Reply to Over 280 University of California STEM faculty members have signed an open letter calling on the UC Board of Regents to

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am surprised so few of them signed this letter.  Where are the rest?  Are they happy with the current state of UC education?[/quote]

You think 280 STEM professors at Berkeley isn't a lot?  That's half the total STEM faculty.[/quote]

It's 280 all over the UC system, not just Berkeley.[/quote]
Not all professors agree with this. I don’t know why they’re recommending the SAT when the UC system was supposed to be developing its own rigorous exam designed by UC faculty.[/quote]

They looked into the CAASPP as an alternative.  The CAASPP is California's state-wide academic barometer test given to different grades, like 8th, 11th.  The same racial disparities that afflicted the SAT were found in the CAASPP.  The use of standardized testing is a very sensitive one in California because there is the belief that white supremacy has infected the entirety of how academic achievement is measured and that whatever path California takes has to be completely distinct from all past iterations.

The UC system looked at developing its own test but decided against it.[/quote]
And that’s their problem. I don’t doubt UC admissions when they say they have data on each high school spanning decades. Developing their own test means an ability to accurately assess where the skill gaps remain in California public schools and having a quantifiable way to make recommendations rather than throwing out “x% of students failed and aren’t ready.”

[b]Gaps will always exist, because income isn’t uniform across racial lines[/b]. We need to get past the inequality part and start solutions. The SAT is alright- it really leaves a lot to be desired in terms of rigor and substance over form. [/quote]

It's more than income. Black students from the highest earning families score about the same as white students from the lowest earning families on the SAT. If you waved a magic wand and blew away the racial income gap, the SAT gap would narrow slightly but not disappear. The problem is more intractable than most people realize.

When affirmative action was around, liberals tended to support it because they were in denial about how big the gaps actually were, and figured it was just a small thumb on the scale. Conservatives tended to oppose it because they were also in denial about how big the gaps actually were, and figured URMs could just work a little harder to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Both were wrong, and the UC system is finding out the hard way.[/quote]

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