Chris Hayes has a book to sell and guilt to expunge. The poor lad feels guilty that he benefited from the Evil Mostly White Meritocracy:
But the problem with my alma mater is that over time, the mechanisms of meritocracy have broken down. In 1995, when I was a student at Hunter, the student body was 12 percent black and 6 percent Hispanic. Not coincidentally, there was no test-prep industry for the Hunter entrance exam. That’s no longer the case. Now, so-called cram schools like Elite Academy in Queens can charge thousands of dollars for after-school and weekend courses where sixth graders memorize vocabulary words and learn advanced math. Meanwhile, in the wealthier precincts of Manhattan, parents can hire $90-an-hour private tutors for one-on-one sessions with their children.
By 2009, Hunter’s demographics were radically different—just 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic, according to the New York Times. With the rise of a sophisticated and expensive test-preparation industry, the means of selecting entrants to Hunter has grown less independent of the social and economic hierarchies in New York at large. The pyramid of merit has come to mirror the pyramid of wealth and cultural capital.
Here, Hayes is relying on the cheapest and most meretricious of the education myths: the rich have the ability to improve their test scores, SAT or otherwise, through expensive test prep, while the low income blacks and Hispanics do not. The higher scores are not genuine, and thus the acceptance is not truly meritocratic.
There’s just one tiny glitch in this mythology:
Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to use test prep than whites. Cite, cite, and oh look, this cite has a table:
Use of Test-Prep Courses and Gains, by Race and Ethnicity
| Group | % Taking Test-Prep Course | Post-Course Gain in Points on SAT |
| East Asian American | 30% | 68.8 |
| Other Asian | 15% | 23.8 |
| White | 10% | 12.3 |
| Black | 16% | 14.9 |
| Hispanic | 11% | 24.6 |
The idea that blacks and Hispanics don’t have access to test prep is some sort of delusion that all the reality in the universe can’t shake out of progressives.
Within a ten mile radius of my home, at least 10 organizations are dedicated to providing free test prep, college admissions advice, and academic support to low income, first generation college blacks and Hispanics. Double the radius and the count will be in the dozens, if not hundreds–as it probably is anywhere in America. Any low-income black or Hispanic who wants SAT/ACT test prep and thinks he or she can’t afford it is the victim of criminally ignorant high school advisors–and the facts suggest that this isn’t a big problem.
Low income whites are a different story; few charitable organizations are dedicated to improving their test scores. Of course, given that low income whites trounce high income blacks on the SAT (Cite, cite, and
cite), I guess maybe organizations figure there’s no point making the gap worse? But of course, the very fact that poor whites outscore wealthy blacks pretty much kills whatever remained of Hayes’ theory about the test score advantage of the rich and powerful.
Furthermore, as Steve Sailer and commenters to Hayes’ article point out, Hayes complete ignores another reality: the huge shift in Hunter College High School demographics isn’t so much from low income to high income, but from whites to Asians.
If you read of a school that’s suddenly moved to elite status or seen a dramatic rise in test scores (e.g., AIPCS), or heard that a test prep process has gotten out of control, it’s a sure thing that it’s become “an Asian school”, as we call them in my area. Once a school “goes Asian”, hitting a tipping point of about 40%, it’s a short step to 60-80%. Check out the top-scoring comprehensive high schools by SAT average, and the highest ones will be “asian schools”. They end up Asian because of white flight. It’s not that whites don’t like Asians, but their kids will lose access to AP/honors courses and get lower GPAs—not because they have lower abilities, but because the white parents haven’t managed to convince their kids that the world will end of they don’t get straight As. Donations, as a rule, decline with this demographic change, which is why wealthy school districts get more than a little annoyed when their schools are at risk of “going Asian”, and come up with all sorts of odd rules to discourage it (giving up class ranking or limiting AP grade bumps).
Hayes engages in yet another fiction (and that’s just in this excerpt!): that through test prep, the rich are distorting their abilities. The poor and the rich have similar abilities in a purely meritocratic world but thanks to test prep, the rich are making themselves look smarter, even though it’s a mirage.
Clearly, that can’t be true, or rich blacks would have higher test scores.
But here I will bring in personal experience in test prep. For the past nine years, I’ve been preparing students for the SAT, the ACT, the Subject tests (Math, Histories, English Lit), the high school admissions tests (HSPT, ISEE, SSAT), and all grad school tests except the MCAT (although this last not as much as I used to). I do this both through private instruction institutions (Kaplan in the past, an SAT academy now) and private tutoring (with rates in line with those in tony Manhattan, apparently). I work with Asians of all income levels, wealthy and upper income whites (as well as middle income whites in my Kaplan days), low income Hispanics, and low income African Americans.
In other words, unlike many people who yammer on about test prep, I actually have some experience preparing people of all races and all demographics for all sorts of tests, and will draw upon that experience to assert this as fact: test prep primarily helps people use their existing abilities more effectively. With some people, the bump is huge, with others it’s minimal, with still others, non-existent. In only a very few cases are students actually distorting their abilities by improving their test scores, but rather showing their abilities in the best possible light.
Is it possible to game the test, to prep so much that the score is a blatant misrepresentation? Yes, but it’s rare. The people who are most likely to do this are not the rich of any color, who can buy their way into whatever school they want. And it’s not low income blacks or Hispanics, who I’ve coached and seen huge increases that still only bring the majority of the kids to just below national averages. It’s certainly not middle-class or low income whites, who are clearly the least likely to even use test prep.
No, the students who might be actually distorting their abilities through test prep would most likely be Asian. (Please note that this statement is only assuming such distortion is possible.) I work at an Asian SAT “cram school”, teaching book clubs and math enrichment. Their parents call it “SAT school”, even though the kids are rising freshmen and sophomores for book club, and rising seventh and eighth graders for geometry, because as far as the parents are concerned, the kids are doing this as part of a five year program to improve their SAT scores. Junior summer, they are in SAT boot camp: 20 hours a week (plus a test) for 10 weeks in the summer, and then Saturday school until the test.
The kids I’m working with, dozens of hours per year, aren’t distorting their abilities, but going through all that work for the last 10 or 20 points possible of their score range. That’s leaving aside the Korean cram schools, which somehow enable kids with limited English skills to score an 800 on the SAT reading section. Now that, I would argue, is distortion.
Unfortunately for Hayes, though, these Asians aren’t rich. Wrong again.
Hayes is correct about one thing, though: the elites are locking out the hoi polloi from highest-level institutions. But it takes a real ignorance to pretend that the rich are doing this because of over-reliance on test scores or test prep, as opposed to buying their way in, using their powerful networks to only hire from the “right” schools, and the fuzzy math of the “holistic” evaluation process. Give me test scores any day.
educationrealist 
June 20th, 2012 at 9:38 pm
Why do you think East Asians benefit so much more from test prep than other groups? Are the East Asians more likely to do the homework assigned in test prep classes?
June 21st, 2012 at 1:45 pm
They go to more hours, and they take the test more times. Most of the kids I know take the test 5 or 6 times; a kid who gets a total of 2200 is sent back to review and practice and get 2250 or 2300.
Also, I think, they are working on getting a higher score, as opposed to learning more information. When you only get 2 wrong in the entire math section, a higher score does not involve learning more math. Far fewer whites do this–in large part because there’s no point if they don’t have really good grades, and if they also have really good grades, then they don’t need every single point that an Asian does, because elite schools discriminate against Asians.
July 4th, 2012 at 7:49 am
Personally, I take the evolutionary psychology view that recent human evolution has selected for certain traits in Asian populations. (See The 10,000 Year Explosion for arguments about recent human evolution).
2,000 years of rice farming in Asia has selected for people who are very good at working highly repetitive jobs for long hours day after day. (See Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers). This has selected for people who are mentally capable of getting something out of hours and hours of repetition. iPhone manufacturing hasn’t moved to Africa because only in Asia can you find millions of people willing to solder electronics for 16 hours a day.
Meanwhile, Western Europe, especially Britain, was largely populated by the offspring of the rich, who had the most children and suffered the lowest mortality (see A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark). Thus, Westerners are more likely to be intelligent strivers, but not necessary to have the patience for long hours of test-prep labour.
July 4th, 2012 at 7:50 am
See: http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html
August 25th, 2013 at 4:36 am
That’s not evolutionary psychology. That’s not how evolution works – 2,000 years isn’t long enough for that kind of genetic selection. Gladwell was talking about socialization. When it’s the norm in a culture to do very detail-oriented memorization work, you’re more likely to get it. Also, Western Europe was not more populated by the offspring of the rich; very few people in Western Europe before the 19th century were rich.
April 23rd, 2014 at 3:50 pm
Actually Lissa, Gregory Clark in “The Son Also Rises” provides more than enough evidence via surnames that richer Britons were having far more children than their lower class countrymen. Not all of these children could remain rich. Many became poor, falling into the underclass. When middle classes started rising in Europe they were more likely to be people who descended not from poor folks rising, but children of rich folks who weren’t inheriting their parents wealth but had enough of an advantage to make their own.
November 6th, 2012 at 4:26 am
The richest nation for thousand years was China.
The world 2nd largest empire was Mongol
The Highest I.Q are East Asians on average
China, Japan, S.Korea were top 5 in olympics
Taiwan won invention contests in U.K, Russia, Ukraine
East Asia was already thousand years more advance than most of Europe who were backward savages conquered by Mongols, Arabs, Moors, Turkic for thousand years. East Asia have never suffered these invansions fron non-Asian because they were military adance that time. Europeans only started became powerful when the stole Chinese invention gunpowder. China was the most inventive nation in the world until communist took over and made China backward, now you have Japan and S.Korea who are good in advancing products. China still controls trillions of American and European debts.
November 6th, 2012 at 7:42 am
Wow. Good thing you’re here to give us that history lesson!
February 22nd, 2015 at 11:18 am
Literally all my wut.
China hasn’t been a single nation for thousands of years. As for civilizational wealth over the last 2000 years… have a table on what we estimate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
You see all sorts of regions fluctuate, even poor as all hell India.
Mongolian empire and IQ is true, but the IQ difference is so small that it depends on how you administer the test.
Japan wasn’t even top 10 in the 2012 Olympics. Korea is pretty good for an Asian country though. China just gets some because they have a huge population, but they are notable.
Invention contest thing is just off the wall.
But here’s the point that got me to respond: Mongols. China has been ruled more often by outsiders than ethnic Chinese for hundreds of years. The Mongolian dynasty, that didn’t even manage to conquer Europe, ruled China. Europe and the Americas are the only continents that haven’t really been totally conquered by outsiders. There are exceptional countries like Thailand, but almost everyone, including China, Japan, Korea, have been conquered by Europeans or North Americans. On the other hand, none of the Arabs, Moors, Turks or Mongols made it past southern or eastern Europe. Mongols did get Russia for a while, Moors did get Spain for a while, Arabs did get Sicily for a while and Turks did get the Balkans for a while, but those aren’t really core Europe are they? Besides, they all got kicked out eventually leaving very little behind. The rest of the world had to wait for Europeans to leave, and they left their indelible mark in Christianity, democracy and science. The odd ones out are Marxist, which is a vaguely European ideology anyway.
In addition, China was going through two centuries of domination by European powers in what they call the humiliation.
June 21st, 2012 at 12:27 pm
Most Asians of first generation are not rich. I wonder how much this guy knows about east Asians besides teach some prep classes. Most asian students in the US take prep SAT prep class in Princeton review or Kaplan. It is extremely unusual to go to 20 hours per week boot camp. Those camps are mostly oversea in South Korea or China. SAT is simply too easy to warrant such effort, particularly for Asian students born in the US. SAT math is pathetic to Asian students: No more than a driver license test. Whites not as good as Asians in SAT math are not because of lack of prep effort, but because of not as strong in fundamental skill and problem solving capability. Get over it, guy.
June 21st, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Most first generation Asian students take boot camp classes. Second and third generation Asians take Princeton review or Kaplan. If you don’t live in an area with huge Asian saturation (over 50% Asian), then you are probably not familiar with the huge business in SAT cram schools.
And yes, most Asians are not rich. That’s my point–that Chris Hayes is probably (although not provably) wrong about the influence of test prep on the rich.
Finally, none of this should be taken as criticism of Asians. The common stereotype of Asians as unimaginative swotters is just completely wrong, and I am not insinuating that they should not be taking hours of test prep. I wish the kids would start rebelling against their parents, though!
June 22nd, 2012 at 2:02 pm
I think there is some equivocation on the term “rich.” As a veteran of the commercial prep industry, I would say that most of my students were not poor, but also not rich. Indeed, it is absurd to think that the commercial test prep market could prepare the volume of students it does by only targeting the truly rich. Nevertheless, in the minds of many, “not poor” translates into “rich,” particularly when we are speaking about race and ethnicity.
As someone with perhaps even more exposure to the test prep industry than I, I would ask you whether poor black and hispanic students are more likely to take test prep than truly poor white and Asian students. The common belief is that test prep disadvantages poor non-Asian minority students. It seems to me that this has led to an effort to target these students for test prep in ways that other students, including more affluent black and hispanic students, may not be targeted. Thus, it is quite possible that non-poor black and hispanic students are less likely to take test prep than their non-poor white and Asian peers even while blacks and hispanics as a group do take test prep courses more frequently than white students. This is just speculation, but I must say that I had very few traditional black students in my classes. Of the few that I had, most were older, non-traditional students studying for graduate school entrance tests.
