As some elite colleges resume SAT requirements in admissions, will we ever see an end to the outdated practice of weeding out prospective students on the basis of race, gender, and class?       

 BY Sonali Kolhatkar

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, higher education institutions throughout the United States started adopting a progressive standard of education that advocates had demanded for decades: they began dropping standardized tests such as the SAT and the ACT as requirements for admissions. As was the case with so many other pandemic-era societal adaptations—government economic relief that lowered poverty rates, a pause in student loan repayments, free vaccines, an end to public library late fees—this offered an opportunity for a grand experiment in promoting equality.

The move to drop the tests can actually be traced to a time before the pandemic, but it was accelerated by students being unable to travel to testing sites during the lockdowns. Further, the mass racial justice uprising of summer 2020 pressured elites into embracing ideas rooted in equity.

Many celebrated the spurning of tests as the right direction for institutions that have ensured the maintenance of white supremacist patriarchy since their inception. But as elite universities such as Yale, Harvard, and Caltech recently reneged on the promise of leveling the playing field by returning to test requirements, are those celebrations premature?

Research has confirmed over and over that requiring students to take the SAT or ACT weeds out women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. As a physics and astronomy undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, I participated in efforts in the early 1990s to address how such tests undermine women’s entry into STEM fields. I was a perfect example: a straight-A student whose academic record had only one stain: a mediocre SAT score which severely narrowed my college options.

Robert Schaeffer, director of public education at FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which is one of the leading advocacy groups against required SAT and ACT testing, told the 19th, “Despite the fact that young women get lower scores on the test than young men, they earn higher grades when matched for identical courses in college than the boys.”

Although the SAT has evolved significantly over the years, its origins in racist beliefs are telling. The test’s precursors, the Army Alpha and Beta tests, were analyzed and championed by Carl Brigham, a psychology professor at Princeton University and a eugenicist who believed that testing offered unbiased and scientific proof of white superiority.

Black and Latino students routinely score lower on the SAT’s math section compared to whites and Asians. This is not evidence of a racial difference in educational ability and intelligence as Brigham might have liked to believe. Rather, it is evidence of racial bias in the test.

There is a similar bias based on class. Wealthier students routinely do better on the test than low-income students. This is no surprise given the lucrative industry built on test preparation, helping students navigate the notoriously tricky test in exchange for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The fact that SAT scores are used to determine many a student’s eligibility for scholarships further entrenches class bias.

Indeed, because of the SAT’s racial and class bias, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2019 that officials at the University of California were convinced “that performance on the SAT and ACT was so strongly influenced by family income, parents’ education and race that using them for high-stakes admissions decisions was simply wrong.”

By 2021, in response to a lawsuit brought by the Compton Unified School District, the entire UC system at this experiment has been in place shows promise in opening up higher education to historically excluded communities.permanently dropped tests as requirements for admissions. The move seemed to herald a new era in higher education, and indeed, data from the few years th

But, as advocates of racial, gender, and economic justice painstakingly chipped away at the exclusivity of higher education, conservatives predictably pushed back. A wave of right-wing attacks in recent years has taken aim at affirmative action admissions policies, the teaching of Critical Race Theory, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) campus initiatives.

It was only a matter of time before elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Caltech did a backflip on their commitment to equity by reverting back to SAT requirements. Opinions of elite commentators such as New York Times Education Editor David Leonhardt helped validate this decision. Leonhardt wrote, “Standardized tests have become especially unpopular among political progressives, and university campuses are dominated by progressives.”

He highlighted a 2023 paper by an organization called Opportunity Insights to justify reinstating test requirements. The paper concluded that “SAT/ACT scores and academic ratings are highly predictive of post-college success.” It was precisely the ammunition elite institutions were waiting for. Harvard specifically cited the paper in its reversal on testing.

But, according to FairTest’s Schaeffer, the conclusions that Opportunity Insights comes to are flawed. He told the New York Times, “[W]hen you eliminate the role of wealth, test scores are not better than high school G.P.A.” The organization, in a report responding to Leonhardt and Opportunity Insights, accused researchers of omitting student demographics such as “family income, parental education, and race/ethnicity.” They found that when accounting for these critical demographic markers, the SAT fails to predict academic merit and that students’ grade point averages (GPA) in high school are better markers.

