The Controversies Surrounding Standardized Tests
The other day, the Connecticut State Department of Education released the student results of the first SBAC test, and we learned, well, nothing we didn’t already know.
The tests were a little harder than the CMTs or CAPT, especially in Math. But otherwise, the students in the wealthiest towns did well and the students in the poorest towns did poorly.
I shared the results with the students in my Pre-Teaching course, showing them the range, from students at New Canaan High, where 82% of 11th graders were proficient in Literacy, to Bridgeport, where 17% and 15% of 11th graders at Harding and Bassick, respectively, were proficient.
My students were shocked, but they shouldn’t be. Standardized tests have revealed similar discrepancies since their inception.
There are many ways to look at these results. Some would praise the tests for shedding light on the achievement gap in Connecticut while others might criticize the test for being an expensive way of telling us what we already know. To me, the value of such tests comes down to what we do with the results. And the history of standardized tests would tell us to be careful about this.
The SBAC test is new, so let’s look at the SAT as a better test case. This is especially relevant since the SAT will now replace the SBAC test for 11th graders in Connecticut.
In Rethinking Rubrics, Maja Wilson provides a succinct history of the SAT, and it’s not pretty. The College Board developed the SAT in 1926 as a cost-effective tool for colleges to use in making admissions decisions. But its creator, Carl Bingham, was a eugenicist who advocated “selective breeding†as a means of purifying Americans. Bingham’s work became the basis for the 1924 National Origins Act, which codified limits or outright bans on the immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Arabs.
I’m not suggesting the recent or current members of the College Board have such intentions for the SAT, but it is notable that the SAT continues to register vast discrepancies between groups, such as white and black test takers. And this discrepancy has only grown in recent years. According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the gap grew more than 200 points between 1988 and 2005, and even exists when you control for income.
An inevitable question that arises is if we need such tests at all. Certainly there are many, including the authors of the JBHE study, who see value in standardized tests’ ability to reveal issues such as the poor quality of curriculum and instruction in at least some (if not many) minority majority schools. But many others suggest that elimination of standardized tests, at least as a criterion for college admissions, would benefit African-Americans and many other groups.
For example, President Jonathan Lash of Hampshire College recently wrote about Hampshire’s policy to stop considering SAT or ACT scores in its admissions decisions. In short, since adopting this policy, Hampshire College has experienced a significant increase in minority enrollment and in the enrollment of students who are the first in their families to attend college.
A friend pointed out that Hampshire is wealthy enough to afford the personnel to review applications filled with qualitative criteria such as essays and letters of recommendation, but most schools could not afford this.
But I would ask if we need to add such measures to the admissions process at all. Can’t we just rely on the evaluations of the students’ high school teachers? Think this is crazy? I don’t think it is.
A little over a year ago, the National Association for Admissions Counseling published a study based on 800 participating universities that demonstrated that the most reliable predictor of student success in college was the grades a student received in high school. Furthermore, the students who most benefitted from “test-score optional†colleges were “minorities, women, first-generation-to-college enrollees, Pell Grant recipients and students with learning differences.â€
Why is it controversial to rely upon the evaluations of high school teachers? Part of the kasus may be because high school teachers are overwhelming women—62% overall according to UNESCO, and higher in the field of English. In The Teacher Wars, Dana Goldstein documents the historical attitude that women teachers were “angelic public servants …; wholly unselfish, self-abnegating, and morally pure,†but also “cost effective,†in large part because they were not as educated as their male counterparts. These attitudes (and facts) may be discredited today, but institutionalized attitudes and practices linger, and even if you discount the institutional misogyny argument, certainly there is a basic distrust on the part of many people throughout society that high school teachers can handle such an important job.
Will we ever get past this prejudice?
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