Reply to Banneker versus School Without Walls

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
It’s about aptitude, not “genetic” aptitude.  Brains have plasticity, which is why education, especially ECE, is important.  And the fact that studying — learning more math and logic — can improve scores shows that skills are involved (and, I would argue, these same skills are useful in work and life).

Whether SATs predict college performance or whether it should be used for college admissions are different matters.  But the idea that the SAT is all about “genetics” is absurd.[/quote]

It's absurd if you are totally ignorant of the history of test. Once you learn that history, you will know that the SAT was explicitly and intentionally created by white supremacist and eugenicist Carl Bingham as a test of GENETIC aptitude (specifically in the context of claimed aptitude differences between races).

[/quote]

The Asian obsession over SATs is particularly ironic given that Bingham was staunchly anti-immigrant. There were no "good immigrants" in his estimation, even if his then targets were primarily Southern and Eastern Europeans[/quote]

Breaking news!!!  George Washington was a slave owner!!![/quote]

that's also important history to know even if better known than the racist roots of the SATs[/quote]

You probably want to return us to British rule because George Washington was a "racist."

You realize that Americans didn't invent standardized tests, right?  They date back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) in China, when officials designed civil service exams to choose people to work in the government based on merit rather than on family status.

Standardized tests are a tool for evaluating kids using an objective, unbiased standard.  Sure, they aren't perfect but they are less subjective than grades, recommendation letters, and the like.
[/quote]

+1 Exactly![/quote]

Except that they’re neither “objective” nor “unbiased”.  If you want to argue that they should be the “standard” because they correlate with particular types of academic performance for specific— and delineated— populations, fine. That’s a completely different argument from the one that many seem to be asserting, though.  [/quote]

Who appointed you to determine what the arguments are?

The SAT has been around long enough by now, and has been reinvented enough times, to have emerged as a reasonably objective and unbiased test when taken my HS students who have the brains, drive and academic prep to undertake BA work on good form. If you're determined to see formal education structures in this country, and the standardized tests that measure progress within them, as racist, elitist, classist and discriminatory, you'll surely find your grist for the mill. More power to recent immigrant communities in this countries, particularly immigrants from Asia, for focusing on academic performance, vs. whining about unfair standardized tests that favor whites and the well-off.[/quote]

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