Garfield High Teacher: Standardized Tests 'Disproportionately Impact Students Of Color'
By KYLE STOKES • DEC 9, 2014
The issues of race and class currently fueling protests around the U.S. manifest in a different way in the classroom, says Garfield High School teacher Jesse Hagopian.
"Many of our students feel they're being set up," said the educator-activist and advisor of Garfield's Black Student Union who led the school's testing boycott in 2013.
Hagopian says the setup exists in the standardized tests policymakers across the nation have increasingly used to measure the gap in academic performance. The gap, he says, too often separates students of color from their white peers, and hold teachers and school leaders accountable for closing it.
Catching Students Who Are Falling Behind
President Obama has said, "There's nothing wrong with testing. We just need better tests ... that track how well our students are growing academically so we can catch when they're falling behind, and help them before they just get passed along."
Though the mechanisms that made the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act so powerful have become largely unpopular, many, including Obama administration officials, still support the law's central aim: to shine a bright spotlight on inequities in the nation's education system.
But Hagopian sees it differently, especially when it comes to racial inequities in schools. He recently edited a book titled "More Than A Score" that criticizes education policymakers for becoming too obsessed with standardized testing.
'Disproportionate Impact' On Students Of Color
"When you discuss the problem of black success in terms of their failure to succeed or their failure to achieve," said Hagopian, "and you don't discuss the fact that the opportunities are being systematically denied to them, then you blame our black youth for the problems that our society has created."
"These tests," he added, "disproportionately impact students of color because they Garfield High Teacher: Standardized Tests 'Disproportionately Impact Students Of Color' | KPLU News for Seattle and the Northwest: