wish I could upvote this more than once. Rigorous testing and merit based examinations have a reputation for being elitist but they're the exact opposite.
There's some benefit for people coming from higher social classes, but the difference in intellect is much smaller than the difference in networking, cultural attitudes or any other vague criterion that tests are replaced with.
At any country you look that has truly high mobility in education and has managed to produce a broad, national high quality system there's almost a Leninist attitude towards discipline and putting people through examinations. It's much harder for social privilege to be sustained in these institutions than in some kind of essay writing competition. It's also I think the reason for the pretty strong diversity of the military.
Also good to know that, in California, whites are a racial minority.
I can't wait to see how California designs new tests against racial bias. Will there be different tests for different races? And, their alternative is simply failing to develop a test, after which the methodology will presumably be to have humans make subjective determinations about other humans.
In that case, regardless of race, they would look at your parents' income, or the kind of school you went to and the district it was in.
Why are we lumping minorities into one group when we know that many minority groups score better than average on standardized tests than the general population. Asian Americans, Nigerian Americans, Jewish people, etc all do very well.
In a world where the wealthy have ever more advantages in college admissions, standardized tests serve to level the playing field. I grew up in a very wealthy town and many kids I knew whose parents spent large sums on SAT tutors never improved their scores because they didn't have the intellectual horsepower.
Just because college administrators and others feel uncomfortable that certain groups continue to do better than others on the SAT is a horrible reason to get rid of the test.