Where does the SAT fit with helping Black college-bound students?

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By Delece Smith-Barrow

Leaders of just about every organization, corporation, college and university have publicly announced their commitment to Black lives, and this list includes the parent company behind the SAT, the College Board.

At the beginning of June, the College Board replaced the usual homepage of its website with a message titled “We are DIASPORA” from the organization’s Black employees, written in all-white type on a solid black background.

“We are in terrible fear for the safety of our own children and the students we serve,” it reads. And later: “Our organization’s purpose is for all students to own their future. And if Black students’ futures do not matter, our purpose is broken.”

It also said the College Board is donating $50,000 to organizations that academically support students of color and champion their civil rights. But some advocates for students of color say the statement is missing the mark, and that the SAT’s very existence perpetuates the achievement gap between Black and white students – something that well-meaning donations can’t fix.

“What they’ve failed to do is look at themselves in the mirror, and see how they themselves are perpetuating racial stereotypes, that they are contributing to barriers to higher education and the opportunities that flow from that for black students,” said David Hinojosa, director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, when I asked him for his thoughts on the statement. “I was expecting to see something that they were going to revisit or revise their institutional practices, and it’s absent here.”

On June 16, the Lawyers’ Committee, along with 10 other organizations, published a letter addressed to all colleges and universities that asked them to eliminate the consideration of SAT and ACT scores as part of the upcoming admissions cycle. One reason, the letter said, is because bias is built into the test development process and the test has at times excluded questions that minorities perform well on and kept questions on which they perform poorly.

What students learn before the exam – in school, at home and through private tutoring – often determines how they’ll do at answering the exam’s math, English and reading questions. White students often score well above Black and Latino test takers.

For the class of 2019, the mean SAT score for Black students was 933 and for Latinos it was 978. White students had a mean score of 1114. In 2018, the mean scores were 946, 990 and 1123, respectively. A 1600 is the highest score on the exam.

“There’s a long history of bias there,” said Christopher Nellum, deputy director of research and policy for Education Trust-West, which advocates for students of color and low-income students in California. “In states around the country, we have challenges with systemic racism and bias that we see through the funding structures. And so, oftentimes Black students are in schools that potentially don’t have enough teachers so that students can get the high-quality learning that they deserve in K-12.”

The University of California Board of Regents recently voted to phase out the SAT and the ACT as an admissions requirement by 2025. And dozens of schools across the country have dropped their SAT and ACT requirements for the upcoming admission cycle because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The SAT remains a more accurate measure of a test-taker’s family background than of an applicant’s capacity to do college level work,” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director for FairTest, which advocates for the elimination of the SAT, in a statement FairTest distributed last fall.

The College Board has fumbled in recent years as it tries to even the playing field for students from various socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. In 2019, it tried to score students on adversity and was widely criticized. That same year, a number of wealthy parents were accused of helping to rig the exam so their children would get a high score. But the organization has also taken steps to help students without the money and means to excel in their pursuit of college. In November of 2018, for example, it launched the College Board Opportunity Scholarships, a program that helps students with various steps of the admissions process, such as creating a list of colleges and universities to apply to and completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and gives them a chance to win money at each step. Participant from the class of 2020 received nearly $5 million.

The statement on the College Board’s homepage is a reminder to “our organization and stakeholders in our organization that it’s an integral part of our work to figure out how to close the sort of outcomes gaps you see with low-income students, with first-generation students, with African-American students, with Latino students, with Native American students,” said Steve Bumbaugh, senior vice president of college and career access at the College Board.

Priscilla Rodriguez, vice president of college readiness assessments at the College Board, believes the exam is bias-free; if anything, she said, it highlights how things are unfolding in the K-12 school systems.

“Any objective measure of student achievement – what they’ve learned and where they are – will shine a light on any inequalities or inequities in the education system that students come up through,” she said.

Should all colleges and universities remove SAT or ACT scores from their admissions requirements? What’s the best way to evaluate if a prospective student should be accepted into college? Email or tweet me your thoughts.

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Where does the SAT fit with helping Black college-bound students?

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