This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
This would be the year for your child to opt out of standardized ("STAAR") testing. The test scores won't mean anything anyway. Garbage in, garbage out.
Plus, I find this whole "learning loss" discourse to be deficit-oriented. It's not like children haven't been learning throughout the pandemic. Perhaps some of the greatest, most enduring lessons in their lives will have been learned as a consequence of having gone through this character-building, upending experience. As per an earlier post, school administrators and teachers would do well to not only avoid deficit thinking, but to move forward in a constructive manner by instead asking the following:
“Instead of segregating these children and trying to give them what they didn’t learn, you say to yourself, ‘What must they know in order to stick with their peers and have access to next week’s lesson?’” said David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and former education commissioner for New York state. “The key is you’re always asking yourself, ‘What do they need for next week?’ not ‘What did they miss?’”
One doesn't need to administer a test that still doesn't answer these much more important questions that teachers need to be asking. Plus, as Dr. David DeMatthews in my Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at UT-Austin who is quoted below, students should be evaluated holistically anyway.
Hopefully, school administrators and teachers will remember to ask and keep asking and discovering—and having students reflect on and write about—what this epic COVID experience of storm, stress, and survival meant for them, their families, and community.
Sadly, even though this testing regime robs students and teachers of precious instructional time, I would still ask them to not squander this opportunity for us to learn from our youth. This is a time to care for, and not judge, them with this over-played, de-humanizing instrument of policy.
Mack and Elizabeth Simpson pose with their daughter Carson Simpson, an eighth-grader at West Junior High School, outside their home, Friday, February 26, 2021 in Richardson, Texas. The Simpsons are choosing to not have Carson take the STAAR test this spring due to COVID concerns. Mack, who is immunocompromised, called the prospect of Carson taking the test in person “a bridge too far.” (Jeffrey McWhorter/Special Contributor)(Jeffrey McWhorter / Special Contributor)
Dan Cooper’s grandson spent the last year as a boy in a bubble.
The eighth grader deals with respiratory health issues, uses two inhalers a day and occasionally requires a nebulizer. He is one of the few students at his Hill Country-area middle school who has remained a remote learner since the pandemic hit last March.
The Ingram school district Cooper’s grandson attends made a push for all in-person learning earlier this school year. After some cussing and raising of hell, an exception was made for the eighth grader to remain at home. And that’s not going to change because of STAAR, Cooper said.
This week federal officials told states that the Department of Education wouldn’t waive assessment requirements as was done last year after COVID-19 suddenly forced campuses to shut down. Texas schools will begin administering the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness exams in late March and early April, but the tests will be offered only in person at schools or alternate sites.
But Cooper’s grandson — and thousands more like him — won’t be there as they opt out of STAAR.
“The concerns are fairly obvious,” Cooper said. “There are health risks during a pandemic to go on campus, particularly when you’re accustomed to not being there. It creates certain anxiety levels that adds to the pressure of test taking.”
“The concerns are fairly obvious,” Cooper said. “There are health risks during a pandemic to go on campus, particularly when you’re accustomed to not being there. It creates certain anxiety levels that adds to the pressure of test taking.”
Educators and a large group of lawmakers have called for the state to shelve the exams in recent months because of the pandemic’s disruptions and the related stress students and teachers are experiencing. Education Commissioner Mike Morath, however, maintains that the state needs the tests to identify how much learning loss students face after such a disruptive year.
Federal officials gave similar reasons for wanting such assessments to continue but did give states the flexibility to adapt exams –– tests can be shortened, offered remotely, or delayed into the summer or the beginning of the next school year.
Texas did not announce plans to implement any of these flexibilities for STAAR in updated state guidance released Thursday. The state did extend the testing window for English language learners taking Texas’ alternative exam for such students.
In-person exams level the playing field so students all have the same testing environment, state officials said. If students took the exams from home, they might have to deal with internet outages, distractions or varying levels of help from nearby adults.
Schools are preparing for testing days by creating more space on campus so students can be spread out, said Melissa Steger, Grand Prairie ISD’s chief data and information systems officer. Campuses also have the option to send students not testing to learn from home.
Still, districts expect some students to opt out of the exam altogether.
“Obviously we’re going to do everything in our power to get as many of our students to come and to participate,” Steger said. “We know what we’re up against, and we know that much of the state is up against the same struggles.”
With STAAR tests rapidly approaching and more than 40% of students still learning remotely, participation will likely drop.
Wylie ISD students Sydney Sanders (right), 13, and her brother Jacob (left), 16, with their parents Justin (center left) and Shari at a park near their home in Sachse on Friday, February 26, 2021. (Stewart F. House/Special Contributor)(Stewart F. House / Special Contributor)
Data and equity
Both federal and state officials say tests are necessary to ensure equity for students — essentially, if you don’t test everyone on the same material, you can’t ensure each student learned the same thing or was held to the same standards.
Morath pitched the exam as a helpful tool to diagnose students’ needs during a turbulent academic year.
“If we don’t know where [students] are, then how do we know how effectively to support them?” Morath said in a recent Texas Tribune interview. “How do we know to make these grand sets of changes that we will need to make to honor our moral commitment to children?”
In a normal year, participation rates top 99%, Morath said at a Feb. 22 Senate committee meeting. Texas won’t get anywhere close to that this year, he noted.
Many states will grapple with uneven participation rates, Chris Domaleski said. Domaleski is the associate director for the Center for Assessment, a nonprofit that helps states and districts design and implement assessment and accountability programs.
The variation in who and how many students take exams will make comparing results from this year to previous ones a challenge.
“Reporting in context becomes particularly important,” he said. Education agencies should note factors like the learning method a school or student operated in for the majority of the year and the number of students who tested, he said.
David DeMatthews, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s department of educational leadership and policy, predicted that the turnout of the state’s most vulnerable students could suffer.
“It’s not exactly clear who’s going to be missing … but it’s likely that the people who are most affected by COVID and people who are experiencing poverty in some ways, they’d be the ones that are least likely to attend,” DeMatthews said.
Other ways to assess students provide a more holistic picture of performance, the UT professor suggested. Some North Texas parents agree.
Richardson ISD parent Elizabeth Simpson concedes that her eighth grade daughter’s STAAR results typically align with her favorite and least favorite subjects. However, she doesn’t believe it is a great benchmarking tool compared to others.
For instance, several districts conducted MAP, or Measurement of Academic Progress, testing this year, creating a baseline for students and families to understand academic performance. The test is administered online and adapts questions based on the students’ knowledge and skills.
MAP results showed Dallas ISD leaders that half of students experienced learning loss in math and one-third lagged in reading.
If students could take STAAR online, Simpson’s decision would be different, but because the tests are only available in person, she feels her choice is straightforward.
“We’ve been declining to send her in person all year, and we don’t feel like the STAAR test is a compelling enough reason to send her,” Simpson said.
Wylie ISD parent Shari Sanders hasn’t wavered in her decision to keep her eighth and 10th grade students at home for the remainder of the school year.
Sanders doesn’t buy the argument that the exams are necessary to evaluate students. The time and resources necessary to bring in remote learners for in-person exams could be used to catch kids up, she said.
Plus, schools “will try to put as many safety measures in place as possible but when you get the kids who aren’t used to being in person, they don’t know the routines,” she said. “I think there are some additional risks that aren’t necessary.”
High stakes removed?
Opting out of the exam during a regular year brings consequences for many students. This year, the state removed almost all of the high stakes associated with the exams.
Students in fifth and eighth grade who normally have to pass their STAAR tests to advance to the next grade level won’t face the same requirement because the governor waived it. Texas also won’t assign campuses or districts letter grades for academic accountability that are largely based on student performance.
New TEA guidance notes that districts may be subject to agency review if there are “excessive absences.” Excessive was not defined in the document.
The only remaining stake impacts high school students, who have to pass three of five end-of-course exams to graduate. If they don’t pass these tests, they are ineligible for graduation.
The state assumed every high schooler who passed their class last year passed their exam. But the same provision is not in place this year, and Morath doesn’t have the power to waive the requirement, he said. The governor or lawmakers can remove this mandate but have yet to do so.
By senior year, most students have already taken all of their end-of-course tests. That means that younger high school students could be most impacted by delaying their end-of-course tests until months or years after they have taken the associated class, Grand Prairie’s Steger said.
Some parents, like Tamala Daniels, see the fear surrounding in-person learning as its own high stake.
Daniels’ son Louis is an eighth grader in Troup ISD and one of a smaller group of students still learning remotely in the district located south of Tyler. Louis doesn’t want to be around others at school after witnessing several relatives contract the virus and his campus close for three weeks because of COVID-19 exposures and a substitute shortage.
When Troup Middle School required Louis to come onto campus for some tests earlier this year, Daniels said, she told Louis “keep your mouth closed, stay away from others, don’t talk to anybody. Just go in there, take your test, and call me when you’re finished.”
That’s what he did, but still, Louis was scared he was going to get sick.
Seeing her son respond with fear made Daniels’ decision clear. For Louis, taking the STAAR isn’t worth it.
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, The Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University and Todd A. Williams Family Foundation. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
Emily Donaldson, staff writer. Emily is an education reporter for Education Lab at The Dallas Morning News.
Many thanks to Texas State Representative Diego Bernal for his outstanding leadership in creating an opt-out option from STAAR testing for Texas students this Spring. It's amazing that this should have even been questioned to begin with. Here's a related article titled, "Students learning remotely won't have to take STAAR test, Texas education chief says," where the Commissioner states, albeit begrudgingly, that this option is actually available to all children and families. Yes, all.
We can at least say that this would be the year to opt your kid out of testing. My children opted out for several years each at the elementary grade levels. They marched to the capitol and protested the test, testified in the legislature—with our older daughter, Clara, writing a letter to then-President George W. Bush. He did write back to her which was admittedly cool.
Our children have grown up in a virtuous and righteous movement for fair and valid assessment that has been on point since day one in seeking to eliminate high-stakes testing, on the one hand, and to advocate for meaningful assessment, on the other.
I will continue posting related items, however, the best source of information on this policy agenda and conversation on a day-to-day basis is Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessments. If you're on Twitter, another similarly excellent resource is the Texas Legislative Equity Coalition @TxTLEEC. Also, try to attend an upcoming Tuesday, February 16, 2021 TLEEC Town Hall on Assessment. Register here to attend.
Now we are tasked here in Texas with establishing a humane, meaningful, and research-based system of assessment. To get us to go solidly in this direction, let's all lend our support to Texas State Representative Mary Gonzalez' House Bill 1867 that creates a Texas Commission on Assessment and Accountability.
I also want to extend a shout out to my masters and doctoral students who are working hard and focused on the matter: Lauren Shook; Trae Madrigal, Eliza Epstein, Julia Hernandez, Patricia Nuñez, Nichole Bennett, Maria Unda, Lizeth Lizarraga, Samantha Boiser, and Lesley Rivas. Hope I didn't miss anybody.
Mark your calendars for February 26, 2021 at 12:00PM for a TCEP Brown Bag on High Stakes Testing and Accountability, featuring Representative Gonzalez and Vice-President Theresa Treviño of TAMSA will discuss, among other things, the policy intent of HB 1867 (Zoom link, TBA).
Texas state representatives sent a letter to the Texas Education Agency Monday morning requesting a formal opt-out process for the STAAR exam.
HAYS COUNTY, Texas (KXAN) — Fighting for their constituents, Texas state representatives sent a letter to the Texas Education Agency Monday morning requesting a formal opt-out process for the STAAR exam.
