In the latest reminder that racial preferences in college admissions will not go quietly, the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education has been circulating draft guidelines that propose penalizing universities that use SAT scores as a leading criterion when making admissions decisions.
What’s wrong with the SAT, a standardized test that has played a key role in college admissions for decades? It seems blacks and Hispanics regularly score lower on the test than whites and Asians, so ipso facto, the test must be discriminatory. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which broke the story, “the guidelines would establish a high burden of proof for institutions to show that [SAT-weighted admissions] policies do not violate anti-bias laws.”
The individual responsible for promulgating these guidelines is assistant secretary of education Norma Cantu, a leading administration proponent of quotas. If she succeeds, the net effect will be to undo state referendums and federal court decisions that over the past few years have advanced the quaint principles of merit and race-neutral university admissions. Will any committee chairman in Congress, we wonder, have the nerve to haul Cantu up and question her about this?
