We Get It: "Standardized" Tests Are Racist. Now What?

     Back in May, I proctored the RICAS math and English exams for my advisory of eighth-grade students. This experience opened my eyes as to how differently many of my students viewed such tests from how myself, my classmates, and other students did when I attended and student-taught at predominately white schools in Cranston and Coventry, R.I. In advance of the "high-stakes" tests, many of my students in Pawtucket complained about having to take them. A dozen or more asked myself, my co-teacher, and one of our assistant principals "why" they had to do this. I was slightly shocked at how openly they shared their unsolicited, unproductive opinions with us.

      On the RICAS test days, I was surprised to see two of my students drift off to sleep at their desks while everyone else got right to work. They didn't mention that in the testing manual, I thought. Although I spoke to those sleepy students and tried to get them on-track, I knew that my attempts to motivate them to take the tests seriously were futile. Still, I wondered why the majority of my students struggled to feel remotely enthusiastic about-- or even just power through-- the testing process. I thought, I did it when I was their age, so why don't they all do the same?

      Wayne Au's article "Racial Justice Is Not a Choice" provided me with several answers to that question. One of the reasons, he explains, was that "the pressures and endurance required are developmentally inappropriate and especially damaging for young learners." While reading and after teaching standards, I realized something: The idea of "standards" in education is bogus. That's because all learners are unique, and the strategies and knowledge that students gain in school varies based on their lot in life.

      It's not fair for school systems and states to hold students and teachers accountable for failing to meet standards and achieve uniform degrees of improvement for standardized tests. As scholarly studies have repeatedly shown, one effect of racism and social inequities is that students from poor and non-white backgrounds achieve less "growth," or numeric gains, in these tests and toward these standards, when compared to their better-off, white peers.

      In is writing, Au sums it up nicely. "High-stakes standardized tests," he writes, "do not serve students of color. They support white supremacy." He went on to explain that"Test scores correlate most strongly with family income, neighborhood, educational levels of parents, and access to resources - all factors that are measures of wealth exist outside of schools."

      That was kind of review for me, but something new that this article taught me what about the origination of standardized tests. Au writes that when they rolled out over 100 years ago, the results of standardized tests, "were used to prove that whites, the rich, and the US-born were biologically more intelligent than non-whites, the poor, and immigrants." That being said, remind me why we still administer these!? Seriously, does ETS (the company that makes the tests) lobby that hard to keep schools' business?

      It's sad to me that modern-day teachers are expected to prioritize the test and, therefore, "teach to the test." One casualty of this attitude, which Au connects to well-meaning, misguided federal education programs like "No Child Left Behind," is that some English language arts curriculums don't acknowledge or address and critical problems that face students from different socio-economic classes or racial backgrounds. Instead, they focus on responding to texts.

     I think that teaching standards are important because they provide teachers with some guidance on what they should be teaching students, but I think that the United States should replace standardized tests with acts of transformative justice, a concept that Au describes in his article. Restorative and transformative assessment, he writes, are alternatives to standardized tests. He says that they've both been proven more effective at lowering high school dropout rates and demonstrating students' true skills and learning than standardized tests. Best of all, both of these alternatives address the systemic and racist problems that exist among ethnic and socioeconomic groups in America.

      I wish that teachers and students were given more time to address on their needs and fix the systemic racism that plagues our public education system. In the meantime, I suppose, well-intentioned educators have to be subversive and teach what their students need and what is right, even if it's not going to be on a standardized test.