By Daniel H. Pink
On Saturday morning, 330,000 American teenagers began their march into meritocratic adult life by taking the SAT. The test was new and improved, the first significant changes to the SAT in a decade. Analogies disappeared. A new writing section debuted. And math got a little harder.
The goal of these reforms is to predict college performance more accurately, to reduce possible bias and to make it tougher for affluent students to gain an edge through expensive test-prep courses.
But even if the new SAT cures these ills, one unhappy truth remains: The skills it measures are becoming less central to the future of the students taking the test.
For the past several decades, American life has been an SAT-ocracy - a regime in which professional success depended on the ability to reason logically, sequentially and speedily. The SAT became the working world's first gatekeeper, in part because the jobs that paid the most - in dollars and prestige - required the ability to zero in, computer-like, on correct answers. Think spreadsheet-wielding bankers, number-crunching accountants and code-crafting programmers.
Changing workforce
Those sorts of abilities - call them SAT skills - are still necessary, of course. But for this weekend's test-takers, they're no longer sufficient. The reason? Many of these SAT skills can be done cheaper by overseas workers and faster by computers. And by the time these young people enter the workforce early in the next decade, a large category of jobs - call them SAT jobs - will increasingly be offshore or automated.
Take accounting. Despite a recent uptick in accounting jobs, many accountants could become this generation's factory workers, their livelihoods threatened by the twin pressures of Asia and automation.
Chartered accountants in India and the Philippines can do basic accounting work for $500 a month. Tax software can do it for $39.95. As a result, speedy computational skills matter less, just as a strong back became less crucial for industrial workers when basic manufacturing work migrated overseas and robots hit the factory floor.
What matters more today are abilities that the SAT ignores: artistry, empathy, inventiveness, seeing the big picture and other capabilities that are difficult to outsource or automate. With TurboTax on her computer and a colleague in Bangalore, India, connected by fiber-optic cable, tomorrow's accountant will need high-concept and high-touch abilities in addition to SAT skills. She'll have to become adept at understanding a client's broader needs, at nurturing relationships with far-flung colleagues and at coming up with innovations.
'Post-SAT' jobs
At the same time, the economy is spawning large numbers of "post-SAT" jobs. For instance, more Americans work in art, entertainment and design than work as lawyers, accountants and auditors. And the professional category in greatest demand today is nursing, which requires analytic ability, of course, but also equal measures of empathy and human connection.
Can those sorts of artistic and empathic abilities be quantified? Perhaps. Yale University psychologist Robert Sternberg has devised an intriguing experiment called the Rainbow Project. In this exam, funded partly by the College Board, test-takers get blank New Yorker cartoons and must craft humorous captions. They must write a short story using as their guide only a title supplied by the test-givers. And they're presented with various social challenges - navigating a party, cajoling friends into helping on a project - and asked how they'd respond. The results are promising.
Still, what makes these sorts of abilities increasingly valuable also makes them difficult to measure with traditional metrics. That ought to provide some solace, or perhaps a new source of anxiety, to the young people nervously awaiting their scores. In the parlance of the old test, SAT skills are to the emerging economy what spelling and grammar are to great literature. They'll help. But in a high-concept, high-touch age, it will take a whole lot more.
ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2009)
A new study in the journal Social Science Quarterly reveals that music participation, defined as music lessons taken in or out of school and parents attending concerts with their children, has a positive effect on reading and mathematic achievement in early childhood and adolescence. Additionally, socioeconomic status and ethnicity affect music participation.
Darby E. Southgate, MA, and Vincent Roscigno, Ph.D., of The Ohio State University reviewed two nationally representative data sources to analyze patterns of music involvement and possible effects on math and reading performance for both elementary and high school students.
Music is positively associated with academic achievement, especially during the high school years.
However, not all adolescents participate in music equally, and certain groups are disadvantaged in access to music education. Families with high socioeconomic status participate more in music than do families with lower socioeconomic status. In addition to social class as a predictor of music participation, ethnicity is also a factor. Asians and Whites are more likely to participate in music than are Hispanics. While young Black children attended concerts with their parents, they were less likely to take music lessons.
"This topic becomes an issue of equity at both the family and school levels,” the authors conclude. “This has major policy implications for federal, state, and local agencies, as well as knowledge that can help families allocate resources that are most beneficial to children."