Even a Guidebook Can Get Lost in SAT Controversy

It’s so easy for so many to hate the SAT.

Studies have shown that the rich do better than the poor. An only child does better than someone from a big family. Boys do better than girls. Whites do better than blacks and Latinos.

These kinds of findings have stirred plenty of controversy over the years. Now, as California and other states move into the post-affirmative action era, the debates about the fairness of high-stakes testing are likely to turn into courtroom brawls.

“When we had admissions policies that used race as a factor, nobody, including the critics, did anything to challenge these tests,” said Maria Blanco, regional counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

“The civil rights community felt that the discriminatory effects were mitigated by affirmative action,” she said. “Now in places like California, if you use a test that has discriminatory effects, the issue is much more valid.”

This kind of talk makes college officials nervous. Many of them do not like the SAT, but have not found anything better to compare students from different high schools, which vary widely in grade inflation and academic rigor.

Never fear, the federal government is here to help. Or is it?

The Department of Education’s office of civil rights last month began quietly giving educators a draft of a proposed guidebook titled “Nondiscrimination in High-Stakes Testing: A Resource Guide.”

The idea was simple: Explain the complex and sometimes contradictory civil rights rulings in one helpful booklet that would, in effect, show college officials how to avoid getting sued.

But college lawyers thought the guidebook would be ideal for another purpose: a guide on suing your favorite college admissions office.

So the education lobby moved in and began blasting.

“These guidelines undermine the notion of an objective test of student achievement,” said Jerry L. Martin, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “Ignoring test results will make college admissions more arbitrary and less fair. These guidelines will be a death blow to the idea that individual merit counts.”

Specifically, college officials objected to how the guidebook highlighted selected legal cases. The effect, they said, would make it harder for them to prove that their reliance on standardized test scores does not violate federal anti-bias laws.

One key passage they cited: “The use of any educational test which has a significant disparate impact on members of any particular race, national origin or sex is discriminatory . . . unless it is educationally necessary and there is no practicable alternative form of assessment.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Education officials say that their draft document has been grossly and unfairly misinterpreted.

The department began circulating the draft, a spokesman said, so that it could get suggestions on how to help educators “find common ground and minimize the risk of litigation or controversy as they design or revisit policies regarding the use of tests with high-stakes consequences for students.”

Furthermore, all the guidebook does is distill about 30 federal court opinions and existing test measurement standards, said Arthur L. Coleman, deputy assistant secretary for civil rights.

“We’re not issuing new guidelines or regulations or setting new legal standards,” Coleman said. “It’s not about eliminating tests, it’s about explaining how to use tests in the right way for the right purpose.”

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That’s precisely at issue in a lawsuit filed earlier this year against the University of California. Representing eight black, Latino and Filipino American students rejected by UC Berkeley, a group of MALDEF and other civil rights attorneys charges that the university violated federal laws with “unjustified reliance upon standardized tests scores” that favor the privileged.

Coleman said that he has not seen the Berkeley case, but that the final guidebook should neither help nor hinder such legal challenges.

Blanco, the MALDEF attorney, agreed that the guidebook merely restates much of existing antidiscrimination law. She and other civil rights lawyers are quite familiar with all of these cases.

On the other hand, she said, the guidebook will probably be cited in the case against Berkeley “to show that we don’t have a farfetched legal position.”

“It helps in the sense that having the Department of Education issue something in writing that this is the department’s analysis,” she said. “It’ll be up to the court to decide, what weight to give to it.”