Stockton's SAT gap reveals how opportunity passes many kids by

December 4, 11:13 AMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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We fret constantly about the “achievement gap,” but a

in today’s news reveals something equally shocking – a glaring opportunity gap. This story comes out of Stockton, Calif., where last year only 9% of the school district’s juniors and seniors took the SAT.

The SAT, for anyone who’s been asleep for 100 years, is The Big Test, an essential part of the college admission process. (The ACT is a parallel test that serves the same function – one or the other is more common in different parts of the nation.) There’s a growing backlash against the dominance of these tests in students’ college prospects – a few colleges don’t require them and claim that the lack of scores won’t harm a student’s admission prospects. It’s a middle-class luxury to participate in the backlash; that’s not what's deterring Stockton’s largely low-income, Latino, immigrant population.

I don’t have comparable figures yet for other school districts (I have a call in to SFUSD’s public information goddess, Gentle Blythe), but Stockton’s 9% is undoubtedly seriously low. After a chat with Stockton Unified School District (SUSD) spokesman Rick Brewer, I’d say a combination of poverty, uneducated parents, challenging logistics and an SAT setup (overseen by the creepily all-powerful College Board) that is particularly user-unfriendly in those circumstances simply create a culture where the SAT has been viewed as irrelevant and inaccessible.

This year, Stockton Unified is trying something novel, according to the Stockton Record: All juniors and seniors can take the SAT free this Saturday (Dec. 6), and are strongly encouraged to do so. The district is sending automated wake-up calls to students at home; church bells all over town will ring to help get everyone up; transportation is provided; schools have called employers asking them to let working students adjust their schedules. All students were offered the normally pricey Kaplan SAT prep course for free. About 1,800 seniors are signed up to take the SAT on Saturday, compared with about 300 who took it last year. Those who show up will get free tickets for a pro hockey game in Stockton that evening.

I’m the mom of a public school senior currently immersed in college applications, and I’m an involved parent in a diverse urban public school district. I’m not living in a bubble. But I was still startled at the lack of “college knowledge” that Stockton schools apparently struggle with.

“This is really an equity-of-access issue,” SUSD’s Brewer told me. He cited a variety of factors: Many students work or care for younger relatives on Saturdays; parents don’t recognize the importance of the tests or of college at all; the $45 basic test fee – and an unrealistic threshold for a fee waiver – makes it unaffordable to some. SATs are given worldwide on the same day, usually one Saturday a month, for test-security reasons. “We’ve argued with the College Board asking why we can’t give the SAT on a Friday,” Brewer said. “Our students have typically never had buy-in – from the schools or the parents or the College Board.”

Stockton, a small city of about 250,000 population, 65 miles from San Francisco in the agricultural Central Valley, has recently been notorious as the foreclosure capital of the nation. The school district’s demographics: 37,900 students; 72.6% low-income (qualifying for subsidized lunch); 26% English language learners; 56.5% Latino; 12.4% African-American; 11.8% Asian (mostly Laotian, Hmong and Vietnamese, according to Brewer); 9.2% white. (See below for SFUSD’s comparative statistics.)

It remains to be seen how many Stockton juniors and seniors turn out the day after tomorrow for test day, and how well they do. Are the schools that have previously been unsuccessful in creating college-bound culture still able to educate students so they'll do OK?

This news story opened my eyes to how different  -- and how much more challenged -- some urban cultures can be. Even SFUSD’s most low-income general-ed high schools promote college and publicize the SAT; awareness of it is generally pervasive. But our district does have different demographics and a different culture from Stockton’s – and undoubtedly from many other challenged urban districts.

I keep reading about the “No Excuses” culture in some of the “it’s a miracle!” education reform fads and thinking about what hype that is.

Here are SFUSD’s demographics: 54,853 students; 54% low-income; 29.5% English language learners, 41.8% Asian (heavily Chinese); 23% Latino; 12.5% African-American; 10.3% white. Both sets of demographics are for the 2007-08 school year from the California Department of Education website.