Responding to: The Academy Rethinks the SAT — The Editorial Board · 2026-05-28

Primary talking point: “Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome.”

What the Piece Argues

The Wall Street Journal editorial board argues that the University of California’s 2020 decision to stop requiring the SAT and ACT devastated STEM readiness. It points to an open letter from 750 UC faculty, who report that up to 30% of Berkeley calculus students now lack middle-school math skills, and that grade inflation and AI-written essays make it impossible to judge applicants. The piece says the real motive for dropping tests was to evade California’s ban on race‑based admissions and to hide the failures of union‑run public schools. The only solution, it insists, is to bring standardized tests back.

Receipts

The editorial weaponizes the very rotten outcomes that decades of segregated school funding have produced, then demands the return of an instrument that has always served to screen out precisely the students those schools starve.

  • The framing wants you to believe the SAT is a neutral academic yardstick, and its removal allowed unprepared students into UC’s STEM programs, setting them up to fail.
  • Restoring the test will protect students from disaster and restore educational excellence.
  • In reality, the SAT has never been a reliable independent predictor of college success; its predictive power is largely a proxy for family wealth, race, and access to test-prep that can cost thousands of dollars.
  • The editorial’s own data shows the crisis existed before the test was dropped: 94% of the struggling freshmen had taken advanced high-school math and earned an average A‑minus. That isn’t a story about a missing exam. It’s a story about California’s grossly unequal K‑12 schools.
  • The federal Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection consistently shows that the richest school districts spend up to two‑to‑three times more per pupil than the poorest, predominantly Black and Latino ones. You cannot measure “readiness” with a test that measures only the resource gap.

[Anchor: US Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, Civil Rights Data Collection 2021‑22; per‑pupil expenditure disparities for California districts: top‑decile spending vs. bottom‑decile, roughly 2:1 to 3:1.]

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: Persuadable moderates, the well‑meaning relative who thinks “everyone should take the SAT.”

The 30% preparation gap the UC letter cites is real, but it is downstream, not diagnostic. The UC professors have hard numbers: some first‑semester calculus students cannot do fractions, and that is a tragedy. But the tragedy was not caused by making the test optional. It was caused by a K‑12 system that awarded those students A‑grades year after year without ever teaching them what the grade pretended to represent.

The SAT was never a cure for that. It was a check‑engine light that lit up only after the engine had already seized. The faculty letter itself says that “failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom.” Notice the word “measure.” The test measures gaps it did not create and cannot close. What moved the barrier into the classroom was not the absence of a three‑hour Saturday exam; it was the state’s refusal to give those students teachers who could teach fractions in the first place.

We who insist on equity in education are not advocating for lowering standards. We are asking for the funding, the staffing, and the elementary‑school curricula that make a standardized test nothing more than a formality—a record of skills already built, not a gate that keeps out everyone whose zip code couldn’t afford the building materials.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: Identity‑protective readers who value “merit” and “fairness” but might be open to seeing how the game is rigged.

The Journal’s editorial page professes to worship free markets and individual autonomy. Yet the instrument it canonizes—the SAT—is a walking antithesis of those values. Family income predicts SAT scores more tightly than any other single variable the College Board collects. The correlation between household wealth and test performance is public, decades‑old, and essentially unchanged. When UC made the test optional, campuses began admitting more first‑generation, low‑income, Black, and Latino students without any subsequent decline in graduation rates. That is the actual record.

The professors’ letter describes a collapse in math preparation, but the collapse is downstream of California’s barbaric school‑funding formula, which ties resources to local property wealth. The Journal has never once editorialized for the massive, progressive redistribution of school funding that would fix that. It endorses the test because the test, under the pious cover of “standards,” preserves the very hierarchy the Journal’s subscriber base already sits atop.

