Yohuru Williams, a professor of history at Fairfield University, marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Malcolm X by revisiting the cultural and racial biases that robbed him of his dreams.
Williams argues that black students today are labeled and stigmatized by test scores as surely as Malcolm was labeled and disparaged because of his race.
Williams writes:
“It is the kind of racial determinism that many students of color have become accustomed to. Proponents of high stakes testing resurrect such determinism, presumably without the racial overtones, by reducing students, their hopes and dreams for the future, to test scores. Effectively, they close the door to the hope of achievement through hard work and academic engagement…..
“In shrinking students’ lives to test scores, the opportunity for them to dream and achieve beyond the arbitrary measures of intelligence offered by standardized tests will be lost. Coupled with punitive disciplinary policies, high stakes tests narrow the pathways to success for poor and minority youth even as they come neatly wrapped in the language of colorblind assessment.
“More significantly, testing will continue to feed, not eradicate the real great civil rights issue of our time; the growing school to prison pipeline, which like a malignant cancer, continues to eat away at the fabric of many inner cities by robbing students of their future…..”
“Rather than acknowledging the potential dangers posed by the adoption of high stakes assessments, testing’s proponents press forward heralding such evaluations as the best hope for a level playing field. In the same way that segregation laws limited opportunity under Jim Crow, high stakes testing has become one of the primary instruments of exclusion in support of what legal scholar Michelle Alexander has termed the New Jim Crow…..
“We are saddled with an education system that transforms believers in fairness and equality into staunch critics of a system that reduces the hopes and dreams of future generations to a score.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What a powerful article.
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Uh, oh. Bill Gates had better send him some money quickly!
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Once again, I advise sloggin’ through S.J.Gould’s “The Measurement of Man”. The very root of ‘standardized testing’ was an attempt to solidify the social status quo, to preserve the privilege of the ‘power elite’. Today, it serves the same purpose.
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John Wund: please pardon the correction—
Stephen Jay Gould, THE MISMEASURE OF MAN (revised and expanded paperback, 1996).
😎
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“It is the kind of racial determinism that many students of color have become accustomed to. Proponents of high stakes testing resurrect such determinism, presumably without the racial overtones, by reducing students, their hopes and dreams for the future, to test scores. Effectively, they close the door to the hope of achievement through hard work and academic engagement…..”
High stakes tests were a double whammy for my special ed minority students. First they were labeled incompetent by their disabilities and then by the color of their skin. As a white woman from an affluent background, I believed that tests were a measure of my ability. I was fortunate to grow up at a time when there weren’t high stakes attached to most tests and results of standardized tests were not generally shared with children. Although I always thought of myself as “bright,” as an adult I learned of one occasion when I outperformed all expectations. I was put into a a language program for which I didn’t make the cutoff and ended up second in the class behind a student who had already studied Spanish. (Not that it stuck. I am studying it for the third time!) So, here is this little white girl growing up in an educated, financially secure, stable family, who measured herself by test performance. How is a minority child with none of the advantages to be expected to fight the tide?
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