Resistance to High Stakes Tests Serves the Cause of Equity in Education: A Reply to “We Oppose Anti-Testing Efforts”
Twelve national civil rights organizations
released a statement
today in opposition to parents and students who opt out of high-stakes
standardized testing–what has now become a truly mass direct action
campaign against the multi-billion dollar testing industry. I believe
that their statement titled, “We Oppose Anti-Testing Efforts,” misses
the key role that standardized testing has played throughout American
history in reproducing institutional racism and inequality. I wrote the
below statement, with the aid of the board of the
Network for Public Education,
to outline the racist history of standardized testing and to highlight
leadership from people of color in the movement against high-stakes
testing. I sincerely hope for a response from the civil rights
organizations who authored the statement and I hope that this dialogue
leads to deeper discussion about how to make Black Lives Matter in our
school system and how to remake American public education on foundation
of social justice.
Resistance to High Stakes Tests Serves the Cause of Equity in Education A Reply to “We Oppose Anti-Testing Efforts”
Authored by Jesse Hagopian and the NPE Board of Directors 
Today several important civil rights organizations released a statement that
is critical of the decision by many parents and students to opt out of
high stakes standardized tests. Though we understand the concerns
expressed in this statement, we believe high stakes tests are doing more
harm than good to the interests of students of color, and for that
reason, we respectfully disagree.
The United States is currently experiencing the largest uprising
against high-stakes standardized testing in the nation’s history. Never
before have more parents, students, and educators participated in acts
of defiance against these tests than they are today. In New York State
some 200,000 families have decided to opt their children out of the
state test. The largest walkout against standardized tests in U.S.
history occurred
in Colorado earlier this school year when thousands refused to take the end of course exams.
In cities from Seattle, to Chicago, to Toledo, to New York City,
teachers have organized boycotts of the exam and have refused to
administer particularly flawed and punitive exams.
Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan attempted to dismiss this uprising by saying
that opposition to the Common Core tests has come from “white suburban
moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they
thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought
they were.” Secretary Duncan’s comment is offensive for many reasons. To
begin, suburban white moms have a right not to have their child over
tested and the curriculum narrowed to what’s on the test without being
ridiculed.
But the truth is his comment serves to hide the fact that
increasing numbers of people from communities of color are leading this
movement around the nation, including:
-
Members of the Baltimore Algebra Project occupied the school board meeting to protest the closure of five schools.
Members of the Baltimore Algebra Project organized a die-in of recent Black graduates who took over a Baltimore school board meeting in protest of the school closures
that had been facilitated in part by labeling them failing with test
scores. Heritage High School graduate Antwain Jordan said of the plan
to close his alma mater, “The education system, there is no value on
black life in this country. That’s nothing new, it’s not a secret. It’s
the status quo, which is why these things are allowed to happen.”
- During the first week in March, several New Mexico schools with Latino/a student populations of over 90% organized mass walkouts against the Common Core PARCC tests in Albuquerque and across New Mexico, with the message, “We are not a test score.”
- On Feb. 17th the Newark Student Union, an organization led primarily by students of color, occupied
the Newark school district headquarters in part because of their
opposition to the implementation of the new Common Core tests.
- On April 7th Gerald Hankerson, the President of the Seattle/King County NAACP chapter launched a press conference
against the new Common Core, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
(SBAC), tests, by saying, “…the Opt Out movement is a vital component of
the Black Lives Matter movement and other struggles for social justice
in our region. Using standardized tests to label Black people and
immigrants ‘lesser,’ while systematically under-funding their schools,
has a long and ugly history in this country.”
You
would expect the multi-billion dollar testing industry not to celebrate
this resistance. Conglomerates such as Pearson, the over 9 billion
dollar per year corporation that produces the PARCC test, could stand to
lose market share and profits if the protests continue to intensify.
But it is unfortunate that more civil rights groups have not come to the
aid of communities resisting the test-and-punish model of education. In
a recent statement issued by the national leadership of some of the
nation’s most prominent civil rights organizations, they wrote:
Data obtained through some standardized tests are
particularly important to the civil rights community because they are
the only available, consistent, and objective source of data about
disparities in educational outcomes even while vigilance is always required to ensure tests are not misused.
We agree that it is vital to understand the disparities that exist in
education and to detail the opportunity gap that exists between
students of color and white students, between lower income students and
students from more affluent families. There is a long and troubling
history of schools serving children of color not receiving equitable
access to resources and not providing these students with culturally
competent empowering curriculum. Moreover, the schools are more
segregated today than they were in the 1960s—a fact that must be
particular troubling to the NAACP that fought and won the
Brown vs Board of Education
desegregation decision. For these reasons, we understand why national
civil rights organizations are committed to exposing the neglect of
students of color.
Yet we know that high-stakes standardized tests, rather than reducing
the opportunity gap, have been used to rank, sort, label, and punish
students of color. This fact has been amply demonstrated through the
experience of the past thirteen years of NCLB’s mandate of national
testing in grades 3-8 and once in high school. The outcomes of the NCLB
policy shows that test score achievement gaps between African American
and white students have only increased, not decreased. If the point of
the testing is to highlight inequality and fix it, so far it has only
increased inequality. Further, the focus on test score data has allowed
policy makers to rationalize the demonization of schools and educators,
while simultaneously avoiding the more critically necessary structural
changes that need to be made in our education system and the broader
society.
We also know that standardized testing is not the only, or the most
important, method to know that students of color are being underserved;
student graduation rates, college attendance rates, studies showing that
wealthier and predominantly white schools receiving a disproportionate
amount of funding are all important measures of the opportunity gap that
don’t require the use of high-stakes standardized tests.
The civil rights organizations go on to write in their recent statement on assessment,
That’s why we’re troubled by the rhetoric that some
opponents of testing have appropriated from our movement. The
anti-testing effort has called assessments anti-Black and compared them
to the discriminatory tests used to suppress African-American voters
during Jim Crow segregation. They’ve raised the specter of White
supremacists who employed biased tests to ‘prove’ that people of color
were inferior to Whites.
There are some legitimate concerns about testing in schools that
must be addressed. But instead of stimulating worthy discussions about
over-testing, cultural bias in tests, and the misuse of test data, these
activists would rather claim a false mantle of civil rights activism.
To
begin, we agree with these civil rights organizations when they write
that over-testing, cultural bias in tests, and misuse of test data are
“legitimate concerns about testing in schools that must be
addressed”—and in fact we hope to hear more from these civil rights
organizations about these very real and destructive aspects of
high-stakes standardized testing. Moreover, we believe that when these
civil rights organizations fully confront just how pervasive
over-testing, cultural bias and misuse of data is in the public
education system, these facts alone will be enough to convince them join
the mass civil rights opt out uprising that is happening around the
nation. Let us take each one of these points in turn.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT, the second largest teacher’s union in the nation) conducted a
2013 study
based on a analysis of two mid-size urban school districts that found
the time students spent taking tests claimed up to 50 hours per year. In
addition, the study found that students spent from between 60 to more
than 110 hours per year directly engaged in test preparation activities.
The immense amount of time devoted to testing has resulted in students
in a constant state of preparation for the next high-stakes exam rather
than learning the many skills that aren’t measured by standardized tests
such as critical thinking, collaboration, civic courage, creativity,
empathy, and leadership. The new Common Core tests are only in math and
language arts and thus have served to skew the curriculum away from the
arts, physical education, civics, social studies, science, music, and a
myriad of other subjects that students of color are too often denied
access to.
Standardized tests have repeatedly been found to contain cultural
biases. The process by which test questions are “normed” tends to
eliminate questions that non-white students answer correctly in higher
numbers. In New York,
the number of Black students rated “below standard”
jumped from 15.5% to 50% with the introduction of new Common Core
tests. English learners did even worse – 84% tested “below standard” on
the new tests. This sort of failure has devastating effects on students,
and does not reflect their true abilities.
-
Violations of student privacy
Common Core tests are associated with the collection of unprecedented
levels of data from individual students, with few safeguards for
student privacy. These systems allow for-profit testing companies, and
third party companies, access to information that could be used against
the interests of students in the future.
However, if those problems weren’t enough there are a myriad of other
ways that these high-stakes standardized tests are being used to
perpetuate institutional racism. Perhaps the most curious omission from
their letter is the fact that they assert that, “
The anti-testing
effort has called assessments anti-Black and compared them to the
discriminatory tests used to suppress African-American voters during Jim
Crow segregation,” yet they offer no rebuttal of the assertion
that the standardized tests today share many of the characteristics of
the discriminatory exams of the past. As a recent editorial by the
social justice periodical Rethinking Schools asserted:
The United States has a long history of using
intelligence tests to support white supremacy and class stratification.
Standardized tests first entered the public schools in the 1920s, pushed
by eugenicists whose pseudoscience promoted the “natural superiority”
of wealthy, white, U.S.-born males. High-stakes standardized tests have
disguised class and race privilege as merit ever since. The consistent
use of test scores to demonstrate first a “mental ability” gap and now
an “achievement” gap exposes the intrinsic nature of these tests: They
are built to maintain inequality, not to serve as an antidote to
educational disparities.
This
is why some of the most prominent early voices of opposition to
standardized testing in schools came from leading African American
scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond, and Howard Long. Du
Bois, one of the most important Black intellectuals in the history of
the United States and a founding member of the NAACP, recalled in 1940,
“It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [first]
World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of
psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk
absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization.”
The great educator and historian Horace Mann Bond, in his work
“Intelligence Tests and Propaganda,” wrote this statement that so
clearly reveals one of the primary flaws of standardized testing that
persist to this day:
But so long as any group of men attempts to use these
tests as funds of information for the approximation of crude and
inaccurate generalizations, so long must we continue to cry, “Hold!” To
compare the crowded millions of New York’s East Side with the children
of Morningside Heights [an upper-class neighborhood at the time] indeed
involves a great contradiction; and to claim that the results of the
tests given to such diverse groups, drawn from such varying strata of
the social complex, are in any wise accurate, is to expose a fatuous
sense of unfairness and lack of appreciation of the great environmental
factors of modern urban life.
Bond was expressing then what is today know as the “Zip Code
Effect,”—the fact that what standardized tests really measure is a
student’s proximity to wealth and the dominant culture, resulting in
wealthier, and predominately whiter, districts scoring better on tests.
Their scores do not reflect the intelligence of wealthier, mostly white
students when compared to those of lower-income students and students of
color, but do reflect the advantages that wealthier children have—books
in the home, parents with more time to read with them, private
tutoring, access to test-prep agencies, high-quality health care, and
access to good food, to name a few. This is why attaching high-stakes to
these exams only serves to exacerbate racial and class inequality.
This point was recently driven home by Boston University economics professors Olesya Baker and Kevin Lang’s 2013 study, “
The School to Prison Pipeline Exposed.”
In this peer-reviewed study they reveal that the increases in the use
of high-stakes standardized high school exit exams are linked to higher
incarceration rates. This landmark study should be a clarion call to
everyone interested in ending mass incarceration to end the practice of
high-stakes exit exams in high school and work towards authentic
assessments.
A July, 2010 statement authored by many of the same civil rights organizations that penned the aforementioned letter titled, “
Framework
for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn through
Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” stated:
The practice of tracking students by perceived ability is
a major civil rights obstacle…Ideally, we must provide opportunities
for all students to prepare for college and careers without creating
systems that lead to racially and regionally identifiable tracks, which
offer unequal access to high-quality.
We agree with this statement and thank these civil rights
organizations for raising concerns about the terrible effects of
tracking on the public schools and the detriment that tracking has been
to Black students, other students of color, and low-income students. We
only want to emphasize that the standardized exams they are now
defending are one of the most significant contributing factors to the
tracking and racial segregation of students into separate and unequal
programs and schools.
In that same “Framework” document the civil rights groups write:
Because public schools are critical community
institutions especially in urban and rural areas, they should be closed
only as a measure of last resort. And where a school district deems
school closure necessary solely for budgetary or population reasons, the
burdens cannot be allowed to fall disproportionately on our most
vulnerable communities.
Again, we agree, but we want to point out that it is the use of test
scores in labeling schools as “failing” that have contributed to clear
cutting of schools that serve students of color in cities around the
nation—most notably the closing of 50 schools in Chicago last year all
in Black and Brown neighborhoods.
Left,
front: Seattle/King County NAACP President Gerald Hankerson. Right,
front: Seattle/King County NAACP education Chair, Rita Green.
We call on the civil rights community to support the work of
educators around the nation who are working to develop authentic forms
of assessment that can be used to help support students to develop
critical thinking. Innovative programs like
New York City Consortium Schools have a wavier from state standardized tests and instead use performance based assessments that have produced
dramatically better outcomes
for all students, even though they have more special needs students
than the general population—and have demonstrated higher graduation
rates, better college attendance rates, and smaller racial divides in
achievement than the rest of New York’s public schools.
Finally, we ask that you consider the rousing call to action against
the new Common Core tests that was recently issued by the Seattle/King
County NAACP chapter in the following statement:
It is the position of the Seattle King County Branch of
the NAACP to come out against the Smarter Balanced Assessment tests,
commonly referred to as SBAC. Seattle and Washington State public
schools are not supplied with proper resources and a lack of equity
within our schools continue to exist.
The State of Washington cannot hold teachers responsible for the
outcome of students test results; when these very students are attending
schools in a State that ranks 47th out of 50 States in the Nation when
it comes to funding education. Furthermore, Washington State cannot
expect the majority of students to perform well on increased targeted
performance assessments while the State continues to underfund education
in direct violation of a Washington State Supreme Court Order. We also
know that our students of color are disproportionately underfunded and
will disproportionately be labeled failing by the new SBAC test.
For this reason, we view the opt out movement as a vital component of
the Black Lives Matter movement and other struggles for social
justice. Using standardized tests to label Black people and immigrants
as lesser—while systematically underfunding their schools—has a long and
ugly history.
It is true we need accountability measures, but that should start
with politicians be accountable to fully funding education and ending
the opportunity gap. The costs tied to the test this year will run into
the hundreds of millions of dollars. If the State really wants students
to achieve academic performance at higher levels these dollars should be
put in our classrooms and used for our children’s academic achievement,
instead of putting dollars in the pockets of test developers.
We urge families to opt out of the SBAC test and to contact their
local and state officials to advise them to abide by the State Supreme
Court McCleary decision to fully fund education.
–Rita Green, MBA; Seattle King County NAACP Education Chair
We join the Seattle NAACP in calling for true accountability for
educational opportunities. For too long, our nation has labored under
the illusion that “shining a light” on inequities is an adequate remedy.
Inequitable opportunities are manifestly evident to anyone who cares to
look. The use of tests for this purpose has become part of the problem,
rather than a solution. We reiterate our support for parents and
students who make the difficult choice to opt out of high stakes tests,
and call on our nation’s leaders to shift policies away from these
tests.
