Is High Stakes Testing the Best Way to Improve Educational Performance Among Students of Color and Students Living in Poverty?
By: Dr. Mark Naison
Since the passage of No Child Left Behind, there has been a concerted effort to reduce gaps in educational performance by race and class by promoting regular testing in all grades and subjects and rating schools and teachers on the basis those tests. As a consequence of such policies, thousands of public schools in low income neighborhoods and communities of color have been closed, tens of thousands of teachers removed from their jobs, and charter schools promoted as the best strategy to combat educational inequality. Given the failure of these policies to achieve their stated goal- namely, to reduce the Black/White and Latino/White Test Achievement Gap as measured by test scores or college completion rates- and the many other consequences of such policies which have been largely negative, we would like to call for a reconsideration of High Stakes Testing by elected officials and educators in Low Income Communities and Communities of Color, along with a search for alternative strategies which might produce better results.
Before we provide a critical examination of some of the negative consequences of High Stakes Testing- we would like to call attention to another approach, put forward more than twenty years ago, which has been neglected in the years since No Child Left Behind- namely community schooling and culturally appropriate pedagogy. In the 1980’s and early 90’s, many educators of color were urging