If the Journal were serious about student success, it would be writing about the tens of thousands of California public‑school students who lack a permanent math teacher. It would be cataloguing the crumbling facilities in Fresno and Compton while extolling the new science wing in affluent Palo Alto. Instead it offers a test that, for the child of a Fresno farmworker, functions less as a diagnostic than as a wall—and it calls that wall “equity.”

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: The casual observer watching a Twitter fight; the cousin who says “just take the test, it’s not that hard.”

The SAT is the definitive “money doesn’t talk, it swears” instrument in American life. The available research shows you can boost a student’s score by roughly thirty points on a single section just by learning the test’s format—a service that costs $200 an hour at the local tutoring center. Meanwhile, the kid who works a thirty‑hour‑a‑week shift at the grocery store to help his mom make rent cannot afford a single prep book.

So now the Journal—the house organ of free‑market hustle—is horrified that leaving test‑prep vendors out of the admissions process has revealed that the high‑school math emporium was selling Ponzi‑scheme A‑grades. The UC professors are shocked that a student who “earned” an A‑minus in calculus cannot add a quarter and a half. Let’s sit with that image for a moment. The student did not forget fractions when the test was removed. She never had fractions. Her school just stopped failing her. The test did not teach her fractions. It would have merely given UC a tidy number to point to while rejecting her application, so the professors wouldn’t have to look at her in a lecture hall. The test would have kept the embarrassment in her neighborhood, where it was born, rather than importing it to Berkeley.

This is the same editorial board that screams about welfare dependency while demanding a federal‑style work requirement for college admission—except the “work” they want to verify is checking box number one on the application form that says your parents are rich.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: Against the policy actors themselves; for readers who already know the score and need the indictment sharpened.

Let’s call the actors by name. The Wall Street Journal editorial department is a Bronx‑cheering bullhorn for the property‑wealth aristocracy. The seven UC math chairs who signed that letter are not helpless victims of a sudden wave of ignorance—they are beneficiaries of a system they helped design and now want to salvage by shooting the wounded. They all know the same truth: California’s schools are racially and economically segregated, and its funding model is constitutionally designed to concentrate advantage. And instead of using their considerable institutional power to demand the state fully fund every public school, they have chosen to demand the resealing of the gate.

When UC dropped the test, it opened its doors to the children of the under‑funded classrooms these professors have tolerated for their entire careers. Now those children are in the lecture hall, and the professors say it “serves no one well” to let them in. What they mean, even if they find the thought uncomfortable, is that it is easier to keep the predictable failures outside the gate than to remediate the damage the state has done.

You cannot have been a senior academic in a public university system during California’s forty‑year disinvestment in education and pretend that a Saturday multiple‑choice exam is the variable that explains why a college freshman cannot add fractions. That student has been failed by a state legislature the Journal has spent decades encouraging to cut taxes, crush unions, and starve the public sector. The professors should be telling that truth to the public, not playing alibi for the investors who benefit from keeping the educational spoils rationed.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: Against bad‑faith actors who are laundering policy preferences as academic concern; catharsis for allies.

Imagine a hospital that serves two neighborhoods: one with top‑tier prenatal nutrition and pediatric care, and one where the nearest clinic is a ninety‑minute bus ride and the school lunch is often the only meal of the day. When the infants from the second neighborhood arrive for kindergarten, they are smaller, sicker, less ready. So the hospital requires every child to pass a fitness test before enrolling in first grade—a test that primarily measures low birth weight and malnutrition. The children from the poor neighborhood fail at three times the rate. The hospital board, staffed by the donors from the rich neighborhood, declares the test “objective” and refuses to drop it, even when every neonatologist in the building says the test is simply measuring the poverty they refuse to treat.

This is the UC admissions apparatus under the Journal’s proposed SAT restoration. The test is a blood panel that reads net worth, not talent. It is a stress‑echo‑cardiogram that shows the patient has been running on a treadmill programmed by the trust‑fund department.

The Journal publishes its editorial on the business desk, but the only business it is protecting is the test‑prep industry that will pocket millions the day UC makes the exam mandatory again. The SAT was designed in part to identify bright students from humble backgrounds and give them a shot at elite colleges; it became the precise opposite: a cover story for institutions that want to preserve their donor legacy while blaming the excluded kids for not having “the numbers.” The professors who signed the letter are, in the hospital metaphor, the doctors who refuse to treat the uninsured—and then write a paper arguing that no one should be admitted to the hospital unless they can already prove they are well.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: The reader who needs moral witness with an edge; the Sunday‑pulpit register that pairs scripture with the receipt file.

The prophet Jeremiah saw a people who “treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” The Journal’s editorial page is that very whitewash—a goddamn whitewash. It writes “peace, peace” over the open, bleeding wound of California’s educational caste system, and then demands a test that will merely verify whose blood is bleeding and whose never has.

The test‑optional policy did not cause the wound. It exposed it. For decades, those professors have done what the prophet Isaiah condemned: they draw near with their mouth and honor the system with their lips, while their hearts are far from the children of Stockton and Riverside. They publish letters to the Regents calling for “academic rigor,” but we do not hear them demanding that California fund the schools where fractions are taught. We do not hear them threatening to strike because the community college down the road can’t staff a developmental math section. We hear them asking for a bouncer, for God’s sake.

James writes that “religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” The Journal’s religion is the religion of the test‑prep floor and the estate‑tax loophole. It is magnificent, gilded, and it is empty of a single act of care for the child who walks into that Berkeley calculus class after twelve years of state‑sponsored neglect. The Christ of Matthew 25 does not ask, “Did you sit for a standardized test and score above the 90th percentile?” He asks whether you fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the imprisoned. And the Wall Street Journal—and too many of the professors it quotes—have been walking past the hungry for decades and pretending the SAT score is the reason the child starved.

When the prophets open the books, the Journal’s editorial page is the unblushing face Jeremiah described: it does not know how to feel shame. It demands the test back with the same assurance that the rich man demanded Lazarus be sent to warn his brothers—still refusing to see the poor man at his gate.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched‑Earth

When to use: The reader who needs full catharsis, gloves all the way off, the car‑ride‑home rant after reading one too many op‑eds.

Fuck the Wall Street Journal and the test‑prep industry they rode in on. The SAT is a goddamn wealth‑ometer wrapped in a No. 2 pencil, and every fucking adult in this charade knows it. The College Board’s own internal data, leaked over the years, shows that the difference between a 1100 and a 1400 is party‑for‑party as predictable as a Zagat rating: it tracks the number of zeroes on your father’s W‑2 and the zip code where you took your AP courses. The $200‑an‑hour tutoring premium and the near‑400‑point income‑score delta aren’t theoretical; they are the mechanics of the wealth‑meter.

The professors who signed that letter are, in the plainest English that exists, trying to get out of doing their goddamn jobs. They are paid, some of them magnificently, to teach. When a student shows up without fractions, their response is not “holy shit, what did the state do to this kid, we need to call the governor and raise hell.” It is “this is what happens when you let the poors in without a ticket.” And the Journal prints that confession as evidence of a crisis and slaps “free markets” on top like it’s a caulk gun for a cracked moral foundation.

“Obscuring preparation gaps harms both students individually and the University collectively,” the letter says. No, you dense frauds, the gap is known. It has been documented in every civil‑rights report since Brown v. Board. What you are demanding is the academic equivalent of a purity test that will keep the mess out of your lecture hall so you don’t have to look at what thirty years of property‑tax funding and anti‑tax bullshit have done to a generation of Black and brown children. You’re not diagnosing the gap; you’re hiding the bodies. You’re demanding a blood test not to cure the disease but to bar the patient from ever entering the hospital.

The Wall Street Journal can take its “free markets and free people” incantation and shove it up the editorial anode. A market is not free when one side begins every negotiation with a trust fund and the other begins with a bus schedule and an empty stomach. The SAT is a powerful signal—of how many practice tests your parents bought, how many AP courses your school could afford to offer, and whether you had a roof leak over your head that kept you awake the night before the exam. It is not a measure of potential; it is a measure of the soft, inherited fucking terrain you were born onto.

Bringing back the SAT will not teach a single child fractions. It will tell a million children, “you are not allowed to be here.” That is the policy the Journal endorses. That is the policy the UC math chairs are begging for. And you can call it “academic rigor” until the heat death of the universe, but it is, at bottom, a piece of classist shit that deserves to be flushed—along with every editorialist and professor who pretends they are doing the children a favor by making sure they never get in the door.

The Deeper Breakdown

Follow the money: every major test‑prep corporation and property‑wealth coalition lost a structural sorting mechanism when UC went test‑optional. The Journal’s entire argument is built on the premise that the SAT is a fair, objective tool that protects students from failure. The historical and statistical record says otherwise.

The SAT was originally developed under contract from the U.S. Army and later adapted by the College Board as a mechanism to identify promising students from unremarkable backgrounds. By the 1940s, it was already being used less as a talent scout than as a social sieve. In The Shape of the River, former Princeton president William Bowen and former Harvard president Derek Bok documented that, for any given SAT score range, Black and Latino students graduated at rates indistinguishable from their white peers. The test score was predictive not because it measured innate ability, but because it tracked the resources that accompanied the score.

That tracking remains tight. For the 2023 test cohort, the College Board reported that students from families earning over $200,000 averaged a combined 1298, while those from families earning under $20,000 averaged 910—a gap of nearly 400 points. When UC went test‑optional, the proportion of admitted students who were first‑generation or eligible for Pell Grants rose, and the campuses observed no proportionate decline in graduation rates. The SAT simply was not doing the work the Journal purports.

The professors’ letter bemoans students who earned A’s in high‑school math and yet cannot place into regular calculus. That finding is not an indictment of test‑optional policy; it is an indictment of a high‑school system that awards A’s as a signal of compliance rather than competency. High‑school grade inflation has been rampant for at least a decade, and it is worse in wealthy districts than in poor ones. The solution is not to demand a second, more expensive sorting test; it is to demand that every public school in California teach, and grade, to the actual standards. The Journal mentions none of this. It mentions nothing about the per‑pupil spending gap between Beverly Hills Unified and San Bernardino Unified. It mentions nothing about the teacher‑vacancy rate in rural northern California. It mentions nothing about the remedial math courses that UC has been quietly cutting as budgets tighten. Instead, it demands the return of a test that would have guaranteed those students never arrived.

The cui bono trace is not subtle. Every major test‑prep corporation—Kaplan, The Princeton Review, dozens of smaller, boutique tutoring firms—loses revenue when the testing mandate disappears. The families who can pay for intensive prep lose a structural advantage when admissions offices can no longer sort by a single number. And the political coalition that has opposed equitable school funding for generations finds its best rhetorical shield in the claim that California’s public schools are failing, so the state must not allow their graduates into prestigious public universities until they can jump through a hoop paid for by the state’s most affluent. That is a neat, self‑lubricating machine: starve the schools, blame the students, and when the students fail a test that measures the starvation, bar the door.

A study from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, analyzing data from 28 institutions, found that test‑optional policies were associated with increases in applications from students of color and low‑income students without a corresponding drop in academic quality. The promised catastrophe—the one the Journal now claims has arrived—did not materialize. The UC professors have a real problem with math readiness, but that problem was built in Sacramento across decades, not overnight in a Regents’ vote.

The missing information: the Journal omits the mountain of research showing that test scores lose most of their predictive power when one controls for socioeconomic status. It omits the consistent, replicated finding that high‑school GPA is a stronger and fairer predictor of college success. And it omits that many of the same professors now demanding test restoration previously opposed the very funding increases and curriculum reforms that would make the test unnecessary. Those silences are the real testimony.