted and Talented programs. There is a law against this overtesting, a 2% limit on state and district testing from the Federal Government. But this requirement is oftentimes either ignored or loopholed by claiming that some of these tests measure “growth”.

The sad reality about money in education is not that the United States spends too little. We have plenty of money in the system. The travesty is that so much of the money goes to every place besides students. And one of the many lucrative private industries in the United States concerns standardized testing.

Sullivan fails to see that the SAT is a pale facsimile of what education could be in the United States. His opinions are either narrow or out of touch. It’s great that Sullivan finds only a third of citizens in the United States, those who somehow make it to college (not even counting graduation), worth defending on testing grounds. What about everybody else?

From 2010 to 2019, the percentage of people age 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher jumped from 29.9% to 36.0%.

-From the United States Census Bureau

If you want keen insights on the state of education at the top and how terrible it is for them too, please read The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits, or The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel. What Sullivan experienced as a student at Harvard in 1986 is so far afield from what successful students must tolerate in 2021. Standardized tests are not progressive; they encourage paralysis.

All this to say: do we want a society that is based on the power of standardized testing? This kind of testing does not create an adaptable workforce, it creates stasis. And in a world increasingly in flux due to climate change, creative solutions are not going to be brought about by students engineered to take a test that has tried to remain “objective” and “impartial” for 100 years. Sullivan’s argument misses the point entirely. It is not that we need to tweak these tests. We need to be asking what kind of world these tests create. And in 2021, these tests create a cutthroat system that leaves many impoverished families out of luck and out of skills to be socially mobile.

The SATs are a stop-gap solution for a country in an educational slump. We deserve better.

Sullivan: you’re barking up the wrong tree.

Originally published at http://theroyleline.blog on March 9, 2021.