Right-wing political analyst Heather Mac Donald spent much of her time on Tuesday’s edition of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” railing against a proposal by the College Board to weight the SAT college admissions test using so-called “adversity scores.”
Mac Donald, who once called campus diversity a “scourge,” argued that the effort to consider students’ educational environment was yet another way to give preference to “unprepared” Black students.
Conservative political pundit Heather Mac Donald argued there was “nothing more cruel” than placing a minority student in an educational environment for which they’re unprepared. (Photo: Twitter video screenshot)
“Frankly, Lou, what this is all about is an effort to repackage racial preferences in a more palatable form,” she began. “All of this tinkering with meritocratic admissions in colleges and throughout the economy, frankly, is all driven by one fact, which is the persistent academic achievement gap. If black culture, or the rest of culture, could close that gap, we would be back to a colorblind meritocratic system, but the College Board is trying to give colleges an excuse to continue to give preferences to underprepared black students, to catapult them into academic environments for which they are not prepared.”
The author and former attorney went on to argue there “was nothing more cruel” than giving preference to a student based on race, then placing them in an academic environment “for which he’s not prepared.” To her, such an arrangement is a set up for failure.
“He is going to struggle, he is going to inevitably blame his problems on phantom circumambient racism, rather than acknowledging the difficult truth that he would’ve been better in an environment where he’s actually matched with his peers,” said Mac Donald.
On Tuesday, the College Board, which administers the SAT exam, said it would abandon it’s single-score adversity tool after fierce criticism and fears that it could affect SAT scores.
As reported by The Los Angeles Times, the company first introduced its “Environmental Context Dashboard” two years ago to help give context about a student’s performance on the exam and also weigh community factors like advanced course offerings and local crime rates to produce a single score.
“The idea of a single score was wrong,” David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board, told the Associated Press. “It was confusing and created the misperception that the indicators are specific to an individual student.”
The company will now use a revised tool called Landscape that will provide a “series of data points” identified by government sources and the board that may impact student educational outcomes.
These metrics will give college admissions boards a more comprehensive look at applicants’ backgrounds from which to make decisions about college acceptance.
Watch more in the video below.
Lou Dobbs guest blames "black culture" for an academic achievement gap and says that colleges are giving preferential treatment to "underprepared black students" pic.twitter.com/pozijjSu1e
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) August 28, 2019
