Last Saturday, thousands of students anxiously flocked to their assigned testing school to take the SAT–a standard of college readiness–all for the low-low price of $68. March 8 was one of seven SAT testing dates this year.
Prior to 2009, it was unlikely that a student would choose to retake the SAT multiple times because each additional score would be sent to their prospective universities, potentially worsening applicants’ chances for admission. Once “Score Choice” was introduced in 2009, however, retaking the SAT several times became normalized.
In a poll taken by the “Tribune” of over 50 current seniors, the average number of SAT attempts a Stone Bridge student takes is two, costing $136, with some students taking as many as five tests for $340. Startlingly, this data scores below the projected average number of attempts future students will take because the graduating class of 2025, current seniors, is the last class where the submission of college readiness exam scores to the majority of universities is optional.
Students are also being encouraged to take the ACT–an additional college readiness exam that costs $65 without the $25 writing add-on fee—in case they are not fond of their first two SAT scores. 23% of Stone Bridge seniors took the ACT as well as the SAT.
The summation of these added costs does not even include the exorbitant $99 fee per each Advanced Placement (AP) exam a student takes. Even with Loudoun County covering the cost of the first four AP exams a student completes, with the average Stone Bridge senior taking 6 AP classes overall (23% of seniors took 10 or more), the average student would have to pay a grand total of $532 in SAT, ACT, & AP testing fees.
Unquestionably, the price of being a public school student is going up. And none of this data even considers the topic of university costs, with crushing student loans and rising college tuition. College Board and ACT, Inc. have monetized high school education to the point where the line between public education and private corporations is frighteningly blurred.
America is putting a hefty price tag on learning. Educational grabbagging has already made its way into classrooms and is inhibiting child development, as most notably revealed in the Lucy Calkins curriculum closure.
Calkins, an early literacy curriculum developer, used her instructional consultancy at Columbia University to push her faulty “Balanced Literacy” approach into thousands of districts across America, earning her and her team millions. This approach lacked scientific research and ignored the importance of phonics in early literacy.
Calkins’s story is just one example of many educational initiatives that valued profit over effectiveness. To make the situation worse, government initiatives that are structured to improve standards of learning tend to have the opposite of their intended effect.
Common Core, a multi-state educational initiative to standardize content across state bounds, overemphasizes high-stakes testing. Similarly, George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” Act forced educators to “teach to the test” to meet oppressive standards until it was replaced in 2015 by the “Every Student Succeeds Act,” which weakened equity expectations and masked inequality.
The most absurd part about these initiatives, whether governmental or privatized, is that none of them are even decided upon by current educators. In fact, a large portion of modern educational philosophy is grounded in the work of psychologist Carol Dweck.
Dweck published groundbreaking research on the importance of a “growth mindset” as opposed to a “fixed mindset” that prioritized positive encouragement and the idea that every skill can be improved and no ability is inherently fixed at birth.
Just because every skill can be improved doesn’t mean that every skill should be improved or continuously tested on. Dweck’s experiments support the use of standardized testing by encouraging the narrative that all students can reach certain benchmarks. But why should they have to?
A generation of kids has been taught that their value is more dependent on their ability to reach an expensive set of oppressive standards than their excellence in the areas they naturally excel in. Even with Dweck’s growth mindset approach, it’s not as if American students are even meeting the standards set up for them.
As a study from the Program for International Student Assessment supports, Asian countries are pulling ahead with regards to standards in STEM or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Despite the U.S. government spending an average of $16,268 on educating each student in its public education system, significantly above the global average of $10,759 per student, U.S. students are still falling behind.
This excess money being spent is because the government is funneling money into the pockets of corporate standards-based educational initiatives, raising the costs of educational access for all American students, instead of using it towards programs that actualize student growth, rather than just create a mindset.
Much of this is attributed to America’s ‘factory model’ in public schools that focuses on producing identical results among students. These benchmarks insist that kids be a little bit good at everything, ultimately inhibiting their ability to excel at anything. The emphasis in learning should not be that everybody creates an identical result or reaches a certain, predetermined score.
If America could switch its focus to mirror the rest of the world and aim away from the high-cost, unfruitful ideals of corporations, students could have used this past Saturday to pursue their own burgeoning individual interests, instead of taking the SAT.
