SATs = racism

 It's amazing that no one has yet sued the Educational Testing Service on the grounds that its tests are racially biased.

Countless police departments and fire departments have been sued because they used exams which "discriminated" against black people, i.e., black people did not score as high on them. In many of those cases, local or U.S. district judges sided with the plaintiffs.

Yet the SAT has been around for ages, and has for its entire existence practiced such "discrimination."

For the school year 2009-2010, whites averaged 528 in Critical Reading, and 536 in Math. Asians averaged 519 and 591. Hispanics, 454 and 463. And blacks, 429 and 428.

These results have been remarkably consistent over time, as this chart shows.

All of the Head Start, affirmative action, and No Child Left Behind programs haven't made the slightest dent in these racial gaps.

I remember reading about fifteen years ago that whites who came from families which made between ten and twenty thousand dollars a year scored higher, on average, than blacks who came from families which made more than seventy thousand.

Janny Scott, who writes for the New York Times, has been in the news for her recent biography of Barack Obama's mother. In the mid-1970's she wrote an article in the Harvard Crimson about racial disparities on SAT scores in which she quoted an unnamed "ETS official, who said, in an unguarded moment, 'Blaming the Educational Testing Service for the fact that blacks score lower on the SATs is like blaming the Toledo Weight Scale company for the fact that some people are fat'."

Of course, colleges offset the SAT results with affirmative action, and with their quest for "diversity."

But aren't those racial disparities prima facie evidence of today's definition of "racism?" Why hasn't the NAACP or the ACLU brought suit against the ETS for their racist scoring system? Why have the NAACP and similar organizations been so strangely silent? Are they embarrassed to address this particular form of "discrimination" because it deals so directly with the issue of intelligence? Do they feel that complaining about this would undermine their efforts to find "discrimination" elsewhere?

Yet so many of the other suits which have been brought -- against the "racism" inherent in tests used for hiring and promotion in police and fire departments -- also seem to have been based purely on differences in mental ability.

It's hard to believe that the ETS has so far escaped unscathed.