In the wake of last week’s affirmative action decision, most analysts expect the recent enthusiasm for test-optional admissions policies to continue—if for no other reason than to make schools’ racial gerrymandering less transparent. Yet the students who will lose most in the process are the very students that these measures ostensibly seek to help: high performing, underprivileged students.
In the wake of last week’s affirmative action decision, most analysts expect the recent enthusiasm for test-optional admissions policies to continue—if for no other reason than to make schools’ racial gerrymandering less transparent. After all, a key issue in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases was the evidence that Asian American students had to score at much higher levels on the SAT and ACT than their Black and Hispanic peers in order to gain admission. Stop requiring the tests, and that evidence goes away.
But that would be a big mistake. The students who will lose most in the process are the very students that these measures ostensibly seek to help: high performing, underprivileged students. In fact, early proponents of the SAT believed it would introduce meritocracy into college admissions. Prior to the SAT’s inception, America’s elite universities served the richest and most well-connected, not necessarily the best and the brightest. In 1933, James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University, adopted the test in hopes that it could help identify a natural aristocracy, the truly best and brightest, regardless of their family or economic origin.
The SAT still facilitates this ideal, if imperfectly. Consider, for example, two valedictorians of schools where I’ve worked, one in an affluent neighborhood, the other in a poor one.
In the affluent school, this young woman had connections to local universities, access to prestigious internships, a two-parent household where mom and dad both had sufficient leisure time to help their daughter in whatever she needed, and sufficient wealth to pay for writing or application assistance.
In the poor school, this young man had none of that. He lacked the cultural capital to score a fancy internship or connections for letters of recommendation from influential figures. His mother was a nurse, and worked exceedingly hard to instill in him a passion for learning. But she worked second shift, so she rarely crossed paths with her son and couldn’t assist him with any applications or resumes. Nor could she reasonably afford to pay for any of that.
What did this kid who grew up in poverty have, though? He had a higher score than his affluent competitor. Any school that overlooks standardized test scores would miss that. Ironically, so would affirmative action policies. The majority of students who benefited from them are upwardly mobile, immigrant families, not the low-income students like him that they intended to help. His test score is the squeaky wheel that could grab an administration officer’s attention.
And there’s more than mere anecdotal evidence that bears out this reality. Though imperfect, standardized tests remain the fairest, most meritocratic measure of any student’s academic achievement.
My colleague Adam Tyner has cataloged the shortcomings and biases of other “holistic” approaches and the research to support the SAT’s use. One academic review that he references found that essay content and style had stronger correlations with household income than did SAT scores. Another found that kids with college-educated parents were far more likely to participate in extracurricular activities. As for grades, we know that GPAs are badly inflated of late, with those in many districts at all-time highs.
The use of standardized test scores harms no one. Only a fraction of students attend “highly selective” schools; the bulk of American students either two-year or inclusive four-year institutions where essentially everyone who applies gets in, unaffected by low or high exams scores. The SAT, ACT, and other such tests are merely a means to identify the most gifted.
Their benefits are akin to those of universal screening—a great, proven way to identify gifted students within underprivileged populations. One student might have attended Andover with the best tutors and college-application counselors that money can buy, then scored 1400 on the SAT. But another kid, who knows little about the process because he’d be the first in his family to attend college, and who studied for his tests in a rundown apartment and completed homework between shifts at the local grocery store—he took the same test and scored 1550.
The abolition of affirmative action forces a reconsideration of a simple albeit fundamental question: How do we most fairly determine who ought to attend which colleges?
The most meritocratic approach is best; the alternatives are subjectivity, caprice and favoritism, lotteries of chance, and quotas. Standardized tests may be imperfect, we may administer them too often, and family wealth may alter results—but they’re the best and fairest option we have. In the spirit of Winston Churchill, they’re the worst approach, except for all the others.
Editor’s note: Daniel Buck, who was previously a senior visiting fellow, has joined Fordham full-time as an editorial and policy associate.
With the liberal arts seemingly in a perpetual budgetary and identity crisis, I find myself delighted to encounter the rare think-piece that respects the importance of humanities education. Sure, I’m a little biased on the matter: I went to graduate school in English literature and then taught high school English. I’m not in the classroom anymore, but after twelve years in the field, the humanities will always remain near and dear.
So I eagerly read my colleague Daniel Buck’s recent post “How not to read a book with students: A rebuttal to NCTE.” A fellow English-teacher-turned-Fordhamite arguing that literary theory is “deceptively consequential”? Heck, yeah! Plus, Fordham loves a good policy debate between staff. So I volunteer.
