UW-Madison undergraduate researchers: If you favor standardized testing, you’re racist
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Daily Cardinal highlighted a trio of undergraduate researchers this past week who allege that standardized testing “exemplifies systematic racism” which, among other things, hinders the college attendance of black Americans.
Juniors Tyriek Mack, Marquise Mays, and Tashiana Lipscomb presented their findings at the International Colloquium on Black Males in Education earlier this month.
“The group compiled research to create a narrative,” the article notes, “for how standardized testing came to be and found that the tests corroborated white supremacist tendencies of the creators.”
“Create a narrative,” eh?
The students didn’t have to dig all that hard to discover the rather unappetizing beginningsof such testing:
Standardized tests first entered American public schools in the 1920s, at the urging of eugenicists whose pseudoscience proclaimed that white males were naturally smarter.One of these early eugenicists was Carl Brigham, a professor at Princeton University and author of the white supremacist manifesto, A Study of American Intelligence. Brigham developed the Scholastic Aptitude Test, known as the SAT. Some of the most important early voices in opposition to intelligence testing—especially in service of ranking the races—came from leading African American intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Howard Long. Horace Mann Bond, in his work “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda,” noted in 1924 what today we call the “Zip Code Effect”—what standardized tests really measure is a student’s proximity to wealth and the dominant culture.
Certainly, contemporary concerns about the quantity of testing and certain biases within tests have merit; however, should we completely ditch standardized assessments merely due to their creators’ backgrounds?
Under such a standard, we would do away with access to abortions — because Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist who wanted to use the procedure to help produce “cleaner” races … and held other objectionable views on race (specifically towards blacks).
It’s highly unlikely (progressives) would ever agree to that proposal; why, then, completely abolish standardized exams?
Mr. Mack says that “Our role on this campus is to be able to use this, standardized testing, as UW-Madison undergraduate researchers: If you favor standardized testing, you're racist - The College Fix:
