SCOTUS on high-stakes tests: They “eradicate” “insidious” “racism”
It has been common knowledge for a long time that high-stakes tests have a disparate impact on students of color. What is interesting about high-stakes testing is that proponents recently reframed the gap in the NCLB-era from being from discriminatory to instead being about “Civil Rights.” I wrote in the post Segregation Nation: Recap and video from visit to @MSNBC @MHPshow:
Now we talk about tests not as purposeful discrimination and sorting of students, but that the “achievement gap” is a Civil Rights issue. The purposeful sorting and discriminatory design has been pushed to the side by “reformers.”
The disparate impact high-stakes tests were challenged in Florida in the US Supereme Court Case Debra P. v. Turlington. We wrote about Debra P. in a peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of School Leadership entitled High Stakes Decisions: The Legal Landscape of High School Exit Exams and the Implications for Schools and Leaders.
Citation: Holme, J. & Vasquez Heilig, J. (2012). High stakes decisions: The legal landscape of gatekeeping exit exams and the implications for schools and leaders. Journal of School Leadership, 22(6), 1177-1197.
One of the earliest and most influential cases with respect to exit testing is the Debra P. v. Turlington (1981) case, in which African American students who had failed the Florida functional literacy examination known as the Florida Student State Assessment Test, Part II (SSAT-II) challenged the state law requiring a passing score to receive a high school diploma in Florida. The plaintiffs argued that the test was not given with adequate notice, and that the testing requirement was racially biased because “at the time of the 1979 hearing, after three test administrations, the failure rate of black students was approximately 10 times greater than that of white students” (Debra P. v. Turlington, 1984, p. 1405).
In Debra P., the federal district court judge established two central requirements for exit testing linked to diplomas: sufficient notice and curricular relevance. To satisfy due process, the court ruled that notice must be given to students about the academic content several years before the test is implemented. The Court also required that the schools must establish “curricular validity” by demonstrating that they have, in fact, taught what is assessed on the exam. The Debra P court concluded that the “state may condition the receipt of a public school diploma on the SCOTUS on high-stakes tests: They “eradicate” “insidious” “racism” | Cloaking Inequity:
