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@g.e.Taylor
re: "I'm a at a loss for a reason for WNYC's intentionally mislabeling the guest's opinion. The station and its personnel seem interested in sowing divisiveness along any number of vectors - race, economics, sexual, age, etc. . . ."

it's called "class struggle." the definition of "class" has been expanded to include groups who, although far from poor, nevertheless may be susceptible to the politics of "divide and conquer".

Jay Matthews offers very incorrect info about the value of SAT prepping. I have, as a college consultant, observed students, over the past 25 years, raise their scores by 50-250 points. The unfair element here is that richer kids have parents who will pay whatever the price to see those scores at 700 plus, so they can qualify for the Ivies,

"Class" is a murky category, not simply economic. And asian cultures DO emphasize all kinds of excellence (musical, academic, for two) - in one friend's opinion - the western wife of an asian diplomat who hates living in his home country because she feels they are utterly without social graces but staggeringly adept at "book learning," as she describes it. (caning pre-k school kids, giving her jobs she's not qualified for because she's blond and telling her so) Her husband is 200% more fun and less rigid with her in his life and he likes it that way - his focus on learning suffers not at all. I agree, it's parents - both of mine are very well educated (generations of higher education) Both taught - and I attribute their amazing storytelling abilities to their irish heritage. All of us did well in school as a matter of course. It wasn't even early education - we were jammed into classrooms of 50 kids with under-educated nuns... I get the impression that fun is a big part of learning. SAT's ahve nothing to do with learning - and learning doesn't need an institution to happen!

this issue is for the orthodox left what Evolution is for orthodox monotheists.

The SATs aren't racially biased. The test score will depend on how well educated the person taking the test is. Asians outscore everyone because their society reinforces academic achievement. Unfortunately too much of black culture emphasizes being "cool". I was one of the many articulate black kids that was accused of "talking white" because I spoke properly.

The other reason why black test scores are low is the lack of reading done in many homes. I had a mother and father (they were never married) who always read and it influenced me to do the same (I have 2 magazines and 2 newspapers currently in my bag). My home was, and still is, one of the few that had books in it. If blacks spent just as much time reading as we do on clothes and gadgets, there wouldn't be a testing gap.

Another example of WNYC's false advertising of a controversy:
". . . recent findings suggesting that the SAT may be racially biased. . . "
Did anyone ask Mr Mathews what his findings were before he appeared on the show?
As I thought I understood him, Mr. Mathews stated that he does NOT attribute the differential phenomena he is researching to RACE - he seemed to specifically state the it was a matter of "class" (i.e., economic circumstances ).
Although I'm a at a loss for a reason for WNYC's intentionally mislabeling the guest's opinion. The station and its personnel seem interested in sowing divisiveness along any number of vectors - race, economics, sexual, age, etc. . . .
(But maybe I'm just suffering from an unjust, unlawfully discriminatory education.)
Query: Were the ambiguous words Mr. Mathews used as illustrations for his argument actual examples of ambiguities he located in an SAT? Isn't there an appeals process for students who feel they are victims of such ambiguities?

sorry. i'm not buying this argument. grew up in jamaica and i always understood that there was a difference between the queen's english and jamaican english. and when i moved to the usa i understood that there was standard american english and slang. neither of my parent's went to college but both valued education. i can think of a dozen words off the top of my head - hot, cool, tight, slick, sick, etc. how hard is it to teach that words have multiple meanings? i think there is too much reliance on standarduzed tests but i also think it is ridiculous to say that a question is "biased" because you need to know standard english to answer it correctly.

Brian was trolling with this segment. Race, just one of those things that get get people's blood pressure up. Love it. Thanks for the lulz Brian.

JOHN - you are too narrowminded. The problem is a combination of things, the eductional system in ALL districts is failing right now, the focus is not there, the funding is not there, the teaching is not there. Parenting is a very small portion of all elements involved in why "johnny can't read" or pass the SATs

excuse me...Alexis, unless you've grown up in an asian-mixed black city, Brooklyn/NYC is not one of those cities,
your assessment of how Asians & Blacks mix is totally invalid.

Let me give you a few cities that apply:
_ Long Beach, CA (where my classmate, snoop doggie dog, referred to it as LBC)

_Comptom, CA where I grew up and learned & competed in double-dutch tornaments with black inner-city gals

_San Jose
_Westside of east LA
_Santa Ana
Again, Brooklyn is not a good sample.

If we make a case for Blacks, does that mean we would have to make a special case for inner-city asians who grow up with an inner-city culture doubled with the added disadvantage of not having parents who dont even speak english?? The answer to both issues: NO

I disagree with everything Mr. Matthews said. The probelm with education of lower income kids is that they approach it individually. They could form study circles and help each other. Parents and kids, for fun, could do family readings of children's stories as plays with each taking a role. In that way parents would model for their kids that reading is a fun, social activity. The same way that kids learn to dance by dancing with each other, they could learn literature, history, math and science.

It is the absence of parents as role models for their kids that undermines the ability of lower income kids to learn. Higher income parents do exactly that for their kids. Churches could organize communty discovery events focused on reading stories, history, science, and so on. Community organizations, as well. But everyone thinks that all they have to do is send their kids to school and their obligation to educate their kids is fulfilled. It is not!!!! Lower income parents have to realize that they have a very important role to perform, as well as churches and all other community organizations that serve this population. That they don't I think is terriably neglectful.

Truth, not racist, just honest.
Name one black school system that works well, Chicago??Atlanta??. Poor parenting leads to poor scholarship.

Please don't rush to put Asian Americans on a pedestal. They do excel beyond white and Black American students because they have fewer distractions in school. No one considers them cool from either race and do not embrace them openly or to invite them to join either social circle. What's left but to study?

When it comes to the idiomatic meaning of 'slick' among urban youth, let me say there are idoms used among white people in many localities that are not shared with other white peopleeven though they could all be described as 'suburban'. No doubt small groups of white suburban kids answer SAT questions incorrectly as a result, but because each local group answers a different set of questions incorrectly, they cannot be seen when aggregate statistics are examined. What about them? Why address this difficulty for one group and not another?

John as usual showing your ignorance by enveloping the entire Black Community in your racist statements.

It's not merely vocabulary; it's thinking skills. Once I learned to think analytically and critically, my scores jumped 10 percentage points. Working class cultures do not visualize and place info into contexts. Teaching computer chess to inner city and poor kids is one method that helps such kids learn such skills. Both my parents were smart -- my father was capable of systematic, abstract thinking, although he didn't know that he was doing that when he did it -- but neither had learned such methods of processing and working with information.

I know exactly what's causing the 10 point lag, because I've been there. Very frustrating to see people teaching vocabulary when the problem is analysis.

FYI...children in lower income neighborhoods do have the ability to determine when "bad" means good and when "bad" just means bad by the subject matter at hand. FYI slang is a chosen language it is not taught. FYI little white children speak slang as well, watch the hills, be sure you cover this topic accurately with out alienating or it will not be useful.

Have you ever heard of standardized English? Isn't that what the schools are supposed to be teaching so there is no confusion between street slang and the standard "bias." I was in a department store and a black mother was talking to her two kids. She used ungrammatical English and then immediately corrected herself so that her kids would learn correct usage. When I lived in a foreign country, I learned a lot of slang from my friends, but knew enough not to use these words in front of older people.

No one will say the obvious and Brian is to PC to say it. Asian kids come from very good homes, have no language issues, poor people from all over the world come here and excell. Blacks come from broken homes, poor parenting and don't encourage scholarship.

And by defining this problem as one of learning more or less justifies the SAT rather than invalidating it.

In regards to the guest who mentioned Asians performing well regardless of their immigrant status, there are plenty of Asians that have grown up in inner cities that perform poorly. Look at poorer Asian communities in Seattle, Atlanta, Boston (e.g.: Dorchester). That comment is as much a copout based on stereotypes of the model minority as the caller said the study was on black/white performance.

this issue is for the orthodox left what Evolution is for orthodox monotheists.

where are you getting the data that Asian immigrants who live in inner-city schools(especially those fresh of boats) are wealthier than blacks?? YOU CANT ASCREW a national test just because a population of country doesnt chose to promote education in the home!!

Whoa, whoa, whoa what is all this "Black Venacular" business? What do we call the language the rednecks are using again? or the lower income people in New Jersey?

This sounds a little like the ebonics debate. If the proper usage of the words in question is unknown by the test taker, they should be marked wrong. The test is not testing whether they know any definition, but testing if they know the correct definition. The solution is to fix the schools, not dumb down the tests.

so why is 'street talk' more of a handicap than, say, cantonese? the elephant in the room is that poor parenting hampers certain kids.

Does this mean we have to accept "AKS" insteand of ask? Its ridiculous.

Confusing meanings of the words "slick"? "tight"? Nonsense. What's next-- we don't expect kids to know that "cool" has more than one meaning too?

To your caller: Asian kids who speak Black vernacular English do so as a second or third language, not as a first language, and most do not intermix deeply with their Black peers.

I'm curious--which version of "tight" does the good professor think is used in college? In business? In, oh, 98% of the universe?

So...isn't the SAT doing exactly what it's supposed to? Weeding out those who don't understand the proper use of language?

Why change the SAT. Would it hurt to prepare students by teaching the difference between idomatic expressions and the correct usage of vocabulary?

This is another case of political correctness gone amok. Since when do we teach to the level of the "street". The purpose of education is to raise oneself above the "street". This is absolutely the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Great idea, let's dumb down education in this country further so some idiots in an ivory tower can feel good about themselves.

And your example of "slick" seems kind of silly. I grew up with that word in its many senses and learned, as people do, to understand that different contexts activate one sense or the other.

I'm white, from a working-class background. Neither of my parents graduated from high school.

I took the SATs with no preparation, scoring (on the old test) an okay, but not great 1290. A few years later, after graduating college, I took the GRES, again without preparation. My verbal score had magically increased to 700, and my math score had gone up, too.

Several years later, after earning a Ph.D. in English from a "name" school, I took the LSATs. This time, I took the Kaplan course, and scored above the 99th percentile. I was accepted to Harvard Law, but attended a NYC school instead.

Did the standardized tests measure my ability, or my socio-economic status and educational opportunities? Conservatives say "yes." I say, "fuggetaboutit -- are you even kidding?"

you'd better give better examples than 'bad,' 'slick,' and 'tight.' we all know those words and we all realize they have more than one meaning. it's not just blacks who might be confused by this. come on.

I find this hard to believe. Most educated black people consciously code-switch and know when we are using, and reading, standard English or black venacular English. I just don't think that "This skirt is tight" would present a degree of confusion in a test setting when most kids know well that institutional language is not the same as the language of the street.

it's the "anglo-saxon" words that are the problem? is it me or don't we speak "english" which comes from anglo-saxon germanic peoples who were influenced by the romance language normans? maybe the real problem is we need to teach basic english words and all their meanings and not just long latin "sat" words.

I'm white, from a working-class background. Neither of my parents graduated from high school.

I took the SATs with no preparation, scoring (on the old test) an okay, but not great 1290. A few years later, after graduating college, I took the GRES, again without preparation. My verbal score had magically increased to 700, and my math score had gone up, too.

Several years later, after earning a Ph.D. in English from a "name" school, I took the LSATs. This time, I took the Kaplan course, and scored above the 99th percentile. I was accepted to Harvard Law, but attended a NYC school instead.

Did the standardized tests measure my ability, or my socio-economic status and educational opportunities? Conservatives say "yes." I say, "fuggetaboutit -- are you even kidding?"

Why do you keep insisting on referring to socio-economic bias as racial bias?

What about SAT-takers from other countries? I grew up in another English-speaking nation and did very well on the SAT (in the mid 90s). Could that group be a useful control for further study?

It's kind of funny, it feels like Jay Mathews is making a case for segregating the of college application process based on race---because races aren't equal when taking the SATs.

Ironic.

I knew the SATs were biased when I found out as a teen in the 80s that a few hundred dollars could increase your score.

I'm glad fewer schools are basing their decisions on the scores, but do you still have to take them just in case?