Buck dug into a recent policy brief by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), denouncing their advocacy of “critical” approaches to teaching and interpreting literature. For him, critical theories reframe books as “cultural artifacts,” often undermining books’ true meanings by crushing them into submission to a simplistic, politically progressive narrative.
But that’s an oversimplification. Inevitably, books are cultural artifacts. They don’t emerge from an ahistorical vacuum. That’s not a bad thing, nor should teachers ignore that reality. Buck writes admiringly of Orwell’s books on “the horrors of authoritarian governments”—and yes, that core theme is critical to understanding Orwell’s work. At the same time, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was inspired by Allied leaders’ efforts to divvy up the globe into “Zones of Influence,” and Animal Farm (1945) is a weird barnyard fantasy absent the context of the Russian Revolution and Orwell’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell could not have “removed himself and his emotions from his work,” even if he had wanted to—nor can any writer. Teaching students to situate books in their historical context doesn’t mean that the books can’t also retain universal, timeless meanings. If anything, doing so helps reveal continuities, both good and bad, between past historical moments and our own.
Literary interpretation isn’t a zero-sum game. Buck worries that, “were students to read Romeo and Juliet through a feminist lens, gone would be Shakespeare’s varied perspectives on love.” Perspectives on love don’t have to go anywhere, though; they can co-exist alongside feminist readings. Students can handle more than one take on a text. In my own schooling, I first read The Tempest (1611) with an eye toward themes of revenge and conflicts of man versus nature. Of course those ideas permeate the play, but decades of postcolonial readings also offer an alternative interpretation, with protagonist Prospero as colonizer and antagonist Caliban as colonized. What better fodder for class discussion than to have students examine whether Prospero is the hero or the usurper, and whether Caliban is the monster or the disenfranchised? It’s not only possible, but also productive for students to grapple with multiple possible interpretations.
Here’s where I expect some readers (such as Buck) will say, “But Shakespeare didn’t intend for his work to be read through a postcolonial lens!” Perhaps not, but books can and do have meaning beyond what we imagine the author intended (to the extent we can even claim to know intent). We can reasonably say that Joseph Conrad meant Heart of Darkness (1899) as a critique of Belgian colonialism, but that doesn’t preclude Chinua Achebe’s famous postcolonial reading of the novella as racist in its dehumanization of African characters. Achebe didn’t pick this book “at random” or “muffle the voice of the author,” but rather paid close attention to certain characters and reported back on what he read. He didn’t suppress the text’s meaning, but instead complicated our understanding of it. In a secondary English classroom, students can explore the tension between Conrad’s intention and the impact of his words. Actually, doesn’t that sound like a classic exercise for an English class?
I also disagree with Buck’s suggestion that critical interpretations offer the same story, over and over. “Critical theory acts like a photo filter, distorting and coloring every book until each text displays much the same message,” he writes, and: “Critical theory...is almost cultish in its repetition of one message over and over again.” This line of argument oversimplifies a significant body of scholarship while implying that there isn’t much point in advancing research on older works. That is, if we can’t bring new approaches to older texts, then what more is there for scholars to say? Contributors and editors for English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, Dickens Quarterly, and quite a few others might be surprised to learn that there isn’t value in new readings of classics.
Ultimately, Buck and I agree on plenty. Understanding the “classics” matters, and how we teach students to read books matters a great deal (+1 for those of us who still believe in the urgency of a humanities education!). I also share several of Buck’s suspicions about the NCTE’s specific recommendations. It’d be tough to convince me, too, that Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) offers a relevant lens through which to consider masculinity in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).
Yet I believe it’s worthwhile to examine masculinity in Gatsby—at least for students to consider such readings, even if they ultimately argue against them, based on the evidence. To give students the tools to read books through critical theory is not “doing it wrong,” but rather empowering them to attend to detail, to consider multiple views at once, to advance academic discourse, and most importantly, to think for themselves.
Recent policy innovations such as education savings accounts, microgrants, and tax credits address some of the financial barriers that prevent families from accessing flexible education opportunities. But there remains a stark divide—often along predictable lines of race and income—between how, where, and when students learn, and affordability is only one part of the problem.
Consider, for example, the experience of two of my students—Leah and Anthony—during my time as a high school teacher.
A common complaint I received was that my class was boring. When I encouraged my students, at the very least, to be nuanced in their criticism, they shared that we never talked about the things they were interested in or excited about. The problem was that my class wasn’t designed to acknowledge or nurture the entirety of who each of them was. No school is designed to do that.
Leah, like all of my students, had a unique mix of interests and talents, many of which never made their way into my lesson plans. But unlike many of my students, she was fortunate enough to access a suite of activities beyond my classroom that nurtured her passions and built her academic skills: She took horseback riding lessons, attended weekly art history seminars at the public library, and worked with a private tutor to improve her ACT score.
