That is, if you have very low expectations.

College Board, as you all know, is a private company that works for itself, via a Board of Trustees who are hand-selected for candidacy by, well, the College Board. They’re a business, and we should understand that.

Still, among my many quibbles with the corporation, in the past they have always taken the very public stance of being in favor of diversity. Just Google it if you don’t believe me. That last result talks about excellence and equity. Good job, College Board.

They used to have a major role in helping EM professionals navigate things like the University of Michigan cases challenging practices in undergraduate and law school admissions. They hired Art Coleman to fly around the country doing sessions to help us navigate OCR, Civil Rights Laws, and Strict Scrutiny. It was extraordinarily helpful.

But that was a different time, and a different president. Many of the initiatives you see on their website predate the current President, David Coleman. Since Mr. Coleman has stepped in, there have been many embarrassing missteps by the organization, including several I outlined in this Slate article: Parkland, bad concordances, fake journalism, promotional books masquerading as serious research, having politicians on the (literal) payroll, and countless technological, operational, strategic, and deceptive practices during COVID. Almost all of these were in service to their bottom line.

But again, they’re a business. They act like a business. Don’t be surprised.

Up until Florida and the AP African-American Studies debacle, College Board had a reputation for making a lot of active, unforced errors.

Florida changed the tone. First they lied. Then they lied about lying. And then the truth was finally revealed, and they stopped lying, but got very self-righteous about it. This was not a typical business error, where businesses do what businesses are expected to do.

This was an example of a corporation not doing something to support the tenets it beat its chest about on a regular basis. They folded like they were holding ducks in poker. It was not a good look; hypocrisy never is.

And they’ve done it again, but this is a more passive form of hypocrisy, an error of omission that might otherwise escape notice .

You know by now that colleges got the Dear Colleague letter a few weeks ago, making some fairly preposterous claims and actually inventing judicial precedent and distorting actual words in SCOTUS ruling in the process. The big thing I’m sure College Board noticed right away in it was the claim that not using test scores in admissions could be considered illegal in some circumstances, which seems on its face to be preposterous. (As I think about it, I don’t actually wonder to myself if they didn’t actually suggest it.)

If it gained traction and became enforceable, this absurd proposition would be really good for College Board business and their bottom line, of course. The government would be telling students who wanted to apply for college that they needed to pay for a test from a private company. If the corporation were really about diversity and equity and fairness and allowing colleges autonomy, you’d think they’d rush to object to all of this document, but especially the testing part.

Silence. They have not (to the best of my knowledge) uttered a word about it in public. I know they have my email address, as they send me stuff about their products and services on a regular basis.

Now a letter has come forth from The American Council of Education, co-signed by just about every higher education group in the country. The letter asks ED to rescind the DCL, and it points out some actual legal tenets that appear to a layman to make sense.

College Board has not added their name to the list of signers. (If I am mistaken about this, and no one at College Board was asked to sign, someone at College Board can let me know, in which case I’ll first apologize and then call Ted Mitchell myself and ask him if there is room for one more on the letter, which I’m sure won’t be a problem.)

College Board never disappoints. Unless you expect them to stand up for their professed principles over their concern for the bottom line. Then, you come away disappointed almost every time.