Jay Mathews, the education reporter for the Washington Post, has a long article in the current Atlantic Monthly on “The Bias Question” and the SAT.
Poor Jay. The article is built around the SAT criticisms of one Roy Freedle, a former Educational Testing Service researcher whose work has been severely criticized by Kimberly Swygert (here and here), among others. Too bad Jay hadn’t seen those posts first.
The underlying theme of the article is revealed by these comments near the beginning:
Plenty of Americans, particularly those familiar with the subtlest forms of ethnic prejudice, think there is something wrong with the SAT, and with other standardized tests. For the high school class of 2002 the average score for a non-Hispanic white student on the 1600-point test was 1060. The average score for a black student was 857, or 203 points lower. (For Asians the average was 1070, and for Hispanics it was slightly over 900.) The gap between blacks and whites on the test is sixteen points greater today than it was in 1992.
If minority students are at a disadvantage in taking the SAT, their choice of colleges will be significantly limited, with important implications for their financial, professional, and social futures. In other words, the SAT is interfering with the pursuit of happiness — a problem that has long absorbed the efforts of education researchers and civil-rights lawyers, with not nearly as much progress as anyone would like.
The problem, in short, is with the test rather than with any reality the test measures. Mathews, a good journalist, tries to be fair. He dutifully quotes Wayne Camara, vice president of research and development at the College Board, who states that the problem
is not bias in the tests. It is the differences in the opportunities the students have to get a quality education, the kinds of support they have in school and in the community and in the home.
But this quote and one or two others provide merely the appearance of balance. This article is Freedle all the way.
UPDATE: Once again, Kimberly has sliced and diced the bias argument.
Answering Mathews’ “Bias Question”
John Rosenberg bopped me on the head this afternoon with a reminder that the “Bias!” crowd is still at it. The latest installment? An article by Jay Mathews in The Atlantic online entitled,”The Bias Question”, in which Mr. Mathews swallows…
Actually, I fail to see what the big fuss is all about. Since the elite colleges routinely ignore the SAT results of minority applicants, why do liberals waste their time complaining about the “biases” in the SAT test questions?
Richard – Interesting question. I suppose it’s simply because the objective, hierarchical test scores do exist, even if schools don’t use the SAT. As long as the scores exist, they can be used to compare groups, and they can be used to predict later peroformance. They also indicate what’s being taught (or not taught) in our K-12 system.
All of this angers the liberals who believe in equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity, and who believe that “fairness” means everyone should have the same outcome, regardless of whether they started at the same point, had the same opportunities, or expended the same energy. This would explain why they are convinced that the score gap IS the problem, rather than an indication of what the problem is.