The effort was led by Rep. Diego Bernal, who represents District 123 in San Antonio.
According to the letter, representatives are still asking the TEA to reconsider canceling the exam. If that doesn’t happen, they feel a formal process to opt-out would at least make parents feel more comfortable.
District 45 Rep. Erin Zwiener, who represents Hays and Blanco Counties, was one of 67 representatives across the state who signed the letter to back Bernal.
“I join Rep. Bernal in wishing that TEA would request a waiver and not give the test this year,” Zwiener said. “But failing that, we at least need to make clear to panicked parents that their kids will not be penalized.”
Hays Consolidated Independent School District parent Priscilla Cerda feels taking the test in person would be too dangerous. She’s especially on edge, saying her entire family got sick with COVID-19 after her kids started going back to school in person. They’re still recovering at home.
“We can’t have big crowds, but now that it’s STAAR testing time, they’re saying let’s bring this big crowd and have everyone together, and that’s supposed to be ok?,” Cerda said.
Zwiener said representatives would like the TEA to reach out to parents and school districts.
“I think what that looks like is parents being notified they have a choice, and that they can either bring their students to school on a certain day, or that they can send back a form that they can opt out,” Zwiener said. “That’s also very important for our school districts for planning purposes.”
Zwiener said they’re also making this request on behalf of school districts.
“School districts have no idea if they will be penalized if a large number of their students opt-out this year,” she said.
Cerda said the relief would be nice, as times are already stressful enough.
“I don’t understand why they want to do that to them,” Cerda said.
KXAN reached out to the TEA for comment on the letter representatives sent and have not heard back yet.
WIDA needs to take the loss here as it's unconscionable to subject this or any population at risk in the height of a pandemic that further happens to disproportionately impact the families of this very population. What little useful information it may provide does not justify the risk.
As per my previous post, what we really need is not a testing system that amounts to little more than checking a box off, but we need instead an assessment system that is authentic, formative and performance-based. Can one only begin to imagine the kind of "test-based curriculum" to which these children are getting exposed right now in order to prepare them for this test? How uninspiring and wrongheaded.
Furthermore, let's be done with census testing altogether. We've done this for much too long in our country. You don't need a blood transfusion to know the health of the body; you only need a sample and even the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a matrix-sample test, that has long been considered the nation's report card—has been canceled this spring because it's too dangerous to administer, as follows:
“We are in full agreement with the decision by the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics to cease preparation for the NAEP 2021 assessments in reading and mathematics for grades 4 and 8, scheduled to start in January 2021, and to reschedule the assessment to 2022.
However in the middle of a pandemic, where people are sick and dying in staggering numbers, this is arguably irresponsible and discriminatory. Opting out is what I would do if my child were subjected to this. There's no penalty to the children for this anyway in the states that are doing this.
In this Thursday, May 23, 2013 photo, students line up for recess at Jay W. Jeffers Elementary School in Las Vegas. More than 80 percent of the school's incoming kindergartners don’t speak English.
Julie Jacobson/AP
By Corey Mitchell — December 22, 2020 | Corrected: December 28, 2020
Corrected: An earlier version of this article incorrectly included Florida among the states that develop and administer their own English-proficiency exams. Florida uses the ACCESS exam, which is developed by WIDA, one of the nation’s largest ELL testing vendors.
The disruption to in-school learning caused by the global pandemic this year has hit the nation’s 5 million English-language learners especially hard.
These students often lack access to dependable internet and technology, have non-English-speaking parents who struggle to support their remote learning, and have lost crucial access to teachers and classmates who have in prior years helped them develop their language skills.
Now, millions face yet another predicament: being asked to return to schools to take federally required English-language-proficiency exams amid the national surge in coronavirus cases.
That’s because WIDA, one of the nation’s largest ELL testing vendors, has concerns about the validity of a take-home test and students’ access to technology and the internet.
“My job as a test director, is to say that the score you get from our assessment means the same thing that it meant last year, that gives you the same information so that you can make a choice and decision about a student’s proficiency,” said H. Gary Cook, the senior director of assessment for WIDA. “I have a really hard time understanding how we can get a score that’s comparable to the score that’s not remote.”
Advocates in at least two states, Colorado and Florida, say it is unfair and potentially dangerous to ask English-learners—most of whom are Latino, Asian, and Black—to return to school buildings while COVID-19 cases sweep through their communities.
In both states, groups have urged the state education commissioners to postpone the start of testing season, which begins next month, until things are safe or make the test voluntary for families who are not yet comfortable with their children returning to school. National organizations for English-learner educators are also urging states to postpone or aggressively seek testing waivers.
The reliance on in-person testing is “far too risky and potentially life threatening” and “raises serious discrimination concerns,” Jorge Garcia, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Colorado Association for Bilingual Education, wrote this month in a letter to Colorado state Education Commissioner Katy Anthes.
Despite the requests, the Colorado and Florida departments of education indicated this week they will proceed with testing. States run the risk of losing federal funding if they fail to enforce federal standardized testing requirements.
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, states must use data from the exams to determine whether students are English proficient. Not offering the tests could hold back some students who are ready to exit English-learner status.
The push to delay or forego the English-proficiency testing is part of the larger debate this year over federal standardized testing requirements during the pandemic. Outgoing U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has declined to waive testing requirements for the 2020-21 school year after granting states a reprieve in the spring as schools shut down nationwide.
Taking Out the Guesswork
The English-proficiency exams are required by state and federal law for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The scores indicate what level of English proficiency a student has reached and helps determine if students should stop receiving English-learner support services.
Determining whether ELL students still need support and when they no longer require it marks a critical juncture in their academic careers. Students who are deemed English proficient and pulled out of support services before they are ready can end up struggling in school. Taking longer to reclassifying students as English proficient could slow their academic growth and limit their access to higher-level courses that can prepare them for college and career opportunities.
States use the English-proficiency tests to take some of the guesswork out of the process.
Both states belong to the WIDA consortium, the organization that oversees the ACCESS for ELLs tests, which measure students’ English-proficiency in four domains—listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
WIDA, which provides the ACCESS tests to 36 states, several United States territories, and agencies such as the Bureau of Indian Education decided in September not to offer a remote option for the test. Altogether, the consortium tests 2.1 million students annually, slightly more than 40 percent of the nation’s English-learner enrollment.
The tests will not have remote options this year because WIDA and its member states were not confident that all students would be able to take the test in its current format, and that students would have equal access to technology at home to complete the exam, said Cook.
There were also concerns that English-learner students’ parents, some of whom are not proficient English speakers themselves, would be unable to help with setting up and proctoring the test, said Jonathan Gibson, the director of consortium and state relations department at WIDA.
For younger students, a remote test would have been especially difficult to carry out: the entire test for kindergarten students is paper-only and the writing test is paper-only for students in 1st through 3rd grade.
TESOL International Association, an organization for teachers who specialize in working with English-learners, has also raised questions about the validity of tests given this year, especially the speaking portions: with students wearing masks in class, it could be more difficult for teachers to hear and understand what students are saying.
Advocates in Colorado argued that the test results may yield little useful information, given the amount of time that many English-learners have been away from in-person schooling.
The English Language Proficiency Assessment for the 21st Century (ELPA21) consortium, which includes eight states, also will not offer a remote option for its English-proficiency test.
The consortium determined that remote testing was not a constructive use of “time given the pandemic circumstances,” Cathryn Still, the executive director of ELPA21, said in a statement provided to Education Week.
Advocates Push Officials to Tell Parents They Can Opt Out
While advocates in Colorado and Florida are pushing for a reprieve, many of the remaining states in the WIDA consortium will forge ahead with in-person testing, allowing for flexibility in the testing schedule by either delaying the start of testing or extending the period where students can take the exam. Testing has already begun in Montana and Department of Defense schools.
