Lotto Scholarship Funding Change: I'm not saying you are racist but your policy is

The Tampa Bay Times reports on a change in the funding for Bright Future Scholarships that will lead to an over 50% reduction in the number of Black and Hispanic students who receive the college funding for state schools. The change? They will be raising the SAT requirement from 1020 to 1170 (ACT from 22 to 26).

I understand how the people behind this bill probably thought it through. You have a limited amount of funds. You have to make a distinguishing factor somehow. Why not the SAT?

I, with my remaining faith in humanity, don't think that the goal was to make sure the money went to white kids. I don't think that the people making the rule were racist. But, the result certainly was.

The testing gap on the SAT is well documented with whites scoring higher on all sections of the test. Some of the largest problems comes in the reading/verbal section. On the very difficult words, the ones that would only have been learned from school, the racial gaps go down. On the "easier" words they go up. That's because what the (mostly white) test makers think are common, if fancy, words (like plethora) may not have been heard in the non-white (or non-wealthy) homes.

Or, to put it another way, the groups who have historically been kept out of higher education for racial reasons didn't have the opportunity to develop the vocabulary in their communities that other groups with access to higher education did. And now they use a test that is, in part, based on the knowledge of that vocabulary to keep their children out of school. I don't think that the goal is racist in motivation, but the results certainly are.

The weirdest thing is that this move by Florida to make the SAT more important comes at a time when schools are moving away from the test. As Joseph Soares' essay for Inside Higher Ed explains

Even the College Board stipulates in its technical literature that high school grade-point average is the variable that holds the highest statistical correlation with first year grades and with cumulative grades. And high school G.P.A. is the best predictor of who will finish a college degree. High school G.P.A. alone performs better than test scores alone, whether one uses the SAT or the ACT; when combined with high school G.P.A., test scores increase our statistical power by one percentage point, as found at DePaul University, using the ACT, or at the University of Georgia, using the SAT. For me, a variable that raises one’s adjusted r-square in a statistical model by one point contributes diddly to our predictive powers. And what it contributes that isn’t diddly is the transmission of social inequality. There is no correlation between high school G.P.A. and family income; the same cannot be said for the SAT/ACT.  

So, why not raise the GPA requirement for Bright Futures instead of SAT? Why not add the long talked about "need" element to Bright Futures (currently the state pays for every student who meets the qualification, even if they come from wealthy families or qualify for a scholarship from their school)? Why not do what many people do, and shuffle the freshmen classes to Junior Colleges were they can get their required classes for less money. Or, offer to pay the equivalent of what the Jr. College would cost and allw students choosing to go to other schools to pay the difference.

Or, you know, raise taxes. I know. That isn't allowed in Florida. Because we have to keep taxes low so that businesses will come here and then...we can not tax them? I'm not sure. It's sort of an underwear gnome mathematical model.

But any of these would be better than the one solution the picked, SAT and ACT scores.

I really don't think that you're racist, Florida, but your policy really is.