Attention Economy


Saturday, April 2, 2022

Equal Opportunity: The Significance of Social Mobility

Inequality Doesn’t Breed Populism. Social Immobility Does.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/01/inequality-doesnt-breed-populism-social-immobility-does/
The left keeps losing because it has failed to promote equal opportunity rather than equal outcomes. 



The SAT Isn’t What’s Unfair
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/mit-admissions-reinstates-sat-act-tests/629455/
“In its announcement, MIT emphasized the uniqueness of its demanding undergraduate curriculum, which involves two semesters of calculus for all students. So perhaps the utility of standardized tests is confined to an elite institution intensely focused on math and science. But studies of other types of undergraduate institutions and other educational stages have also found that standardized testing improves the representation of low-income students, because testing replaces more flawed indicators of student readiness. A K–12 school district in Florida that made standardized testing universal among its second-grade students saw a substantial jump in the number of low-income and Black students in its gifted-and-talented program. Before the switch to universal testing, admission to the gifted-and-talented program depended strongly on teacher referrals—subjective assessments that, like recommendation letters for college applicants, may be informed by educators’ biases.
Similarly, when the state of Michigan required every high-school student to take the ACT or the SAT, it saw an increase in the number of low-income students attending four-year colleges. These studies suggest that the best policy might actually be to facilitate more high-school students taking the SAT, not abandon it entirely. Standardized testing, inequitable as it might be, is more equitable than any other criterion”.