 Testing The Limits Of America
Even as the patience of our neighbors was tested this weekend by our staff cheering for our favorite men's and women's college basketball teams, the Nebraska Cornhuskers, we thought about another kind of test, the SAT, and the news announced last week that the exam was changing once again.
While the test was adjusted in 2005, the adjustments made nearly a decade ago are effectively being wiped out next year, making the essay optional once again, while ending the penalty for wrong answers.
As a staff with children, and led by a former college professor, education has always been an important topic to us - and one that we think much of the media gets wrong. While the biggest unaddressed problem with education in America remains the growing disaster of the Student Loan Crisis, the lack of investment in our public schools nationwide has also become a major problem - in large part due to the age of austerity that's been imposed on America by Republicans in Congress.
Still, as Chris Hayes and other education and testing experts pointed out last Friday, the SAT test, along with its competitor, the ACT, has unfortunately become ubiquitous as a shortcut for often overburdened college admissions boards. This latest version of the SAT nominally is supposed to put the test more in line with the basic sets of skills American high school students should be graduating with, instead of the kind of obscure vocabulary lists the current SAT has focused upon for many years.
The real problem with the test, however, along with many of America's current educational standards, is that neither are currently preparing students for the world they face beyond high school. What's worse, in an American economy already suffering from the greatest economic inequality since the 1920s, the SAT has become a defacto test of a teenager's family income - not the meritocratic appraisal it claims to be...
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