Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Sternberg

He’s doing the polite-professor version of calling the whole enterprise a racket. Sternberg concedes the pragmatic reality first: if the SAT exists, families will rationally buy prep books and courses. That opening isn’t endorsement; it’s a diagnosis of how a high-stakes test manufactures its own shadow economy. The key move is the pivot to apology: “I’m sorry to say” signals reluctant witness, not crusader, before he lands the charge that matters culturally and politically - the test doesn’t just measure schooling, it reshapes it.

The subtext is about institutional capture. When “what they were doing…was just SAT training,” the classroom stops being a public good and becomes a test-centered production line. Learning narrows to the kinds of verbal and quantitative tricks that reward familiarity with the exam’s logic. Sternberg, long associated with broader theories of intelligence, is implicitly pushing back against the idea that aptitude is a single score you can coach up with the right heuristics. If you can “teach the test” this thoroughly, the test is revealing less about students and more about who has time, money, and schools willing to bend their curriculum toward the gate.

Context matters: decades of test-based accountability and competitive admissions created incentives for districts to treat the SAT as a de facto standard, even when they publicly insist it’s only one factor. Sternberg’s anecdote about visiting his kids’ classes is strategic - it’s not abstract critique from a podium; it’s an insider reporting that the distortion has reached the everyday. The intent isn’t to shame parents for prepping, but to indict a system that makes prep feel like responsible parenting while quietly hollowing out education.