Sara Derdiger

3/4/15
American Urban Education
Thought Paper
Racial Bias in Standardized Testing
Standardized testing has been around for decades and is thought by many to be

the provider of data that informs both teaching and education policy, and will someday

eliminate the achievement gap. This data is said to provide state and federal departments

with information about how effective teachers are in the classroom, which schools are

succeeding, and which schools are failing. Many tests, like the ACT or SAT, are

considered to be the be-all and end-all in secondary education, supposedly making or

breaking a student’s college application. While many believe in the virtues of

standardized testing, the roots of the tests lie in the eugenics movement and have, in fact,

always served to perpetuate the belief that White students are better than students of

color, thus continuing to widen the achievement gap rather than close it.

There is a massive movement sweeping the United States to oppose newer testing

initiatives such as the SBAC and PARCC, as well as limit or eliminate high stakes

testing. Teachers, students, and parents are growing increasingly frustrated with the time,

money, and emphasis placed on what they believe to be meaningless, useless, and unfair

testing practices. Education today is a political and social battleground composed of

many smaller fights, but the effect of current education policies on social justice cannot

be ignored. Those who have been impacted by the inequity in American education the

longest are, without a doubt, students of color. These inequities are increasing with each

new high stakes, standardized test and are being routinely denied by those who are

profiting off of the test’s existence.

 To further explore the issue of racial bias in high-stakes testing, I first had to

examine the history of these tests. Where do they come from and why are they used?

What was their initial intended purpose, and how has it changed? Once the history was

established, I next looked at high-stakes testing today and its impact on students of color.

Information about the performance of students of color, as compared to White students,

needed to be discovered and analyzed. Is it true that White students consistently

outperform their Black and Hispanic counterparts? If my hypothesis, that students of

color consistently score lower than their White classmates, is correct, then what is the

impact this inequity will have on those students? Finally, if such inequity exists, what is

being done about it and what can be done about it? Who are the game-changers in this

hotly debated topic and what are they doing?

The history of high-stakes testing can be traced back to the invention of eugenics

as a “science” by Sir Francis Galton. In 1919 Galton wrote, “Eugenics is the study of the

agencies under social control that seek to improve of impair the racial qualities of future

generations either physically or mentally” (Stoskopf, 2002, p. 126). While Galton saw

eugenics as a new branch of scientific study, it would ultimately be used as a way to rank

and sort people into categories of worth based on race. This idea of sorting people into

categories of worth and ability, coupled with the invention of the IQ test by Alfred Binet,

led some education reformers to believe that both IQ tests and eugenics explained why

some students were simply “slow learners” (Stoskopf, 2002, p. 127). “Mainly they

(Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman, and Robert Yerkes) distorted the original use of the tests

and injected their own underlying presumptions about humans and human ability,

presumptions that had very little to do with Binet (Au, 2009b; Gould, 1996). Through the
work of these psychologists, and with the explicit support of educational philanthropists

like Carnegie (Karier, 1972), IQ in the United States became conceived of as hereditary

and fixed, laying the groundwork to use standardized testing to justify the sorting and

ranking of different people by race, ethnicity, gender, and class according to supposedly

inborn, biologically innate intelligence (Au, 2009b, Gould, 1996)” (Au, 2013, p. 8).

Goddard translated Binet’s test into English and tested a large group of immigrants. His

results indicated that immigrants were feebleminded and, being the social mode of the

time, these results were widely accepted amongst the general public. Goddard then

pushed for his tests to be used in schools for the placement of students (Stoskopf, 2002,

p. 128). The testing of students that subsequently took hold of the education system

allowed administrators and teachers to track students based on IQ. Terman, Yerkes, and

Goddard then used Goddard’s work as a jumping off point to test more than 1.7 million

army recruits. The questions were obviously culturally and ethnically biased. The results

showed that recruits who were immigrants and recruits of color were intellectually

inferior and this work would influence the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of

1924 (Stoskopf, 2002, p. 128, Au, 2013, p. 8). It was Terman who then adapted these

tests, turning them into the National Intelligence Test for schoolchildren and eventually

created the Stanford Achievement Test, or SAT (Au, 2013, p. 8). The SAT would go on

to become a standard tool used to measure a student’s ability to succeed in college,

thereby being a requirement for college admission. By 1925, nearly 65% of districts used

standardized tests to track students, and by the end of the decade more than 130 different

standardized tests were used to classify students (Stoskopf, 2002, p. 129). Each test was

thought of as being created by an expert, and as such, should not be questioned, for tests
told the truth about student’s abilities. The creation of modern day standardized testing as

a tool for the assessment of schools, teachers, and students as either failing or succeeding

can be traced back to the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 (Au, 2013, p. 10). A

Nation at Risk spurred a flurry of negative news articles about teachers and education,

creating fear in the American populace and the pressing urge to grade, and restructure

America’s schools (Ginsberg & Lyche, 2008).