June 22nd, 2012 at 3:00 pm
Yes, it’s likely. I said as much in the post. All sorts of organizations exist to push low income blacks and Hispanics into test prep and other college plans. Kids who don’t take advantage of these are failing to do so out of ignorance, not a lack of access.
It’s also likely that high-income blacks aren’t taking as much test prep as low income blacks. However, they are still more likely to take test prep than high income whites, if the research I linked is accurate.
But I think there’s some research on high income vs. low income blacks. I’ll dig it up if I can.
Oh, and you’re absolutely right about test prep. I worked for Kaplan and now work for an Asian “SAT academy” (among other jobs), and these are primarily middle-class customers. Wealthy customers get individual tutoring.
June 23rd, 2012 at 6:16 am
[…] Educational Realist elaborates on some of the concerns I have had with Chris Hayes’ ballyhooed piece on the failure of elites: Hayes is correct about one thing, though: the elites are locking out the hoi polloi from highest-level institutions. But it takes a real ignorance to pretend that the rich are doing this because of over-reliance on test scores or test prep, as opposed to buying their way in, using their powerful networks to only hire from the “right” schools, and the fuzzy math of the “holistic” evaluation process. Give me test scores any day. […]
June 24th, 2012 at 4:09 am
One half Chinese, half Caucasian individual I know went from 1400 to 1530 on the old 1600 SAT with a little tutoring …
It’s mostly about not making unforced mistakes.
August 16th, 2012 at 5:22 pm
The report “From High School to the Future:
ACT Preparation–Too Much, Too Late: Why ACT Scores Are Low in Chicago and What It Means for Schools”, available online, documents how much time is spent on ACT prep in the Chicago public schools, to little avail.
August 17th, 2012 at 6:32 pm
[…] written before about the persistence of test prep delusions. Reality, summarized: blacks and Hispanics use test prep more than whites, Asians use it more than […]
October 27th, 2012 at 9:30 pm
[…] Why Chris Hayes Fails […]
October 29th, 2012 at 7:10 am
[…] do very well on tests, can’t score above 500 on any section of the SAT, despite all your test prep? All is not lost. Whatever you do, don’t lie to yourself about your abilities, and […]
January 2nd, 2013 at 2:37 am
[…] Why Chris Hayes Fails got a big immediate reaction, winning links from both Steve Sailer and Razib Khan, and is currently #5 on my overall. This post, too, gets a lot of repeat links because of its disconcerting evidence in two big areas: a) blacks and Hispanics are more likely to get test prep than whites, and b) wealthy blacks score lower than poor whites on the SAT, something I return to often. […]
February 22nd, 2013 at 3:12 pm
[…] are only essential for signaling to colleges that the student is a smart cookie, and as Ron Unz and Chris Hayes both point out, the value in that varies based on the student race and family SES (including where […]
March 23rd, 2013 at 2:47 am
[…] get plenty of mileage, despite the fact that black and mestizo students get more funding and are more likely to use test prep than white […]
April 20th, 2013 at 9:43 am
[…] a plurality-black city isn’t teaching enough blacks to register on the radar. It’s an Asian school, […]
May 6th, 2013 at 1:25 am
[…] Why Chris Hayes Fails […]
May 24th, 2013 at 2:46 am
[…] hard is it to stop repeating utter pap? Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to use test prep than whites, although East Asians trump everyo… And here’s a table to prove it (table courtesy of Inside Higher Ed, as mentioned in the […]
August 10th, 2013 at 2:36 am
[…] Realist on who really benefits from standardized test prep, besides the Asians of course. (via […]
September 2nd, 2013 at 7:46 pm
[…] was that dramatic, and it is part of a series of discoveries over past year making me wonder if the big gap between Asian and white test prep use (and time spent in test prep) is doing more than just giving Asians a slight edge. This piece is […]
April 7th, 2014 at 1:02 am
[…] Eighteen months ago, I thought the possibility that Asians were artificially inflating their scores was theoretically possible, but unlikely. Over the next year, my experiences and additional research has changed my view. I now think it likely that both here and overseas, a decent percentage of Asian testers are either cheating or gaming the SAT and AP tests—-or both. I’ve written up some of this but not all, and I’m not expecting anyone to just take my word for it. […]
July 30th, 2014 at 2:54 am
[…] “A blogger called Education Realist (who I found from Steve Sailer’s blog) wrote the following: […]
October 23rd, 2015 at 9:58 am
[…] disadvantaged blacks and Hispanics—because you’re basically ignorant of the fact that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to get test prep than whites (all races are pikers compared to East Asians). Given your products’ abysmal integrity, why […]
November 25th, 2015 at 7:15 am
[…] source […]