Anthony, one of Leah’s classmates, shared her curiosity (and her needling of my sartorial and instructional choices). But he wanted educational opportunities he didn’t have and that I couldn’t provide on my own. The books he checked out from my class library—”The Turn of the Screw,” a collection of Maya Angelou’s poetry, Brent Staples’s memoir—illustrated his wide-ranging interests. He wanted to take a dual-credit English composition course, but he didn’t have a ride that could get him to school at 7:30 a.m. for the class. Anthony also experienced a brain injury in middle school and confided in me that he’d visited an occupational therapist until his mom could no longer afford it.
Leah and Anthony were equally bright and diligent students, and their families were equally invested in their education. But, through no fault of their own, only one of them had access to customized learning experiences. A lack of access to these opportunities for marginalized students exacerbates longstanding inequities in our education system that the Covid-19 pandemic deepened. Here are some ways to fix that.
Relationship-based navigation is essential to building a flexible and equitable learning ecosystem.
Today’s ecosystem of learning options is a spaghetti junction of providers, schools, services, and supports. Navigating it can be overwhelming without reliable sources of information and guidance.
Trained advisers, or navigators, can and do fill this gap by earning families’ trust, curating information about learning opportunities, and tackling barriers to access. For a student like Anthony, this could look like working with a navigator invested in getting to know him and understanding his needs and goals. This navigator could collaborate with Anthony and his mom to find dual credit courses or to enroll in an ESA that would cover the cost of his occupational therapy. Unfortunately, these services can be time- and cost-intensive, making them challenging to scale and leaving families like Anthony’s without the support they need.
Technology can improve and scale relationship-based navigation.
Technology is part of the solution, especially with the exponential growth of artificial intelligence. It’s not hard to imagine AI-powered tools that provide families with information and financial support, match students to providers and programs, and help families identify high-quality learning options.
Although these solutions likely aren’t enough to support families like Anthony’s, they could expand the reach and impact of navigators who are well-positioned to do so. Technology solutions could transform the work of navigators by enabling them to concentrate on the human aspects of their roles. Imagine Anthony’s navigator using an online tool to pinpoint service providers matched to his unique needs and interests. This streamlined, AI-powered process would enable a navigator to spend more time guiding Anthony in selecting the right options and thinking about each of them as part of a broader plan to achieve his goals.
There are endless use cases for these kinds of technology solutions. Many hold the same promise of positioning navigators to serve more families and provide more personalized, tailored support to students who would benefit most.
To develop solutions that advance equity, technology innovators must partner with families, students, and navigators.
Emerging tools and platforms to help students and families navigate education options exist, but many are in the early stages of development. Innovators must engage students, families, and navigators in the product development process to ensure that tools provide the features families and students need while avoiding unintended consequences that could exacerbate barriers. Innovators should go the extra mile to learn from families like Anthony’s, who need increased access to flexible learning.
Technology combined with relationship-based navigation can pave the way for more accessible, practical, affordable, and equitable customized learning. By focusing on the needs of families furthest from opportunity, innovators can streamline connections between families, educational options, and communities. It’s those connections that could have given Anthony the same opportunities as Leah—and can help ensure all students have access to the flexible learning experiences they deserve.
In many schools, being identified as advanced or gifted doesn’t guarantee that students will receive “gifted services.” For low-income students, Black and Brown students, rural students, and many others, the odds of being identified as gifted and having access to advanced coursework are even lower than for their higher-income and White or Asian peers. A new report from Purdue University’s Sarah Bright and Northwestern’s Eric Calvert digs into the results of a pilot project testing a curriculum that could make it more likely that all identified students—especially those typically underrepresented in advanced education—receive services.
Project OCCAMS (Online Curriculum Consortium for Accelerating Middle School) is a collaboration between the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University, the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William & Mary, and the Ohio Department of Education (ODE). It’s a two-year-long, accelerated English language arts curriculum for seventh and eighth graders that combines in-class instruction and out-of-class “technology-based assignments,” such as student-created videos, podcasts, literary magazines, mini-newspapers, audio recordings, and various other Google platform-based projects. Beyond this basic information, however, the report is light on details of how the program actually functions and, thus, is limited in its ability to enlighten us.
A five-year pilot of Project OCCAMS was launched simultaneously in five large Ohio school districts in the 2018–19 school year. The goals of the pilot were to determine the efficacy of the course to accelerate learning, especially for students traditionally underrepresented in advanced education, and to determine if the model is simple enough to easily replicate, and is thus a potential tool to increase service provision elsewhere.
