The Latest Racist/Classist StandardizedTest from ETS
A hundred years ago the first large scale IQ tests were devised by American eugenicists who saw testing as a surefire "scientific" way to sort, segregate, and mistreat "defectives," so that they would not mix and, therefore, stain the purity of the white middle class "germ plasm."
The Alpha and Beta IQ tests were first administered to 1.75 million American military recruits at the outbreak of World War I. The underprivileged who scored poorly were sent off to be gassed in the trenches of France. Those middle class young men who knew that tennis courts had nets and what bowling balls were supposed to look like aced the test and were given desk jobs in Washington or were sent off to officer training school.
A few years after WWI another eugenicist did some minor modifications to the Army tests, and the result was the first college entrance exam known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Machine scoring came a few years later, and nothing has changed since.
Except that a universe of new standardized tests have been devised since those early days to do what the original racist tests did so effectively: weed out the underprivileged, the brown, the immigrant, the black. Just as back then, the test results are directly correlated to family wealth and income, thus assuring that white and/or middle class privilege and scientific racism/classism will not be challenged as the rule of the Land.
So as Arne Duncan spews about the need for more black and brown teachers, he and his henchmen work overtime to inspire the development of new tests to make sure that black, brown, and immigrant groups remain cut out of teaching careers by tests designed to do just that. Story from New York Times:
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS JUNE 17, 2015
Students are not the only ones struggling to pass new standardized tests being rolled out around the country. So are those who want to be teachers.
Concerned that education schools were turning out too many middling graduates, states have been introducing more difficult teacher licensing exams. Perhaps not surprisingly, passing rates have fallen. But minority candidates have been doing especially poorly, jeopardizing a long-held goal of diversifying the teaching force so it more closely resembles the makeup of the country’s student body.
“This is very serious,” said David M. Steiner, dean of the School of Education at Hunter College and a former New York State education commissioner. “It reflects, of course, the tragic performance gap we see in just about every academic or aptitude test.”
On a common licensing exam called Praxis Core, a new test given in 31 states or jurisdictions that was created to be more rigorous than its predecessor, 55 percent of white candidates taking the test since October 2013 passed the math portion on their first try, according to the preliminary data from the Educational Testing Service, which designed the exam. The passing rate for first-time African- American test takers was 21.5 percent, and for Hispanic test takers, 35 percent. A similar gap was seen on the reading and writing portions.
In New York, which now has four separate licensing tests that candidates must pass, an analysis last year of the most difficult exam found that during a six-month period, only 41 percent of black and 46 percent of Hispanic candidates passed the test their first time, compared with 64 percent of their white counterparts.
A federal judge is now weighing whether the test is discriminatory. Because of complaints from education schools that students have not had enough time to adjust, as well as concern about the impact on minorities, at least two states — New York and Illinois — have already postponed or loosened some of their new requirements.
Israel Ramos, who graduated from the education school at Lehman College in the Bronx, failed New York’s toughest exam three times, once, he said, by just a few points. While working as a substitute, Mr. Ramos said, he was asked if he would be interested in staying on for at least six permanent teaching positions.
“And on all those occasions, I had to turn them down because I lacked certification,” he said.
On the fourth try, he passed the test, and he is interviewing for several teaching Schools Matter: The Latest Racist/Classist StandardizedTest from ETS:
