What Standardized Test Scores Truly Reveal About our Students
Our entire education system is based on testing. We have tests for the year, the semester, the quarter, the chapter, and the concept. Standardized testing our primary form of academic assessment in the United States, and it is rooted in eugenics. In 1923, eugenicist Carl Brigham asserted that Black and other non-white and immigrant students were biologically inferior to white American citizen students and incapable of achieving the same academic aptitude. Later, this logic contributed to what would become the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
The SAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test, is a college entrance exam. This exam is often weighed to compare students with one another. Unfortunately, the benchmark data used to compare student academic aptitude don’t call attention to the chronic effects of living in poverty that millions of American students experience. Students living in poverty are forced to dedicate disproportionately more mental bandwidth to survival than students who do not live in poverty. Additionally, students of color are far more likely to receive out-of-school suspensions than their white peerswhich facilitates higher probability for learning loss among non-white students. What is ironic about the reality of standardized testing like the SAT actually allow students of color higher opportunities to access post-secondary educational…
