Will Getting Rid Of Admissions Tests Make Selective Schools More Equitable?
The fault is not in the tests but in standard teaching approaches that don't work well for most students.
The combination of Covid-19 and the push for racial justice has led some school districts to abandon admissions tests for selective schools. Will those moves lead to greater equity or just paper over more fundamental problems?
In New York City, the district with the highest proportion of selective public schools in the country, the coronavirus appears to have accomplished what years of protest hadn’t. Instead of assigning students to some middle schools partly on the basis of standardized tests—which were deemed impossible to administer safely—the city will use a lottery. Many, including the editorial board of the New York Times, are pushing for wider reform at the high school level.
Similar developments are unfolding elsewhere. Admissions tests and other criteria for selective high schools have been suspended in Washington, D.C.; Fairfax County, Virginia; Boston; and San Francisco. In some places grades, interviews, or scores on state standardized tests will be used; in others, admission will be entirely by lottery. Even when the coronavirus is cited as the reason rather than the predominance of white and Asian students at elite schools, the moves have been greeted by many as a step towards equity.
New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante has suggested the trend should include colleges—and not just any colleges, but the Ivy League. What if those institutions were to “randomly select students from a vast pool that included more than merely the exceptionally credentialed?” For too long, she argues, under-resourced community colleges have been doing “the hard work of remediation for students coming out of high schools ill equipped to give them the skills they need to thrive after graduation.” Why not shift that work to schools with huge endowments?
Hostility to admissions tests is running parallel to pushback against standardized testing in general—and even the concept of an “achievement gap,” the term education reformers have relied on to decry the gulf in test scores between white and more affluent students on the one hand and lower-income, Black, and Hispanic students on the other. Critics say the phrase casts blame on students for low scores, fosters negative stereotypes, and is racist.
They also say the scores reflect only students’ demographics, amount of test prep, or access to in-school resources like experienced teachers and rigorous curricula. Test scores, they argue, have little bearing on students’ ability to do high-level work. Public outrage has been fueled by the conviction that the dearth of Black and Hispanic students at elite schools can’t possibly be an accurate reflection of their potential.
That conviction is correct. Scientists agree that average intelligence doesn’t vary among racial groups. The racial imbalance at elite schools is therefore deeply unfair. The question is whether getting rid of admissions tests—or standardized tests in general—is the best way to address it.
There are reasons to believe it could help. Some students just don’t test well, and scores don’t necessarily reflect traits like resilience and self-discipline that are crucial for academic success. But test scores do tell us something—and what they tell us is worth paying attention to.
It’s important to understand what reading tests (and to some extent math tests) actually measure. They don’t try to assess whether kids have learned whatever content they’ve been taught. Instead, they aim to measure general reading comprehension skills. But those skills don’t exist in the abstract; they’re largely dependent on how much students know about the topic and how familiar they are with academic syntax and vocabulary. The more you know, the better your chances of understanding a passage on a test and answering the questions correctly.
Here are four things to bear in mind about test scores and admissions:
1. Having a lot of academic knowledge and vocabulary doesn’t just help you do well on tests. It also helps you do well in school—and in life. So to that extent, test scores can predict academic performance.
2. Students from more affluent and highly educated families have more access to academic knowledge, and Black and Hispanic students are less likely to come from those families. At the same time, there is way more that schools could do to provide all children with academic knowledge, especially at the elementary level.
3. In our current system, gaps in academic knowledge—which are reflected in test scores—grow larger and harder to narrow as grade levels go up. By the time students reach high school, they’re often huge.
4. Grades and teacher recommendations can also predict academic success, but they vary depending on the school environment. A hard-working, conscientious student at a school where most students are struggling might get straight A’s but could still have a lot less academic knowledge than a straight-A student at a school where most students are working at a high level.
So what does this all mean if we want to achieve greater equity in admissions?
1. The most dubious proposal is to open up the Ivy League to students who need remediation for the deficiencies of their K-12 education. I’m sympathetic to the idea of divesting the Ivy League of its supposed magic—plenty of less prestigious schools can provide an education that is just as good. But it’s tremendously difficult to compensate for large knowledge gaps at the college level, and there’s no reason to believe that Ivy League schools would do a better job than community colleges. If students arrive not knowing basic things like the difference between a city and a state, or which country the United States won its independence from, or how to construct a sentence—knowledge gaps that are not unusual in high school graduates—teachers at any college may not know where to begin.
2. If selective high schools abandon admissions tests, they’re still likely to get motivated students because those are the ones who will apply. That’s especially true if schools also rely on grades and recommendations. But while motivation is helpful, high schools will also need to provide students who have knowledge gaps with tutoring and the kind of writing instruction that can boost learning. Otherwise, those schools will probably end up looking like other “diverse” high schools, where the honors or AP classes are largely populated by white and Asian students.
3. Knowledge gaps are smaller at the middle school level, so New York’s abandonment of admissions tests there has a better chance of boosting equity. But some students will still need lots of support—and it needs to consist of something more than practice with reading comprehension “skills” in order to work.
4. By far the most equitable move that any school district could make is one that isn’t being discussed: change the elementary curriculum so that it provides all children with rich content in social studies, science, literature and the arts, building their academic knowledge and vocabulary. That could not only give all students a fighting chance of doing well at selective high schools and colleges—and on tests—it could vastly elevate the quality of regular, non-selective schools.
The bottom line: Yes, there’s way more potential among Black and Hispanic students than is reflected by their numbers at elite schools. But the cause of that discrepancy isn’t testing—it’s our standard approach to teaching, which simply doesn’t work for most kids. And rather than essentially testing kids on the basis of the knowledge they’ve been able to pick up largely outside of school, let’s start tying “reading” tests to the content they’ve been taught.
The impulse is understandable, but getting rid of admissions tests—or the phrase “achievement gap”—won’t address the underlying problem any more than getting rid of tests for Covid-19 will eradicate the disease.
This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.