2,105 vs. 44. As of April 25, 2025, 2,105 accredited universities and colleges in the U.S. are test-optional or test-free in their undergraduate admissions, while a paltry 19 private and 35 public colleges require SAT or ACT scores for admission. An astounding ratio of 48 to one! With the exception of a few high-profile cases—MIT, Stanford, and the University of Austin, i.e.—standardized testing faces an increasingly bleak future in higher education.
If you talk to an average high school teacher today about college admissions, you’d find some garden-variety, anti-test responses: “Well, research shows tests don’t measure academic success.” “High-stakes tests are not as reliable as GPA.” “SAT unfairly disadvantages marginalized students.”
In my writings over the years, I have made some humble attempts to debunk “anti-testism” with empirical research, literature reviews, news commentaries, and data analysis. There are a handful of others, more prominent and credentialed scholars who have also published works calling for a return to tests. But given the finite reach of our platforms and the somewhat esoteric nature of the issue, we are mostly preaching to the choir. In the meantime, the test-free movement undergoes exponential growth and now has the potential to co-opt even supporters on the right.
How did we get to this supposedly research-informed public consensus against educational testing?
Surely, it cannot be purely driven by the left’s ideological obsessions with “leveling the playing field” or providing “equitable pathways” to higher education. A new book, The Malfunction of US Education Policy, by Richard P. Phelps, investigates power dynamics in education policymaking, or in Phelps’s words, “a duopoly of domineering groups,” that may help explain the assault on testing and its tepid—and ineffective—opposition.
Phelps, who has an academic background in public policy and educational psychology, argues that mainstream research on educational testing, assessment, and standards lacks integrity and rigor, misinforming the public and policymakers with puffed-up claims of novelty and relentless purges of dissent. Two education cartels—establishment and reform—aided by the “Permanent Education Press,” have succeeded in subverting “a vast multitude of relevant knowledge.” Through a chronological account of U.S. testing programs and policies at the state and national levels, his book details how “[i]gnorance, arrogance, and ambition” have perpetuated cycles of suboptimal policies with widespread harms to society at large.
The Education Establishment Cartel, led by “the community of educational testing experts centered on the Center for Research on Education Standards and Student Testing (CRESST), headquartered at UCLA,” has created an economy of scale for its biased research on testing and assessment through gaslighting and degrading opposing views. Rather than engaging opponents in open debate on important issues such as the efficacy of high-stakes tests, the cartel “declares relevant past research nonexistent or no good, without referencing any of it.” Overlooking valid experimental studies, including C.C. Ross’s Measurement in Today’s Schools (1941) and Marjorie Kirkland’s literature review in Review of Educational Research (1971), members of the Education Establishment Cartel cite each other and inflate each other’s “expert status.” This consolidation process is done with the help of the cartel’s strategic partners, including the Federal Government, the Education Trust, the Gates Foundation, and more, which funneled tens of millions of dollars into funding the cartel’s innovative studies on testing.
Notably, many conservative-leaning education experts, due to an objective lack of expertise on the niche subject matter of testing and perhaps out of the infallible human nature of pride, have only made matters worse. Most of these experts “had trained as academic political scientists and economists,” while “some had worked as congressional staff,” which means that “they tended to know about education governance, political processes, education finance, and labor economics,” and “less about curriculum, instruction, standards, or assessment.”
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When presented with a historic opportunity to influence national and state education policymaking after the 2000 election, this group became unfortunately co-opted by the Education Establishment Cartel. For instance, on the topic of test-score inflation, conservatives failed to critically investigate a CRESST claim that “core inflation occurs uniquely with high stakes tests and is caused by ‘teaching to the test.” Instead, they accepted the establishment’s falsehoods, asserting no past research and test security in no- or low-stakes tests. Through “strategic scholarship” to prop up insiders and dismiss outsiders, this small group of well-funded researchers formed the Education Reform Cartel, argues Phelps. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
At the end, the sabotaged knowledge base supporting educational testing, containing “thousands of randomized experiments in education… conducted by psychologists, education practitioners, and program evaluators going back a century,” retreated into devastating irrelevance, thanks to academic tribalism, egocentric urges to hoard credentials, and exclusionary tactics to ostracize critics. And this is a nutshell of the intricate mechanisms that have successfully concocted a myth surrounding standard testing.
The press and the public seemed to be complacent with the myth, until realities struck, such as in the case of Harvard providing a remedial math course to address “a lack of foundational algebra skills among students.” But the damages done by the anti-test myth, incremental at first and decisive cumulatively speaking, are so great that a paradigm shift would take many more years beyond a favorable presidential election and require disrupting a political equilibrium carefully established by the powerful interest groups.
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