Aside from GPA, public school educators have backed the idea of “Performance Based Assessments” (PBA) as a better alternative to the SAT. Such assessments measure the totality of students’ expertise, achievements, and ideas. They are, by design, complex and varied—just as human beings are—and are based on interaction and collaboration—just as society functions in real life.

The SAT is largely a multiple-choice test. It is an individualistic assessment designed for an individualist mindset and is therefore an exceedingly narrow measure of a person. Aside from its essay section, each question has only one correct answer embedded in an array of wrong answers. There is no room for complex thinking and ideas. According to FairTest, “Using the SAT as the gatekeeper for higher education turns out to test one thing above all else: existing station in life.”

Standardized tests, and the idea that universities may revert back to using them, are a source of undue stress on students and their families. Thankfully, thousands of universities and colleges remain test-free or test-optional. Ultimately, only a tiny sliver of the nation’s students are able to attend the institutions that steadfastly cling to elitist practices. If anything, the decision by some to insist on outdated racist, sexist, and classist standards is a further indication of how irrelevant they are to modern American society.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

 This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

WHAT'S STANDING IN THE WAY? 

 By Sonali Kolhatkar

It’s true that the number of uninsured Americans has dropped to an all-time low. But that fact obscures the failures of our patchwork, profit-driven health care system.

Here’s one of many indicators about how broken the United States health care system is: Guns seem to be easier and cheaper to access than treatment for the wounds they cause. A survivor of the recent mass shooting in Half Moon Bay, California, reportedly said to Gov. Gavin Newsom that he needed to keep his hospital stay as short as possible in order to avoid a massive medical bill. Meanwhile, the suspected perpetrator seemed to have had few obstacles in his quest to legally obtain a semi-automatic weapon to commit deadly violence.

Americans are at the whim of a bewildering patchwork of employer-based private insurance plans, individual health plans via a government-run online marketplace, or government-run health care (for those lucky enough to be eligible). The coverage and costs of plans vary dramatically so that even if one has health insurance there is rarely a guarantee that there will be no out-of-pocket costs associated with accessing care.

It’s hardly surprising then that the latest Gallup poll about health care affirms what earlier polls have said: that a majority of Americans want their government to ensure health coverage for all. In fact, nearly three-quarters of all Democrats want a government-run system.

Gallup also found that a record high number of people put off addressing health concerns because of the cost of care. Thirty-eight percent of Americans said they delayed getting treatment in 2022—that’s 12 percentage points higher than the year before. Unsurprisingly, lower-income Americans were disproportionately affected.

Women are especially impacted, with more women than men delaying treatment as per the same Gallup poll. The findings were consistent with results published by researchers at New York University’s School of Global Public Health—that women’s health care was increasingly unaffordable, compared to men’s—in a study that solely focused on people with employer-based health coverage. Imagine how out-of-reach health care is for uninsured women.

Added to that, Republican-led abortion bans have made it even harder for American women to obtain reproductive health care. On the 50th anniversary of the recently overturned Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, abortion providers in Massachusetts, for example, reported a steady stream of people driving to their state—one where abortion remains legal—to access care.

President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party appear to think that this grim status quo is perfectly acceptable. Democrats’ reliance on the Obama-era Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a bulwark against Republican opposition to any government intervention in health care seems to be resoundingly successful—on paper. In December 2022, Biden touted the fact that 11.5 million Americans, a record high number, had signed up for ACA plans during the last enrollment period. He said, “Gains like these helped us drive down the uninsured rate to eight percent earlier this year, its lowest level in history.”

His administration, rather than working to fulfill what a majority of his party’s constituents want—a government-run health care system—has continued instead to tweak the ACA by extending a period of discounted monthly premiums for private insurance plans. Such tweaks are not permanent. Neither are they a panacea for accessing adequate care. If anything, they are a façade protecting profit-based private insurance companies.

A survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that although the number of insured Americans is now at an all-time high, more than 40 percent of those who bought ACA plans and nearly 30 percent of those with employer-based plans were underinsured—that is, the plans were inadequate to cover their health care needs.

By focusing solely on the number of people who had health plans as a measure of success, the White House is participating in a great coverup of the ongoing American health care tragedy.

Meanwhile, just over the horizon from Biden’s celebration of record numbers of ACA signups is the fact that millions of people currently enrolled in the Medicaid government health plan could lose access because of the end of an emergency provision that allowed for “continuous enrollment.” That provision expires at the end of March 2023. If all Americans were automatically enrolled in government-provided health care regardless of eligibility, this would not be a concern.

Right-wing sources, so terrified that too many Americans want a government-run health system, are busy shaping public opinion against it. The Pacific Research Institute’s Sally Pipes published an op-ed about how Canada’s national health system was a good reason why the U.S. should not have a similar program. Using the deadly logic of a free marketeer, she wrote, “In Canada, health care is ‘free’ at the point of service. As a result, demand for care is sky-high.”

The implication is that charging people for service would reduce the demand, just as it would for, say, an electric vehicle. In Pipes’ world, people are accessing health care just for fun, and if they were charged money for it, their ailments might resolve themselves without treatment.

The Heritage Foundation also published an attack on Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), gleefully claiming that it is “cratering,” and warning that it is a lesson for American liberals who might support a similar “single-payer” system in the United States.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board published a similar warning, claiming that the NHS was “failing patients, with deadly consequences.”

It’s puzzling why the Pacific Research Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Wall Street Journal appear unconcerned about the 330,000 Americans who lost their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic simply because they don’t live in a nation with a universal health care program.

The U.S. spends nearly twice as much per capita on health care than other comparable high-income nations. According to Health Affairs, excessive administrative costs are the main reason for this discrepancy—these are nonmedical costs associated with delivering health care in a patchwork system of employer-based private health and publicly subsidized plans. In fact, “administrative spending accounts for 15–30 percent of health care spending.”

Again, right-wing media outlets and think tanks appear unconcerned by this disturbing fact. They only want to convince Americans that a government-run health plan is a bad idea. And, sadly, the Democratic Party leaders like Biden seem to agree implicitly.

The National Union of Healthcare Workers together with Healthy California Now created an online calculator for individuals to determine how much money they would save if the U.S. had a single-payer system.

I have an employer-based health care plan that is considered very good. Using the calculator, I determined that I would save more than $16,000 if California, the state where I live, had a single-payer system. That’s money I could be saving for my children’s higher education or for my retirement.

The victims of mass shootings, like the Half Moon Bay survivor, are saddled with high costs of care on top of the trauma of having been shot. Every year, there are more than 80,000 survivors of injuries from firearms in the United States. Having a single-payer health care system would not fix our epidemic of gun violence. But it would certainly make it easier to bear.

Canada and Britain’s state-run systems of health care may be imperfect, but they are a vast improvement on the survival-of-the-fittest approach that the U.S. takes.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The Republican Party’s latest wave of attacks against anyone who threatens the white supremacist patriarchy is couched in false concern for health and well-being.
By Sonali Kolhatkar                  This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of Independent Media Institute
Republicans are resorting to their age-old tactic of manufactured moral outrage to distract from the fact that they have no economic agenda other than to enrich the already wealthy. It would be laughable if their culture wars didn’t have a deadly impact on people’s lives. From attacks on the right to an abortion, to the right to be transgender, to the right to study accurate history, conservative attacks on vulnerable populations have reached a fever pitch. And it’s destroying the nation.

As if overturning Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court in 2022 wasn’t enough, 20 GOP state attorneys general are now targeting pharmacy chains Walgreens and CVS for fulfilling mail orders of the abortion drug mifepristone. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a federal agency, in January expanded availability of the drug across the country. The abortion pill was relatively unknown some years ago but is now used in more than half of all abortions nationwide, likely in response to the rapidly disappearing access to surgical abortions. Now, as they go after mail-order abortion pills, Republicans are showing just how hell-bent they are on ensuring that the bodies of women (and transgender men) remain glorified baby incubators.

Republicans claim that in addition to protecting the life of a collection of fetal cells that they are determined to personify, they are working in the interests of women’s health. Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey explained his opposition to the abortion pill in a written statement, saying he was merely “protecting the health of women and their unborn children.”

However, not only are abortion pills safer than penicillin or Viagra, but going through pregnancy and childbirth is far more dangerous to women’s health than aborting a fetus. According to a New York Times report on one study of the effects of abortion restrictions on women, “Women who were denied an abortion and gave birth reported more chronic headaches or migraines, joint pain and gestational hypertension compared with those who had an abortion.” Furthermore, “They also reported more life-threatening complications like eclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage, and burdens that included higher exposure to domestic violence and increased poverty.” (It is a wonder that some of us choose to have children at all.)

The GOP’s war on transgender people has also gained steam. Just as Republicans are determined to control the bodies of people who want to terminate pregnancies, they are battling the right of transgender people to transition via surgeries, hormone supplements, or other gender-affirming medical treatments. It’s a shocking attack on people’s right to be who they want and need to be—one that targets young people in particular.

Again, the right wing uses concerns over health as cover for its attacks on human rights. For example, GOP lawmakers in Texas have introduced 35 anti-LGBTQ bills, three of which would view medical care as child abuse. But, even though the vast majority of the anti-LGBTQ bills that are introduced fail to become law, according to the Trevor Project, the debate itself is deeply traumatizing for young people. The organization found that “86% of transgender and nonbinary youth say recent debates around anti-trans bills have negatively impacted their mental health.” It has further encouraged bullying, and the risk of suicide.

Writing in the Nation, Amy Littlefield and Heron Greenesmith point out how “The right is deploying tactics against trans rights that are eerily similar to those mounted against abortion rights over the past five decades.” It’s the same Republican playbook over and over: claim that attacks on vulnerable people are in their own best interests to distract from the fact that the party has no actual plan to make people’s lives truly better.

Like the attacks on abortion and transgender rights, Republicans are also so worried about the supposed harm to students of American history that their third major battlefront is educational courses that question white supremacy and its impact. Claiming they are fighting a college-level academic approach to history called critical race theory, GOP leaders such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are busy banning books and classes at all levels of education. DeSantis’s latest assault is a ban on a new AP-level high school African American studies course that the College Board spent years devising and is set to pilot in 60 schools across the country.

The pushback by DeSantis and his allies has already yielded results. The College Board seemingly capitulated and sanitized the AP course, paring back mentions of Black feminism, queer theory, and the Black Lives Matter movement and replacing it with a new section on Black conservatism.

The move came at the same time that congressional Republicans took aim at Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), unceremoniously stripping her of membership in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy justified his ousting of Omar from the committee over her alleged antisemitism because she has criticized the state of Israel. Never mind that criticism of Israel is not equivalent to racist attacks on Jews; two of the GOP’s own representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), whose antisemitism is well documented, are now poised to regain their committee seats.

In a speech on the House floor, Omar rightly pointed out that the Republican attack was about “who gets to be an American.” She called out the GOP for its earlier culture war aimed at the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and for spreading rumors that he was a secret Muslim and not a natural born U.S. citizen.

The message that emerges from the conservative party is that those who are not either straight, white, cisgender men, or in service of white supremacist patriarchy, had better fall in line or face prohibition and the threats of violence.

Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans are busy readying their pitchforks over the federal government’s debt, hoping to extract austerity measures in exchange for their support to raise the debt ceiling. According to the Washington Post, “the party has focused its attention on slimming down federal health care, education, science and labor programs, perhaps by billions of dollars.” And, some have “pitched a deeper examination of entitlements,” which is a euphemistic way of saying they want cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Aggressively bombarding women, transgender people, Black people, immigrants, and people of color over their bodily autonomy and their gender and racial identity is a tactic that Republicans hope will keep conservative voters loyal to the GOP and lets them off the hook on regressive economic policies. It’s a classic bait and switch—one that we ought not to fall for.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio:
Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.