Standardized testing has, since its beginning during the eugenics movement,

served to devalue, demoralize, and classify students of color. In their discussion of test

question bias, Grodsky, Warren, and Felts state, “The most transparent analysis of item

bias is a review of items by experts to ferret out those prompts that may favor or disfavor

certain groups. Critics of testing argue that test items are often, is not routinely, biased

against African Americans, Latinos, women, and/or socioeconomically disadvantaged test

takers (FairTest, 2007)... past empirical research studies suggests that ‘expert judges did

no better than chance in predicting which items would be relatively more difficult for

black examinees’ (Camilli & Shepard 1994)” (Grodsky, Warren & Felts, 2008, p. 392-

393). According to analysis of average SAT scores by parental income and race/ethnicity

collected by the National Center for Education Statistics, Black and Hispanic students

underperform compared to their White and Asian counterparts, regardless of parental

income. In fact, Black students whose parents make more than $60,000 a year score

lower than White students whose parents make less than $20,000 a year (Singleton &

Linton, 2006, p. 30). There is research to suggest that constant academic failure, even

only by comparison, leads to decreased motivation and even intentional further failure

(Holt, 1964). Drop-out rates associated with high-stakes tests are high. “When
Massechusets implemented a high-stakes test-based accountability system in the 1990s, it

witnessed a 300% increase in dropouts, and with the implementation of a graduate exit

exam, it saw a 4% decline in graduating students” (Au, 2013, p. 11). These higher drop-

out rates for students who don’t succeed on high-stakes tests will disproportionately

impact students of color, as they disproportionately score lower than their White

classmates, perpetuating the school-to-prison pipeline and the stereotype that claims

Black and Hispanic people are uneducated. To combat racial bias in high-stakes testing,

there are many options being discussed today, but consensus seems to be that

standardized tests are not objective and therefore invalid as a measure of student success

(Stoskopf, 2002, Au, 2013, Grodsky, Warren, & Felts, 2008). Some are calling for the

elimination of high-stakes and standardized testing (Hagopian, 2014), others suggest

altering the education system entirely in order to create social equity in the classroom

(Gay, 2010, Singleton & Linton, 2006).

The findings of my research conclude that high-stakes and standardized testing

have roots in the eugenics movement and were, therefore, meant to segregate based on

race, rather than create equal education opportunities. Not only that, but they are

succeeding in this original intention. Black and Hispanic students consistently score

lower on standardized tests, impacting their access to higher education and increasing

drop-out rates. The implications of this research suggest that racial disparity will only

increase as the rate of standardized testing increases. Education reform should shift focus

away from Value Added Measures and standardization and toward racial equity,

Courageous Conversation, and culturally responsive teaching to truly close the

“Achievement Gap.”
 References

Holt, J. (1964). How children fail. New York, New York: Pitman.
Stoskopf, A. (2002). Echoes of a forgotten past: Eugenics, testing, and education reform. The
Educational Forum, 66(2), 126-133. Retrieved March 14, 2015.
Singleton, G., & Linton, C. (2006). Courageous conversations about race: A field guide for
achieving equity in schools. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press.
Ginsberg, R., & Lyche, L. (2008). The culture of fear and the politics of education. Educational
Policy, 22(1), 10-27. Retrieved March 14, 2015, from Sage Publishing.
Grodsky, E., Warren, J., & Felts, E. (2008). Testing and social stratification in american
education. Annual Review of Sociology, 34, 385-404. Retrieved March 14, 2015, from University
of Washington.
Gay, G. (2010). Culturally responsive teaching theory, research, and practice (2nd ed.). New
York, New York: Teachers College Press.
Au, W. (2013). Hiding behind high-stakes testing: Meritocracy, objectivity, and inequality in u.s.
education. The International Journal: Comparative Perspectives, 12(2), 7-19. Retrieved March
14, 2015, from www.iejcomparative.org
Hagopian, J. (2014). More than a score: The new uprising against high-stakes testing. Chicago,
Illinois: Haymarket Books.