Civil rights groups, led by Kati Hatcock of Education Trust, assert that standardized testing is a civil right. Without it, they say, black and brown children would be overlooked, neglected, forgotten. No one would know about the achievement gaps.
Of course, we do know about the achievement gaps in the nation, states and major cities whose NAEP scores are reported every other year. It is not necessary to test every child every year to report what is already known.
Nonetheless:
““Removing the requirement for annual testing would be a devastating step backward, for it is very hard to make sure our education system is serving every child well when we don’t have reliable, comparable achievement data on every child every year,” Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, said in recent testimony before the Senate education panel. Her group joined 20 civil rights organizations to lobby Congress to keep the requirement to test all children each year in math and reading.
“The civil rights argument adds a new dimension to one of the most contentious education issues in decades: whether standardized testing is good for students. Congress is wrestling with that question as it reauthorizes No Child Left Behind. The Senate education panel is expected to begin debating a bipartisan bill next week that would maintain annual testing, but it is unclear how the bill will fare in the House, where conservative Republicans want to drastically scale back the federal role in education.”
But Gary Orfield, a long-time civil rights watchdog, says that testing does not help minorities:
““The main victims of this misguided policy are exactly the people the civil rights groups want to help: teachers and students in high-poverty schools,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. The focus on math and reading has squeezed out science, social studies and the arts from high-poverty schools, he said.
“Tests don’t address the social problems that poor children bring to school or the fact that many start kindergarten already lagging behind more affluent children, he said.
“They also don’t fix the inequality of a public education system funded primarily by real estate taxes, where schools in wealthy communities are well equipped and attract the strongest teachers, while high-poverty schools often have fewer resources and weaker teachers, he said.
“The idea that you can just ignore the conditions that create inequality in schools and just put more and more pressure on schools and if that doesn’t work, add more sanctions, makes no sense,” Orfield said. “As if it’s just a matter of will for the students and teachers in these schools of concentrated poverty.”
The civil rights groups apparently are unaware if the history of standardized testing, and its ties to the eugenics movement. I wrote about that in chapter 4 of “Left Back.” Historically, standardized tests were used to deny educational opportunities to under served groups and to re-enforce theories of white supremacy, based on test scores.
Like school choice, standardized testing was a weapon used by racists to deny civil rights, not a force for civil rights.