The researchers chose Ohio as the laboratory for this intervention because the state began implementing universal screening for giftedness in 2018. Identification numbers have been tracked annually by ODE since then, but the provision of gifted services was not—and still is not—mandated by the state. This the first published analysis following completion of the five-year pilot, although the data are limited in time and only reference one of the participating districts.
Project OCCAMS was rolled out in five unidentified “diverse urban middle schools” within Columbus City School District—buildings chosen because underrepresentation of minority students in gifted education was a “significant concern” in each—starting in the 2018–19 school year. To qualify for the Project OCCAMS intervention, students had to be entering seventh grade in those buildings. They also had to have been identified as gifted in their General Cognitive Ability in ELA specifically or to have scored at or above the 85th percentile on a state or national achievement assessment in reading or ELA at any point prior to seventh grade. No definitive student n-size is provided (another limitation to drawing conclusions from it), although it is likely less than seventy-five per cohort; see below for details. Bright and Calvert do report that students participating in the Columbus intervention reflect the diversity of the district overall: Sixty-seven percent of students were Black, just over 11 percent were Hispanic, nearly 8 percent were multi-racial, and more than 19 percent were White. Income data on students were not collected, but all schools in the study were fully Title I–eligible.
When schools were shut down and students sent home in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Project OCCAMS continued in a fully-online form for the rest of the 2019–20 school year, with synchronous virtual teaching taking the place of classroom instruction. During the following school years, the program toggled between hybrid and fully online as each building’s changing instructional modalities required.
In keeping with its acceleration model, each student received three years’ worth of instruction covering typical ELA content for grades seven through nine in “compacted” form over two school years. Details of the curriculum structure are included in the report’s appendices—a plus point. Participating students took the state’s ELA I test—which, at the time, was given as an end-of-course exam to all ninth graders—at the end of the intervention, and the results of that exam are the basis of the achievement data in this report. The researchers also examined seventh- and eighth-grade administrations of above-level ACT tests. Students received credit for both eighth and ninth grade English language arts courses upon completion of the OCCAMS program.
Full outcome data are not provided, but eighth graders who participated in Project OCCAMS and took the state ELA I test in 2019 outperformed both the district average and the average posted by students in the district’s highest-performing high school. The majority of program students achieved scores of proficient or advanced. Program students also showed higher growth on the above-level ACT tests between seventh- and eighth-grade administrations, compared to a set of “more academically selective but economically similar students” in the district.
Student surveys completed at the end of the two-year course were generally positive. (We get our only hint at n-sizes here—which seem small—with sixty-five participating students noted as responding to a particular survey question in 2021, the largest number observed for any response.) A majority of students responding said that they learned to be more independent learners, that the course helped them improve how they analyze and understand what they read, and also helped improve their writing. Percentages for all of these positive responses grew between 2020 and 2021.
Students and teachers alike expressed positive sentiments toward the structure of the course and the learning community built around it. This includes communication and group work conducted via email, message boards, video chat, and text messages, as well as in-person work. The same difficulties faced by other schools when switching to fully-remote learning in 2020—technical problems, students not using cameras during synchronous instruction, absenteeism—manifested here, as well, but seemed far less debilitating than the issues arising in more typically-structured courses. Similarly, lack of access to devices and high-speed internet only impacted a small handful of students, even at the height of pandemic school closures. Part of this is because Project OCCAMS’s implementation included free Chromebooks for all students from the start, and because kids and adults already had experience using them in exactly the same way at school (or on the bus or in libraries or wherever) as they needed to when locked down at home. Bright and Calvert include descriptions of how students helped each other to overcome glitches to continue full participation with minimal interruption.
Perhaps reflecting the dearth of data provided, this analysis of Project OCCAMS is mainly descriptive. There’s clearly much to learn from the information presented here. Essential but unanswered questions include which students were recruited and how, how any oversubscribed spots were filled, how teachers were trained, how the program impacted students’ daily schedules, and whether any participating students were receiving other gifted services provided by the district. But the report raises even more questions regarding what is not included.
Bright and Calvert focus their discussion on the technology piece of the puzzle: Does the computer-based nature of much of the work (and indeed all of the work during Covid shutdowns) actually help achieve the goal of more equitable access to advanced learning opportunities? Data show that, overall, remote learning during the pandemic was a dismal failure that set most kids back months or even years. Advanced students lost ground, too, but they fared a bit better than their lower-achieving peers, both nationally and, it seems, in this very small, very local program focused on underrepresented students. The intent of the Project OCCAMS pilot was to provide effective and efficient services to students typically underrepresented in advanced education. This report suggests that at least some answers could be available by digging further—and more rigorously—into the data.
SOURCE: Sarah Bright and Eric Calvert, “Educational Technology: Barrier or Bridge to Equitable Access to Advanced Learning Opportunities?” Gifted Child Today (June 2023).
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