Tuesday, May 07, 2002

The great racial witch hunt is still on, and this time they're gunning at the SAT's

Heather McDonald weighs in with this trenchant observation.

Expect the race industry to resurrect the same arguments against content testing as were used in the 1940s, but without proposing aptitude tests in its place. There is no reason to think that the test score gap will go away with a different test, since the explanation for it lies largely in a culture that devalues academic achievement. So after spending millions on developing a new test, the education profession will be left with its old options: shooting the messenger by blaming the test for differential academic outcomes, or finally telling the truth about the cultural changes needed to overcome lagging academic achievement. The sky will fall before the latter option comes to pass, so get ready for another decade of covert racial preferences and explicit excuse-making around the new SAT.