This has led to allegations of cultural bias and systemic unfairness. But the results of the SAT say less about the test and more about high schools' failure to properly educate. Students across the country are failing to meet testing federal benchmarks , even before COVID disrupted education. Undeterred, some educators, like the Oregon Department of Education, now just criticize math itself for favoring the privileged.
They are stressful, long and hard. The SAT has been a metric for college admission programs to measure academic potential since the s. Research shows the test is a good predictor of student outcomes in college — which is where people like me could succeed. And testing can help identify gifted children who lack privileges. For example, when a large Florida school district implemented a universal, nonverbal screening test for elementary school students in , the number of Black and Hispanic students identified as gifted actually doubled.
Teacher: My students need support, not standardized tests. Biden, keep your promise to end testing. The attacks on standardized tests are part of a broader assault on academic sorting. Advanced learning classes in Boston have been canceled lest they create unequal outcomes. Others are going further.
A number of schools in California will stop using traditional A-F grading to combat inequality. In America, 82 percent of those who took the Stanford-Binet test in scored above the average for individuals of the same age. The average black did about as well on the Stanford-Binet test in as the average white did in Third, when black or mixed-race children are raised in white rather than black homes, their pre-adolescent test scores rise dramatically.
Edited by Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. Sawhill Traditional explanations for the black-white test score gap have not stood up well to the test of time. During the s, most liberals blamed the gap on some combination of black poverty, racial segregation, and inadequate funding of black schools. Recent evidence suggests that disparities in school resources do affect achievement, but resource disparities between black and white children have shrunk steadily over time.
Predominantly white schools seem to attract more skilled teachers than black schools, but while black students who attend predominantly white schools probably benefit from having better teachers, this advantage seems to be offset by the social costs of being in an overwhelmingly white environment.
In any event, schools cannot be the main reason for the black-white test score gap, because it appears before children enter school and persists even when black and white children attend the same schools.
If schools play an important role in perpetuating the gap, either desegregated schools must be treating black and white children very differently or else black and white children must react very differently to the same treatment.
There is no direct genetic evidence for or against the theory that the black-white gap is innate, because we have not yet identified the genes that affect skills like reading, math, and abstract reasoning. Studies of mixed-race children and black children adopted by white parents suggest, however, that racial differences in test performance are largely if not entirely environmental in origin. Cultural differences associated with chronic poverty may account for some of the black-white test score gap, but they cannot be the main explanation, since the gap persists among affluent children.
And while children raised by single mothers score lower on most standardized tests than children raised by married couples, this difference almost disappears once we take account of the fact that women who become single mothers come from less advantaged families, have lower test scores, and complete less schooling than women with husbands. We suspect that successful new explanations for the test score gap will differ from their predecessors in several ways.
Second, instead of looking mainly for resource differences between predominantly black and predominantly white schools, successful theories will probably have to look more carefully at the way black and white children respond to the same classroom experiences, such as being in a smaller classroom, having a more competent teacher, having a teacher of their own race, or having a teacher with high expectations for those who perform below the norm for their age group.
Successful theories will therefore have to pay more attention to psychological and cultural influences, which are much harder to measure than income, education, and living arrangements. It might well require an investment of time and effort comparable to the effort that went into developing cognitive tests during the first half of the 20th century.
Our argument that reducing the black-white test score gap would do more to move America toward racial equality than any politically plausible alternative rests on two problematic premises: that policies aimed at reducing the test score gap are in fact politically feasible and that such policies can in fact reduce the gap. Public support for almost any policy depends partly on whether the beneficiaries are perceived as deserving or undeserving. First graders of every race seem eager to please.
Both black and white adults often think that older black children lack academic motivation, but most adults still blame this on the children s parents or schools, not on the children themselves.
That was why Lyndon Johnson emphasized helping children in his original war on poverty. Both school desegregation and eliminating academically selective classes at desegregated schools have aroused strong white resistance because of the perceived cost to white children. But these policies would not do blacks much good even if whites were willing to adopt them. White suburban moms, among many others, have certainly played an important role in organizing resistance to high-stakes tests in actions that have led to important victories in Texas, New York, and beyond as they fight to defend their children from abuse by a multibillion-dollar testing industry that is homogenizing education and draining resources from cash strapped school districts.
The obsession with data and testing is driving the professionalism out of teaching and the joy out of learning. And activists of color are playing leading roles in the movement to curb these abuses. In the name of closing the achievement gap, entire communities of color in cities around the country have seen classrooms converted to test prep centers, where the time spent on studying strategies for eliminating wrong answer choices has pushed out inquiry, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, the arts, and culturally relevant pedagogy.
The United States has a long history of using intelligence tests to support white supremacy and class stratification. High-stakes standardized tests have disguised class and race privilege as merit ever since. Fortunately, in the wake of a decade-long barrage of standardized tests unleashed by No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and now the Common Core, a movement of resistance has emerged around the country in the last year.
In downtown Providence, Rhode Island, pedestrians were startled when a troop of ghastly looking youth—complete with blood-spattered clothes and deathly pale complexions—gathered at the state department of education building, where one student stepped forward to announce:.
To base our whole education, our whole future on a single test score is to take away our life—to make us undead.
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