High-stakes testing has struggled with overt and implicit biases. Should it still have a place in modern education? (via undarkmag)
Back in the year 2000, sitting in his small home office in California’s Mill Valley, surrounded by stacks of spreadsheets, Jay Rosner hit one of those dizzying moments of dismay. An attorney and the executive director of The Princeton Review Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the private test-preparation and tutoring company, The Princeton Review, Rosner was scheduled to give testimony in a highly charged affirmative action lawsuit against the University of Michigan.
The new data sets had information that could help him decipher how questions were chosen for use in the tests. Since their advent in the early 20th century, standardized tests have come to possess an astonishing amount of power in American society — helping to dictate who succeeds and moves upward through the educational and, very often, economic ranks, and who does not. But ample evidence, including Rosner’s, suggests that the tests have always fallen short of being the objective sorting tool they purport to be.
Rosner did deliver his data-based testimony on standardized testing in the Grutter vs. Bollinger case. The lawsuit was brought by a White University of Michigan Law School applicant who argued that the university’s affirmative action policies effectively discriminated against her when she was denied admission despite, among other things, her strong test scores. Rosner’s contribution was in support of the university and in 2003, the U.S.
While much of the conversation focuses on college-level gatekeeper tests like the SAT and ACT, the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE, and other graduate school tests such as the LSAT or Medical College Admission Test , most U.S. students take an astonishing array of standardized tests meant to evaluate their progress much earlier, often beginning in elementary school. The use of such tests exploded after former President George W.
He agrees that some of the longstanding differences in test scores are cultural, and that this won’t likely change until the culture itself changes. But, McWhorter added, “we can’t go there until we stop excusing Black kids from serious competition via testing.” Such data, Forte pointed out, can be used to help develop better class lessons, improve teacher training, and bolster struggling schools.
“It’s hard to know if all of them actually believed in the hierarchy,” Kendi added. “But what I do know is that the standardized tests arrived right on time, in every period, with new theories and measures to justify racial hierarchy.” Yerkes declared that in either case, the tests measured innate intelligence rather than education. “It behooves us to consider their reliability and their meaning, for no one of us as a citizen can afford to ignore the menace of race deterioration,” he wrote.
Brigham acknowledged that Northern Black people often had better educational opportunities than Southerners, White or Black, but he theorized that some of the difference was because Blacks living in the North had a “greater amount of admixture of White blood.” Overall, he added, the tests underscored “the marked intellectual inferiority of the negro,” and Brigham suggested that too much of an admixture of Black and White blood would send America’s aggregate intelligence spiraling downward.
Still, Brigham’s influence is not the only piece of complicated history still haunting the history of standardized testing. The 1954 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, which famously struck down racial segregation in schools, shook some regions of the country to their core — and no more so than in the American South.
As Wake Forest University education professor R. Scott Baker details in his book, “Paradoxes of Desegregation,” Southern university administrators reached out to the Educational Testing Service, which today develops the SAT for the College Board and received an enthusiastic response from an industry anxious to expand its reach. Part of the Southern idea, Baker said in an interview, was that standardized tests could be used to keep Black teachers from teaching White students.
In 1994, Herrnstein, along with political scientist Charles Murray, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, published “The Bell Curve,” which amplified these arguments further.
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