Extra help for PSAT unfair

Junior year is stressful. This is probably the understatement of the century, especially at a school as academically oriented as Saratoga High.

As soon as October rolled around, junior Nandita Kumar became preoccupied with the impending SAT. She, along with most juniors and many sophomores, also took the PSAT, which could qualify them for the National Merit Scholarship, a prestigious award that seems to have decreased in distinction at SHS because of the vast number of people who receive it.

Looking solely at this year’s senior class, 38 students were named semifinalists—approximately 12 percent of the senior class. This number of students puts SHS at the position of being the school with the third highest quantity of National Merit semifinalists of the third highest National Merit ranking school among the public schools of California, surpassed only by Lynbrook and Mission San Jose.

With such an influx of National Merit scholars in the Bay Area alone, the question of why becomes important.

Saratoga, similar to Cupertino and Sunnyvale, is an affluent town in which academics are given great priority. The intense competition to stand out or leap ahead of the general student population often leads students to seek outside help in the form of tutoring organizations and extra classes.

Especially for tests like the PSAT, where such important scholarships are at stake, Bay Area students, including those from SHS, go to prep classes where they are taught exactly what to expect on these tests along with tricks to get through them. This to most seems normal—a typical move for students whose families not only pressure them to maintain high scores, but also have the money to spend on expensive classes and tutoring to ensure their children’s success.

However, in many other California districts, parents cannot afford such help for their kids. This means generally smarter student from a poorer district could be beaten out of a scholarship by a less intelligent richer student who went through weeks of intensive training for the test.

This gap between rich students and poor students needs to close. Students should be tested on their base knowledge with no preparation, no tutors and no eight-week SAT summer boot camp. Only this type of testing will put students on equal footing with one another.

Another solution would be raising the educational standard for students in poorer districts. As of this January, the state of California is ranked 43rd in per-student spending according to Ed Week’s state rankings. The state’s $7,571 spent for each student back in 2009 was already more than $2,000 below the national average. In comparison, $47,000 was spent that year for each prison inmate.

This drastic gap between the money spent on prisons and that spent on education shows that California does have the money to spend on less economically stable students. Raising the per-student spending by even a couple thousand dollars could result in smaller class sizes, more attention for individual students, and prevent many from falling through the cracks of the public school system.

With the economic educational barrier down, students from less wealthy communities will gain more interest in learning and achieving.

Although such a system may bring some changes to the top ranking schools in California and decrease the number of National Merit scholars that Bay Area schools flaunt, in the end it would provide equality in education for all students.

Maybe even someday all schools will experience the mob that surrounds the College and Career center on the first day of PSAT signup.