The History of the SAT Is Mired in Racism and Elitism
The Perfect Score is a Teen Vogue series on standardized testing in the United States. In this op-ed, Mariana Viera explores the history of the SAT and its ties to racism, classism, and nativism.
“The SAT still promises something it can’t deliver: a way to measure merit.” - Lani Guinier
Standardized tests are supposed to be neutral, value-free assessments of how hard students work. The more students study, the more seriously they take their education, the better they will perform on these tests. In high-stakes settings, standardized tests are used as primary determinants of student access to, or else denial of, resources, opportunities, and spaces. The Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) is one such test. Ostensibly, the students who work hardest will earn higher scores, and those scores will give them an upper hand in the college admissions process. This particular narrative neatly aligns with the illusion of America’s meritocratic tradition: Those who work the hardest will reap the greatest benefits, never mind structural inequality. But studies have proven, time and again, that standardized tests are much better at revealing things like household income, race, and level of parental education than they are at predicting the success of students in college classrooms.
In a deeply flawed and unequal educational system that has continuously failed its most vulnerable children and their communities, high-stakes standardized tests function to reinforce that same system. When we accept the myth that these tests are merit-based, we also accept the idea that race and class gaps in standardized-test results, which have remained essentially unchanged over the last 20 years, are due to individual and group shortcomings, not structural ones.
Even if we accept the premise that the best way to create and sustain an ethical, justice-oriented educational system is by rewarding “high-achieving” students, the system remains deeply flawed. The tests themselves have a long history of favoring white, middle-class students by testing bodies of knowledge that are fundamentally white and middle-class; therefore, the tests reinforce the idea that white identity is the default American identity.
In How the SAT Creates Built-in-Headwinds, Jay Rosner, a national admissions-test expert, explains a process that was used by SAT designers to decide which questions would be included on the test:
“Compare two 1998 SAT verbal [section] sentence-completion items with similar themes: The item correctly answered by more blacks than whites was discarded by [the Educational Testing Service] (ETS), whereas the item that has a higher disparate impact against blacks became part of the actual SAT. On one of the items, which was of medium difficulty, 62% of whites and 38% of African-Americans answered correctly, resulting in a large impact of 24%...On this second item, 8% more African-Americans than whites answered correctly...”
In essence, questions for future tests were deemed “good questions” if they replicated the outcomes of previous exams; specifically, tests where black and Latinx students scored lower than their white peers. Test-makers might argue that race was not explicitly used to determine which questions would be included, but the method used was inherently racist and biased toward knowledge held by white students. Beyond the issue of affirming whiteness as a marker of neutrality — as questions are deemed to be good when white students do well on them — the SAT is mired in a long history of racism, classism, and nativism.
The story of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (now Scholastic Assessment Test) begins with [Army IQ tests] that were (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/where/three.html) developed during World War I. In 1917, a group of psychologists, led by then-president of the American Psychological Association (APA), Robert M. Yerkes, created the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests to measure the intelligence of recruits and help the Army identify those of “superior mental ability” and those who were “mentally inferior,” among other things. In 1923, Carl Brigham, one of the men who developed these intelligence tests, published A Study of American Intelligence. In it, he used data gathered from these IQ tests to argue the following: “The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro. These are the plain, if somewhat ugly, facts that our study shows. The deterioration of American intelligence is not inevitable, however, if public action can be aroused to prevent it.” This was the era of Jim Crow, de jure segregation, and lynchings.
Armed with the pseudoscience of these American psychologists, eugenicists promoted laws and movements for the preservation of “racial purity.” States began passing laws (later confirmed to be constitutional by a Supreme Court case that permitted the forced sterilization of people with “defective” traits, preventing them from “polluting” America’s ruling class.
In an essay, titled “Hiding Behind High-stakes Testing: Meritocracy, Objectivity and Inequality in U.S. Education,” professor Wayne Au of the University of Washington Bothell wrote, “...the assumptive objectivity of standardized testing was thus used to ‘scientifically’ declare the poor, immigrants, women, and nonwhites in the U.S. as mentally inferior, and to justify educational systems that mainly reproduced extant socioeconomic inequalities.”
Carl Brigham eventually used his experience with Army intelligence tests to create another standardized test, this time for the College Board]. Together, they restructured the Army intelligence tests and came up with the “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” which was administered to high school students for the first time in 1926.
Almost a century later, the use of high-stakes standardized testing is ubiquitous in our educational system. And no matter how many iterations of the SAT have been produced since 1926, it still has explicit roots in classism, nativism, and white supremacy. This truth will never change, good intentions notwithstanding. In many ways, the SAT continues to be a tool of the same structural system of white supremacy that it was originally meant to undergird. As long as liberation for all is a thing of the future in this country, high-stakes standardized testing can never be neutral, color- blind, or fair.
If the first wave of widespread high-stakes standardized testing in education came in the 1920s, the modern wave was spurred by the Reagan administration’s publication of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform in 1983. The report read: “Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world….If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” And so began the modern period of relying on data gathered from standardized tests to tell the story of America’s classrooms and as the primary means of understanding the needs of our nation’s children.
From the beginning, the use of high-stakes standardized testing was a bipartisan effort. In 2002, the Bush administration signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into law. Mandated by NCLB, schools whose students did not perform high enough on state tests faced sanctions in the form of the loss of federal funding. In the aforementioned essay, Au wrote, “NCLB represents the culmination of a 20-year trajectory of education policy that centered on high-stakes, standardized testing as the tool for enforcing educational reform in the United States.” Barack Obama’s secretary of education Arne Duncan exacerbated this “test and punish” system by doubling down on the use of high-stakes standardized tests to assess teacher and school performance. During this time, federal laws became driving forces behind teacher firings and school closings, which disproportionately affected (and continue to affect) children of color, namely black and Latinx students.
The insistence of far too many people in the field of education to obsessively quantify and measure students, districts, and states while simultaneously disregarding the reasons why discrepancies between groups exist has been the driving force behind a full-frontal attack on black and brown communities throughout the country.
If anything, the SAT — its ubiquity, its usage, its results — is proof of the miles we have left to reach social justice and liberation for all in this country. From the beginning, educators, scholars, and activists have steadily challenged this country’s preferred model of education. Still, the desire and willingness of people to breath life into the fallacy of America’s meritocracy persist.
Sometimes, when we’ve done something for so long, it becomes very difficult to imagine anything else. But there are real alternatives to models of education that rob our children of opportunities to enhance their creativity where they already exist, culturally, linguistically, and creatively; that don’t reduce them to numbers and data to be sorted, classified, and categorized. The path to a just educational system in this country is entangled in much larger, more complex systems of social inequality, but we can certainly begin with moving away from systems that are proven unproductive and detrimental at every turn.
Related: Why Do Schools Rely So Much on Standardized Testing?
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