Back in January, I wrote the great news about my son who was invited to take the SAT as a seventh grader. This weekend, we received his scores. He was afraid to open the envelope because he kept saying he wasn’t confident about his performance. So I opened the envelope for him. This boy…this SEVENTH GRADER…earned a huge 1380 on the SAT. This placed him in the 96th percentile of the other seventh graders invited to take the test, and it placed him in the 93rd percentile of ALL students combined (middle school through twelfth grade).

The score report indicated he met the benchmark for college readiness, so I asked my son “What’s the point of even going to high school?” His answer was “Because of social norming.”