In response to concerns about health-and-safety protocols, WIDA developed guidelines on how to administer the ACCESS tests during the pandemic. While having data to gauge how students progressed or regressed is valuable, Cook acknowledged that requiring students to return to class does carry risks.
In Colorado and Florida, advocates are asking the states to communicate to parents that they can opt their children out of taking the test. While the state could face penalties for not offering the test, students cannot be punished for skipping the test.
Advocates asked in their letter to Florida state Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran to inform parents that “those students who elect not to take the tests will not be disciplined, punished, or otherwise sanctioned for opting out of the tests.”
Illinois is among the states that pushed back the start of testing in response to community concerns. The state’s Board of Education this week announced plans to delay the opening of its spring assessment window, ensuring that no students will take a federally required assessment, including ACCESS, until mid-March at the earliest. In previous years, the state testing window for ACCESS typically ran from mid-January through mid-February.
California, home to about 1.1 million English-learners, will offer remote and in-person testing options for its annual English-proficiency exam, the English Language Proficiency Assessment for California, also known as ELPAC. Most of California’s 6 million public school students are still learning from home—and some school districts have not set a timeline to resume in-person instruction. More than 40 percent of public school students in the state speak a language other than English at home.
Like California, the states of Arizona, Texas, and New York develop and administer their own English-proficiency exams. Officials there did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Award-winning author, Dr. Ibram Kendi calls out in this piece below the underlying racism and elitism undergirding the very idea of an "achievement gap," and the use of standardized tests as the key instrument for determining this. A couple of good quotes from within:
(1) Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies. However, some of the greatest defenders of standardized testing are civil rights leaders, who rely on the testing data in their well-meaning lobbying efforts for greater accountability and resources.
(2) The testing movement does not value multiculturalism. The testing movement does not value the antiracist equality of difference. The testing movement values the racist hierarchy of difference, and its bastard 100-year-old child: the academic achievement gap.
Dr. Kendi appropriately also calls out Civil Rights organizations for supporting the testing regime that we're in. They say "We can't reform what we can't measure," which is true. But "achievement" is a cultural idea that is not value free. Nor is the means by which we measure it value free. Teachers and administrators who are the closest to the students are best able to make determinations of growth and success than the scientistic, "remote-control," top-down approach that we currently have.
Plus, we'll never test our way to equity as Kendi suggests below. Rather, the opposite is true.
Many, myself included, have written on such things for years. The high-stakes testing movement is what inspired this blog to begin with, dating back to 2004. Our task then is to make a shift in policy if we are to end high-stakes, testing and move toward more robust and holistic forms of assessment.
“Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies”
Source: citizenstewart.org
This year marks the 100-year anniversary of the academic achievement gap–built and continuously renovated by the 100-year-old standardized testing movement. It is a centennial that hardly anyone knows about.
These days, many people are criticizing the testing movement. Colleges are slowly diminishing the importance of standardized testing in admissions decisions. We are seeing unprecedented numbers of wealthy white parentsopting their school children out of these tests.
But few testing critics are bursting its biggest bubble: the existence of the achievement gap itself. To believe in the existence of any sort of racial hierarchy is actually to believe in a racist idea. The achievement gap between the races–with Whites and Asians at the top and Blacks and Latinos at the bottom–is a racial hierarchy. And this popular racial hierarchy has been constructed by our religious faith in standardized testing.
Americans have been led to believe that intelligence is like body weight, and the different intellectual levels of different people can be measured on a single, standardized weight scale. Our faith in standardized tests causes us to believe that the racial gap in test scores means something is wrong with the Black test takers–and not the tests. And the belief that “inferior” Black minds are capable of doing as well as the “superior” White minds does not take away from the racist belief in the existence of the racial hierarchy itself. Let me explain.
Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911)
In 1869, Charles Darwin’s cousin, English statistician Francis Galton, hypothesized in Hereditary Genius that “[t]he average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.” Galton pioneered the western eugenics movement, but failed to develop a testing mechanism that verified his racist hypothesis. Where Galton failed, France’s Alfred Binet and Thodore Simon thought they succeeded in 1905 when they developed an IQ test that Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman revised for Americans in 1916.
Lewis Terman (1877-1956)
An avowed eugenicist, Terman introduced and defended the viability of the nation’s first popular standardized intelligence test in his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence. These “experimental” tests will show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture,” Terman maintained. He imagined a permanent academic achievement gap, a permanent racial hierarchy.
Terman’s IQ test was first administered on a major scale to 1.7 million U.S. soldiers during World War I. Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham presented the test results as evidence of genetic racial hierarchy in A Study of American Intelligence, published three years before he created the SAT test in 1926.
Famed physicist William Shockley and educational psychologist Arthur Jensen carried these eugenic ideas into the 1960s. But by then, these genetic explanations—not the tests and the achievement gap itself—had largely been discredited. In other words, the construction of a permanent racial hierarchy had been replaced by the construction of a temporary racial hierarchy.
Well-meaning environmentalists had shifted the discourse to disclosing and closing the “achievement gap,” a shift that powered the testing movement through The Bell Curve controversy in 1994. “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences” in test scores, wrote Harvard experimental psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray.
The Bell Curve sparked such an intense academic war in 1995 that the American Psychological Association (APA) convened a Task Force on Intelligence. The APA report rejected all the existing explanations for “the differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites,” from “biases in test construction” to genes, class, and culture. “At this time, no one knows what is responsible for the differential,” they concluded.
No one will ever know what doesn’t exist. And yet, the racist idea of an “achievement gap” lived on into the new millennium. The testing movement rejoiced over the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act.
Progress has been slow in closing the statistical gap. In 1964, a Department of Education report found that the average Black 12th grader scored in the 13 percentile, meaning 87 percent of White 12th graders scored higher on their tests than the average Black 12th grader. The Nation’s Report Card fifty years later found that the average Black 12th grader scored in the 19th percentile. And in 2015, Blacks still had the lowest mean SAT scores of any racial group.
At 100-years-young this year, standardized tests have come to literally embody the American doors of opportunity, admitting and barring people from the highest ranked schools, colleges, graduate schools, professions, and jobs. Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies. However, some of the greatest defenders of standardized testing are civil rights leaders, who rely on the testing data in their well-meaning lobbying efforts for greater accountability and resources.
But what if, all along, our well-meaning efforts at closing the achievement gap has been opening the door to racist ideas? What if different environments actually cause different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement? What if the intellect of a poor, low testing Black child in a poor Black school is different—and not inferior—to the intellect of a rich, high-testing White child in a rich White school? What if the way we measure intelligence shows not only our racism but our elitism?
Gathering knowledge of abstract items, from words to equations, that have no relation to our everyday lives has long been the amusement of the leisured elite. Relegating the non-elite to the basement of intellect because they do not know as many abstractions has been the conceit of the elite.
What if we measured literacy by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environment: how much individuals knew all those complex equations and verbal and nonverbal vocabularies of their everyday life?
What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know? What if we measured intellect by how open an individual’s mind is to self-critique and new ideas?
What if our educational system focused on opening minds instead of filling minds and testing how full they are? What if we realized the best way to standardize a highly effective educational system is not by standardizing our tests but by standardizing our schools to encourage intellectual openness and difference?
But intellectual difference, and multiple literacies, languages, and vocabularies, are only valued in a multi-cultural society that truly values diversity and difference. The testing movement does not value multiculturalism. The testing movement does not value the antiracist equality of difference. The testing movement values the racist hierarchy of difference, and its bastard 100-year-old child: the academic achievement gap.
