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Eleventh-grade student Alanny Alvarez makes a salad at the salad bar in the cafeteria at Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. In 2018, after 11th graders at the Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., researched the “food deserts” plaguing many neighborhoods in their city, they began pressing their cafeteria contractor to make a change: they wanted a salad bar in their school, not just for students but for faculty and staff as well. The company complied, at first offering the salad bar just two days a week, but eventually providing it on every school day. This small piece of successful activism aptly illustrates what has happened to service learning, the nearly 40-year-old educational strategy that mixes academics and volunteerism—at times compelled volunteerism. The idea has undergone many permutations, but scholars say it has never been given its due—either by educators or by those who appropriate funds. Today it lives on in an unusual form that rethinks the relationship between academics and service, calling upon students to pose questions about a community problem, research the answers, and devise a fix.

Accommodations, deserved or undeserved, have been under the microscope in 2019. They played a prominent role in this year's Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, with prosecutors alleging that wealthy parents persuaded willing psychologists to say their child needed extra time in special testing centers--in a few cases, ringers proctored the exam and cheated on a student's behalf. The \"New York Times\" reported from court filings that in one case, William Singer, the scandal's mastermind, told a parent that for $4,000 or $5,000, a psychologist he worked with would attest that his child needed more time. As schools grapple with these realities, a few educators, researchers, and psychologists have begun to wonder whether it is time to make a fundamental change to tests like the SAT so that they are harder to game. More broadly, they ask: If success in college is about 21st-century skills such as critical thinking, close reading, and collaboration, should gate-keeping tests such as the SAT be timed at all? Advocates argue that making the test untimed for everyone would make it harder for rich or well-connected parents to game the system, and also might do a better job of measuring students' true capabilities.

The first time she took the SAT, in December 2013, Savannah Treviño Casias got what she calls “a really low score”—1040 out of 1600. It put her squarely in the 50th percentile—not so good for someone aspiring to be a psychologist. At the time a junior at the Girls Leadership Academy of Arizona, a small public charter school in Phoenix, Treviño Casias had been diagnosed in 6th grade with the math learning disability known as dyscalculia. The diagnosis qualified her for extra time on classroom tests and quizzes, along with other accommodations. But she’d sat for that first SAT without requesting extra time, taking it in four hours along with hundreds of other students at a nearby high school. Treviño Casias vowed to do better. She arranged for a family friend to tutor her over the following six months—and she asked for extra time on the next test. She is not alone. Requests for more time and other accommodations on the SAT have soared in recent years, to an estimated 160,000 in 2015–16 from 80,000 in the 2010–11 school year. At the same time, the jaw-dropping “Varsity Blues” scandal in 2019 shed new light on parents determined to get their kids an advantage on such tests, at any cost. As schools grapple with these realities, a few educators, researchers, and psychologists have begun to wonder whether it’s time to make a fundamental change to tests like the SAT so that they’re harder to game. More broadly, they ask: If success in college is about 21st-century skills such as critical thinking, close reading, and collaboration, should gate-keeping tests such as the SAT be timed at all? Advocates argue that making the test untimed for everyone would make it harder for rich or well-connected parents to game the system, and also might do a better job of measuring students’ true capabilities.

IN 1959, six years before he authored the study that would remake America's segregated public schools, James S. Coleman found himself face to face with a very different foe: the inscrutable desires, evolving tastes, and secret motivations of the post--World War II American teenager. At the time, Coleman was head of Johns Hopkins University's Department of Social Relations (later renamed the Department of Sociology). He had just spent two years studying the \"climate of values\" at several midwestern high schools, interviewing students about their academic lives, their social lives, school culture, and their rapidly evolving teen culture. Deep within the data, he found what he considered the root of the underachievement crisis in American high schools: a management structure that misunderstood teenagers and fundamentally misused student incentives. For more than 50 years, Coleman's findings in this study have been overshadowed by those of the Coleman Report. But scholars and educators would do well to revisit Coleman's earlier focus on student culture and motivations if we're to understand, in his words, \"why and for whom educational institutions fail.\" Building on Coleman's early theories, this article discusses how new academic competitions motivate students to achieve. [This article is part of a new \"Education Next\" series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman's groundbreaking report, \"Equality of Educational Opportunity.\" The full series appears in the Spring 2016 issue of \"Education Next.\"]