Steven Singer, a teacher and blogger in Pennsylvania, takes on the myth that high-stakes testing is a civil rights issue. It is curious that this myth gained any traction, because civil rights groups used to sue to block high-stakes tests because they violated the rights of black children. They argued that the tests were biased and unfair. They argued that it was wrong to label children with such tests.
He writes:
“Standardized testing has never been shown to adequately gauge what students know, especially if the skills being assessed are complex. The only correlation that has been demonstrated consistently is between high test scores and parental wealth. In general, rich kids score well on standardized tests. Poor kids do not.
“Therefore, it is absurd to demand high stakes standardized testing as a means of ensuring students’ civil rights.
“Judging kids based on these sorts of assessments is not the utopia of which Dr. King dreamed. We are not judging them by the content of their character. We’re judging them by the contents of their parents bank accounts.
“There are real things we could be doing to realize racial and economic equality. We could do something about crippling generational poverty that grips more than half of public school students throughout the country. We could be taking steps to stop the worsening segregation of our schools that allows the effects of test-based accountability to disproportionately strike schools serving mostly students of color. We could invest in our neediest children (many of whom are minorities) to provide nutrition, tutoring, counseling, wrap around services, smaller class sizes, and a diverse curriculum including arts and humanities.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Singer’s comments sum up the issues of testing and poverty perfectly.
It’s never been about realizing “racial and economic equality”.
It has always been about carefully-crafted PR used to manipulate leaders of groups who have influence on potential troublemakers for the reformists.
Who doesn’t want to say they are for “racial and economic equality”? Just like politicians name laws the opposite of what they achieve, PR flacks name reforms in whatever way benefits them most.
Lewis Carroll showed how its done
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
They are the masters. And we continue to act surprised and to think that combatting powerful, well-funded PR campaigns with truth will somehow fix or change things.
Highly-paid, experienced PR flacks quickly went to work to convince everyone that testing children means ‘protecting’ their civil rights despite the fact that it has never, ever done that. They knew that if most Americans new that the primary purpose of testing was to discredit teacher unions and end public education in order to enact Friedman’s warped dreams then testing wouldn’t be supported.
What the PR flacks have done is provide a very convenient and convincing narrative of “See! Those bad teachers and their bad unions are shortchanging those poor children of color through their greed!” and the media and politicians quickly picked up the talking points and repeated them ad nauseum while teachers, probably too busy to notice, trudged on and ignored the attacks for nearly a generation.
The teacher unions did little to combat the bad PR, evoking the very language the PR flacks used and agreeing with their analysis then adding a “but . . .” that was completely ignored.
There is not one iota of evidence to prove this. There is not one speck of truth in this. Yet it has successfully been made into the conventional wisdom of a majority of people.
At some point we have to abandon the incredulity, the shock, the outrage, and the disbelief that people who have their eyes on billions of dollars of education money will act in illegal, immoral, and improper ways to get at that money.
We need to wake and stay awake.
Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report says this far better than I do:
““This is a battle for democracy in public education.”
The movement by parents to opt their children out of high stakes testing is growing by leaps and bounds, but remains largely white and suburban, despite the fact that Black folks are the primary targets of the destructive testing regime. Almost two decades ago, the corporate world began pouring millions of dollars into a massive campaign to split the two pillars of the Democratic Party: teachers unions and Black voters. It began as a mainly Republican strategy to divert public funding to private school vouchers – an idea that was never very popular among Black parents. But, corporate Democrats discovered that public education could be privatized even more effectively – and much more profitably – through chartering the schools. Charter schools are a capitalist’s dream, in which the public provides all the money, private companies get rich contracting services, teachers are deprofessionalized and deunionized, and Black parents lose all democratic rights concerning their children’s education.
In one of the great ironies of recent U.S. history, the Democratic Party took the lead in what had begun as a Republican project to vilify teachers and privatize schools in Black neighborhoods. High stakes testing became a weapon guaranteed to fail the students, fail the teachers, fail the neighborhood schools, and fail entire school districts in largely Black cities. Everybody loses except the hedge funds and other billionaire investors in the charter school marketplace. These are the people whose interests President Obama has served for the past six and a half years. Obama became the biggest public school privatizer of all time, wielding executive power to force the states to establish more charter schools or lose federal education funds.”
http://www.blackagendareport.com/blacks_opt_out_high_stakes_testing
I am reminded of Flint Michigan citizens having lead-laden Flint River water foisted on them by the state’s Environmental Quality official.
Thank you so much, Diane, for giving my article a shout out. I am loving your posts today. You’ve assembled so much for us to think about on this momentous holiday. I am honored to have my work included. It is vital that people understand and push back against the racist and classist idea that high stakes testing promotes civil rights. Hundreds of civil rights organizations still are fighting against the testocracy for many of the reasons I mention in the article. And most of those championing testing are well funded with grants from the same philanthro-capitalists pushing the test and punish agenda.
How do myths get traction?
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Why-Urban-Legends-Get-Told-in-Sci_Tech-People_Study_Threat_Urban-Legends-160108-521.html
“A recent study, to be published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, found that reading a false statement (say, “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth”) made people more likely to rate the statement as true when they encountered it a second time–even if they were told on both readings that it might be false, and even if they later demonstrated that they knew the Pacific was in fact the largest ocean. Exposure breeds familiarity, which fosters credulity–even when you know better”
“People in one study read two descriptions of the same product, one of which mentioned a threat (“If you press control keys during installation, the software may damage your hard disk”), they rated the writer of the threatening description as more competent ”
So, say it often, gt it printed often, and it becomes truth!