The Inequality of High-Stakes Testing
By Anonymous / Fall 2020
Junior year was coming up. In my high school, it means that we get a break from the dreaded year-long projects we had in other grade levels, but only because we were all under the single assumption that there were more important matters to tend to: the SAT. The SAT was far from any novel concept or experience in my generation; ever since elementary school our education system kept pestering us with peculiar tests that ranked us by competency in our learning. I remember being familiar with acronyms like GATE and going over test results that marked us in numbers and categories with my parents. Therefore, I felt little excitement or apprehension for the test until I started hearing anxious stories of SAT prep courses, SAT practice books, and SAT practice exams that my friends were beginning to take. It turned out that being the first in my family to experience the American high school system made me and my parents oblivious about the harsh competition of college preparation and by the time I realized it, the testing season was about to begin. I felt pressured to panic just like my friends, so I consulted my mom about possibly taking a short course to prepare myself as well. Our worry quickly changed into horror when we saw the unbelievably high prices of the supplemental classes. It also sparked a new sense of concern, and it led me to recognize one of the most harmful institutions the country has yet to acknowledge.
In the United States, standardized tests are widely used to measure students’ academic potential and are especially prominent in high school students’ lives. According to the Princeton Review, “The purpose of the SAT is to measure a high school student's readiness for college, and provide colleges with one common data point that can be used to compare all applicants” (“What is the SAT?”). The SAT is only one example, however; an ambitious applicant for a prestigious college such as Harvard is expected to send scores of their SAT or ACT, subject SAT, AP, IB, and other exams that prove their competency for higher education (“What does it really take to get into Harvard?”). Yet the supposed goal of these costly tests seemed to contradict with my own high school experiences, where my peers of well-to-do families were able to pay to achieve higher scores on these standardized tests. Through this essay I will explain how our society works to systematically favor certain people over others by factors virtually no one has control over, and how that affects us as individuals, families, and a race.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published data supporting that quality and amount of education is correlated to future financial stability: those with a doctoral or professional degree earned nearly three times as much as those with less than a high school diploma in a week, and unemployment rates were at most five times higher in less educated populations than those with higher levels of education (Torpey). In the educational system we live in, however, people who start off with less money, or worse, in poverty are often the ones left behind in the competition for high test scores, successful college careers, and quality of education overall.
Financial struggles and educational disadvantages often come hand-in-hand since the roots of our basic education. Children of poor families are subject to poorer education as they are forced to go to underfunded schools. Jennifer Park of EducationWeek explains that 44 percent of public school funding comes from its local district in the form of property taxes, so districts receive varying amounts of funding depending on factors such as local property values (Park). When I was in first grade, my second younger sister was just born and by then my parents were confident that we would receive our compulsory education in the United States as American citizens. They spent time carefully researching what the best option would be, and eventually moved to a new area that granted us access to “good” schools. As expected, the community we moved to has a median income of nearly twice that of the United States’ (Economy in Fremont, California). While the intention behind maintaining school districts with local funding was to grant locals a better control over their children’s education, it also imposes a strict limit on what the schools can even do in poorer areas. With their poor family unable to contribute to their public schools, financially disadvantaged children are already destined for a disadvantageous primary education.
While the uneven access to better education itself is an issue not to be ignored, there is another underlying problem with the fact that the poor can not prove their potential for success better than their peers from richer families: the people who are not able to afford expensive supplemental courses or move to wealthy areas are more likely to be people of color. In a general survey of the situation, the US Census found that while rates have been decreasing over the last years, poverty rates of black and Hispanic people are more than twice the rate for white people (Creamer). Black and Latino people also had a median wealth of less than $10,000, while white people had nearly $150,000 in 2016 (Day 16 lecture slides). Inarguably, there is an obvious gap in wealth by race, a concerning situation regarding the importance of initial wealth and future potential in education.
When we discuss these racial disparities in wealth, people interpret these numbers in various ways. Some have attributed the wealth gap to simply not wanting to be successful - a problem concerning the attitude of the poor and not of the responsibility of the government or the rich (“Kushner says Black people must ‘want to be successful’”). The institution of neoliberalism in our modern society has especially allowed this idea to proliferate. Neoliberalism, as defined by George Monbiot of The Guardian, “sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations… Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised” (Monbiot). In other words, neoliberalism made us all more individualistic, in common psychological terminology; we are made responsible for our own success and misfortune, and it is for the better to compete against each other rather than helping one another. In terms of college applications, the elaborate volunteer service and extracurriculars made possible in at least some way by their parents’ contribution counted as students’ success stories, but another's struggle to balance their educational priorities and helping the family pay for dinner would also be an issue they had to deal with by themselves. Noam Chomsky in the documentary “Requiem for the American Dream” similarly explains that ‘attacking solidarity’ is one of the key principles that support the society we are in. Public education has also been deeply and directly affected by this dimension of neoliberalism, as according to Chomsky,
“Public schools are based on the principle of solidarity. I no longer have children in school. They're grown up, but the principle of solidarity says, “I happily pay taxes so that the kid across the street can go to school.” Now, that’s normal human emotion. You have to drive that out of people’s heads. “I don’t have kids in school. Why should I pay taxes? Privatize it,” so on. The public education system, all the way from kindergarten to higher education, is under severe attack” (Chomsky).
He points out that the people who are picked to government positions to help these financially challenged people are the very ones who forced them into the crisis: the rich and powerful, who have gained control over the election by exploiting consumers. While they implement a rule just for the poor - “don’t expect any help from the government” (Chomsky), the government would continue to effectively marginalize the poor and people of color through policies that keep them from attaining a better future. In the book “The Color of the Law,” author Richard Rothstein illustrates how racist government housing policies called redlining effectively prevented black and white families from buying houses close to each other, forcing black families to live in houses in worse conditions with limited resources, which worsened the gap between their neighborhoods over time (Rothstein, 50).
As a student deeply interested in the field of psychology, however, I can not emphasize enough how this numerical gap has harmed the cognitive decisions we make about how we treat each other based on race. Earlier American history has proven that segregation had a detrimental effect on children’s self perception as black Americans. Widely known for its groundbreaking role in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, Mamie and Kenneth Clark’s “doll tests” showed that black children preferred white dolls over black dolls that resembled them more, and even struggled to identify with the black dolls (Blakemore). When Kenneth Clark was invited to replicate his test despite increasing threats, he recalled that “we had to test those children… These children saw themselves as inferior and they accepted the inferiority as part of reality” (Blakemore). Segregation had scarred the identities of young black children, who were likely under a psychological state of “learned helplessness,” where they are convinced that they can not change who they are or the situation they are in, even if the opportunity is present. The identity they were born with had determined the other aspects of their self worth and future potential, and the children had done nothing wrong.
Segregation is hardly as robust and rampant in the United States now, but I have repeatedly heard the soul crushing testimonies of black parents who had to teach their children that they were just ‘not the same’ as their white peers and make them conscious about their race in a hardly uplifting spotlight. In light of the endless police brutality against black people, I read many stories about the unsettling daily lives of African American people and how a public source of safety can actually become a life-threatening figure to them. This perspective is far from new either. The very logic unjustly categorized Darryl Lester to a class for educable mentally retarded children and robbed him of an appropriate elementary education in the 1960s. If a black child was asked a moral question of what he or she would do if there was a wallet left behind in a store, they would most certainly decide to leave it, unlike a white participant who would find the manager and hand it to them. The latter answer would be the best choice, except the black child would raise unnecessary suspicions of themselves that the white child would almost never attract (Cusick and Walters). A black child would be taught, unlike a white child, that their race can indicate negative connotations and is best to act in an unprovocative way, sometimes forcing them to prioritize their safety over good deeds.
While administering IQ tests to black children like Darryl Lester is now illegal, I can affirm that we still have a much more dangerous determinant with a strong influence over students’ future: the SAT. The SAT is guilty of not only economic discrimination, but racial discrimination as well, much like IQ tests. Richard V. Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias’s analysis of 2015 SAT test scores found significantly and consistently lower test scores in black and Latino students compared to Asian and white students (Reeves and Halikias). Yet, colleges continue to use SAT test scores as an indicator of future educational success, an oblivious response to the detrimental effects of systematic racism through neoliberalism, redlining, and other inadequate public systems that have persisted to this day, keeping many at an unfair disadvantage that goes unacknowledged.
But it’s never too late to recognize these imperfections in the world we live in. Neoliberalism and powerful political tactics have deepened the racial rift among us, but we have the power to amend those mistakes. As Dr. Martin Luther King stated, “We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live” (King). The first step is to regain our solidarity: the willingness to pay for public schools so that the kid next door can learn how to read, for healthcare so that an old lady living by herself can afford a visit to the doctor, and for helping the disadvantaged achieve better support to find a better life. The situation is even more dire at this time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Under a chaotic government, we have been politically divided and some forced to resort to harmful practices while the neoliberal, precarious lives that many of us live in become hopelessly exposed. Only with the individual caring for another can we begin to regain the collective empathy for each other. The identities we are born with, like our race and gender, should become and remain a part of us, but not an obstacle we are taught to overcome or refuse to accept. At a greater structural level, our voices should echo in public policies and the people who represent us. It’s definitely not easy, but there are solutions to achieve a better future.
In our number-heavy society we live in, it’s hard to grasp how our minds are affected by the small inequalities we are trained to live and bear with. Psychological studies have barely begun to focus on nonWEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic - populations and uncover how people of color potentially view the world in a different perspective. Yet it is an unwavering fact that black people have been systemically harmed and blocked from the same path to success that white people are allowed to take for granted. I now look back at the GATE certification exam and standardized tests I took in elementary school and wonder how those scores may have affected my classmates differently. Our paths may not have been predetermined by those numbers, but it certainly did affect my parents’ and own attitude towards school and learning when I achieved a “good” score; what should have been a test of aptitude so often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of which we can hardly see the extent of its effect.
Works Cited
Blakemore, Erin. “How Dolls Helped Win Brown v. Board of Education.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 27 Mar. 2018.
Chomsky, Noam. Requiem for the American Dream. 2015.
Creamer, John. “Poverty Rates for Blacks and Hispanics Reached Historic Lows in 2019.” The United States Census Bureau, 15 Sept. 2020.
“Economy in Fremont, California.” Fremont, California Economy, 2018.
King Jr. Martin Luther. “The World House”. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? pp. 177-202. Beacon, 2010.
“Kushner Says Black People Must 'Want to Be Successful'.” AP NEWS, Associated Press, 26 Oct. 2020.
Monbiot, George. “Neoliberalism – the Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 15 Apr. 2016.
Park, Jennifer. “School Finance.” Education Week, 11 Dec. 2020.
Reeves, Richard V., and Dimitrios Halikias. “Race Gaps in SAT Scores Highlight Inequality and Hinder Upward Mobility.” Brookings, Brookings, 15 Aug. 2017.
Romney, Lee, et al. “G: The Miseducation of Larry P: Radiolab.” WNYC Studios, 7 June 2019.
Rothstein, Richard. “Racial Zoning.” The Color of Law. Liveright, 2017. pp. 39-75
Torpey, Elka. “Measuring the Value of Education : Career Outlook.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Apr. 2018.
“What Is the SAT?” The Princeton Review.
Wickline, Veronica. “What Does It Take to Get into Harvard? (From a Harvard Grad).” CollegeVine, 20 Nov. 2020.