Russell Sage Foundation Author James Rosenbaum, Writes About Alternatives To Four-Year College Degrees
American society is obsessed with a single route to success. We tell our children they must get high SAT scores, attend selective colleges, get bachelor’s degrees and get high paying jobs to have a successful life. They go through 12 years of incessant testing, test-prep lessons and test mania, as if tests were the key to success.The nation’s education system has become an SAT rat race in which youth are judged on where they fall on the bell curve of test scores. This message drives kids crazy. Even high-achieving students worry about their rankings and strive to improve them in hopes of college admissions. Since low test scores can hurt a school’s reputation and funding, high schools sometimes find ways to exclude low achieving students on test days, presaging future societal exclusion.
In our recent book, Bridging the Gaps, Caitlin Ahearn, Janet Rosenbaum and I find that although academic skills and high test scores are worthwhile goals, the narrow focus on one-dimensional attainments is a mistaken view that ignores many good options and creates unnecessary discouragement for students who feel they cannot meet college test-score requirements...