Not Just a Test (Page 2)

In the past several decades, and especially in the Bush years, there has also been an intensifying ideology of school accountability: holding schools and their financing accountable to test scores. This movement usually stresses achievement tests, covering specific curriculums, over ability tests like the SAT. (Achievement--more than ability, perhaps--might be thought of as improvable through better education. Thus an emphasis on achievement might be expected to direct better education to lower-scoring students in order to bring up their scores. But the ability ethos still seems to shape people's thinking about the kind of education that low-scoring students need.) These systems also divert high-quality resources and teachers away from low-scoring students in favor of remediation efforts, or efforts to enhance their test scores.

The sheer volume of students to be processed sustains the ability paradigm and its tests. The volume of applications to colleges, especially prestigious ones, has increased dramatically in recent years. Graduate and professional schools also confront large numbers of applications. And often grade averages and letters of recommendation do not discriminate well among applicants. In the context of this superheated competition, the hard number of a test score takes on more weight--even when it adds little information.

For these reasons, then, standardized tests have become a virtual truism in our society, the only means we can imagine for rationally meting out educational opportunity.

But what happens when this paradigm--especially its intensified use in the "standards" movement--meets the race gap in test scores that Coleman reported nearly forty years ago, and that every newspaper tells us persists to this day? The use of early-in-life test scores to make educational decisions, such as who gets into enriched reading groups and classes, who graduates from junior high school, who gets into college preparatory tracks in high school, who graduates from high school, etc., consistently channels African-Americans into a lower-grade education that sustains their lower test scores, alienates many of them from their education, contributes importantly to their high dropout rates and puts their lives on a course of restricted opportunity. When one looks upriver from the high dropout rates, the high incarceration rates, the high teenage-pregnancy rates and the high unemployment that disproportionately afflict African-American youth, one sees something systematic at work: an ability/testing paradigm that uses their early low scores to steer them (as well as many Latino and lower-income students more generally) into a low-expectation education as reliably as their parents and grandparents were steered into segregated schools. We have again set up two educational systems, and they are again separate but unequal.

Thus in assessing the nation's progress toward the integrated society envisioned in Brown, the remaining barriers may be not so much lawsuits against busing as a paradigm we use for thinking about human ability.

In writing the recent decision that upheld the University of Michigan Law School's use of affirmative action, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said that the use of this policy in college admissions should end in twenty-five years. This is tantamount to saying that the race gap in test scores should end in twenty-five years. There is admirable optimism in this statement. But it is important to understand where the low test scores of African-Americans and other disenfranchised groups come from.

Consider, for example, what research shows about the experiences of African-Americans in school. They are more likely to go to poorly funded schools in run-down buildings, and more likely to be taught by uncertified and poorly trained teachers. Observational studies show that they often experience differential treatment even from well-intended teachers, such as being called on less in class and being invited less to special activities. They experience more corporal punishment and more frequent and longer suspensions from school for the same infractions as other students. They are more likely to be tracked into lower academic and special-education classes than other students. In junior high school and high school, they are likely to encounter an especially distracting peer group culture. They are counseled with lower expectations. They are more likely to go to schools with few or no Advanced Placement courses, and they are likely to have less access to test-prep courses and related tutorials. Much of this follows from their still living in substantially segregated communities with fewer resources. And much of this holds for middle-income African-Americans as well as for lower-income and working-class African-Americans. (Here it is important to stress that middle-income black families have 10 percent of the wealth of middle-income white families in the United States--reflecting differences in the intergenerational transfer of wealth and housing segregation's depression of black home values. And wealth plays a significant role in a family's educational decision-making.)

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