On Aug. 27, the College Board altered its plan to assign an “adversity score” to students during the college admissions process. Instead of calculating a single score for students’ supposed relative advantage or disadvantage, the organization plans to capture a student’s socioeconomic background “using multiple data points.”
The question remains whether the replacement tool — a different version of its “Environmental Context Dashboard,” now called “Landscape” — is really any different from the original so-called “adversity score” that many conservatives found so objectionable.
“We listened to thoughtful criticism and made Landscape better and more transparent,” College Board CEO David Coleman said in a statement. “Landscape provides admissions officers more consistent background information so they can fairly consider every student, no matter where they live and learn.”
According to the College Board, Landscape gives admissions officers information about the quality of the school and relative wealth of the neighborhood. Additional neighborhood factors such as college attendance, household structure, median family income, housing stability, education levels, and crime are all considered as relevant data points.
Essentially, admissions officers receive most of the same information that would have been contained within an “adversity score” — it’s simply disaggregated, rather than combined into a single number. It doesn’t appear that much is actually changing.
Setting aside the fact that the “revamp” of Landscape is largely semantic, the conversation around an adversity score is deeply ironic. At this point, everyone acknowledges that neighborhood schools and the availability of educational opportunity remain deeply unequal. Many of these same people also believe that band-aid fixes such as adversity scores could help students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
But the reality is that 12th grade is too late for an educational intervention — years of learning have already been lost. Adjusting disadvantaged students’ college applications to make them more competitive against peers who received a solid education for their whole life potentially hurts them even more in the long run, and could worsen the achievement gap currently plaguing colleges.
Rather than focusing on retroactive measures such as adversity scores, we ought to embrace public policy solutions such as school choice, that we know work in providing families a meaningful alternative from their neighborhood school and better preparing students for college.
With recent national polling data showing that support for school choice policies is stronger than ever, let’s help students before they learn their ABCs, rather than try and wait until they’re applying to college.
Kate Hardiman is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. She taught high school in Chicago for two years while earning her M.Ed. and is now a J.D. candidate at Georgetown University Law Center.
