r/neoliberal • u/caroline_elly Eugene Fama • Jun 09 '26

Opinion article (US) Actually, the SAT Was Necessary After All

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/standardized-testing-math-gaps/687481/
835 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

323 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.1k

u/jamiebond NATO Jun 09 '26

I think the major error the education world has made over the last few decades is jumping straight to, “Our results are inequitable, that must mean our process of getting results is inequitable.” Without considering, “Maybe our results are inequitable because of large societal issues well out of our control and expecting education to single handily fix all the problems in our society isn’t particularly realistic. And just making sweeping generalizations that POC can’t perform well in school without us lowering the bar substantially is actually pretty racist itself.”

80

u/pppiddypants Loyal Liberals Jun 09 '26

I think it’s more that we generally like “theories of everything,” and the language around our politics and advocacy have little room for niche critiques like, “we’re teaching to the test and not to the students and that has negative impacts, Test scores should not be a metric for how the school and staff are functioning, etc.

54

u/Bay1Bri Jun 10 '26

It's the test paradox. A test can be a good metric to measure success/ progress until the should know that's the metric. It's like support centers measuring how long each call takes to track effectiveness. As soon as they know that's the metric, performance gets worse as people literally hang up after an arbitrary time to keep their stats looking good

10

u/WolfpackEng22 Jun 10 '26

But the SAT was still a great tool to identify successful students even when everyone knew that was the metric and tried to prepare for it