When Teachers Flunk
Let’s say you’re hoping to become a public school teacher in New York City. You have your master’s degree, your chosen discipline, your arsenal of dry-erase markers. Now all that’s left is to take the state’s Academic Literacy Skills Test (ALST), required for certification. On that exam, you may be asked questions based on a passage about Gertrude Stein or a discussion of ethanol production.
Some prospective teachers see such questions as perfectly reasonable measures of intellect and, as such, decent predictors of whether a person will become a good teacher. To others, though, the tests are discriminatory, stacked in favor of privileged white people who grew up in households where parents talked about Gertrude Stein and ethanol production. The tests may measure cultural capital, detractors say, but not teaching ability.
Some say the tests are inherently discriminatory against black and Hispanic teachers, an allegation bolstered at least in part by statistics: The New York Times notes that, last year, “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.” Nor is this merely a New York issue. The Times also found that on the Praxis Core test used widely around the nation, 55 percent of whites passed the math portion the first time around; only 21.5 percent of blacks and 35 percent of Hispanics had such success.
The trend is especially problematic because U.S. schools desperately need more black and Hispanic people to join the teaching corps, which has been far too white for far too long. A study of classrooms in Tennessee found that “the racial dynamics within classrooms may contribute to the persistent racial gap in student performance.”
But is the need for greater racial parity in teaching such that we’re willing to lower the standards? Is hiring teachers who can’t pass a certification exam another form of discrimination, since it will be children of color who are more likely to have these supposedly less-qualified teachers in their classrooms? Or are teacher exams a poor predictor of who will become a good teacher? In other words, are we measuring irrelevant things?
These are the primary questions at the heart of a lawsuit, Gulino v. Board of Education, that concluded this month after 19 years in court. It was brought by minority teachers who argued that the New York state test does not “measure the knowledge, skills, and abilities of experienced teachers.” They claimed to be competent teachers whose only shortcoming was a bad score on a single standardized test.
The case has been decided, piecemeal, by federal Judge Kimba M. Wood, on the 18th floor of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Her rulings have been complex and nuanced, allowing both sideWhen Teachers Flunk: