It takes a long time for a bad idea to die. Although we ended slavery in 1863, the racist idea that empowered the institution of slave ownership is still dying a slow, torturous death. Racism was invented to justify the financial benefits that accrue to the owners of slaves who, in our country, got rich from tobacco, sugar and cotton. Today the same racist idea is used to justify the financial benefits of completely different industries, industries that use standardized testing as a weapon far more effective than shackles. Shackles only restrain the physical body while education based on the standardized testing movement uses mental restraints that numb the mind with its single purpose objective of stratifying society for the benefit of those already on top. Those people certainly don’t want racism to die. They are still getting rich off of it.
Today the same racist idea is being used to justify the financial benefits that accrue to the owners of the entire education industry, an industry that earns $1.7 billion in sales from the tests alone. The test makers also sell curriculum “aligned” to the tests, which is another money maker for them, with profits in the billions. But beyond that, the education industry serves the objectives of those who benefit from the entire profit hungry economy and who pay their underlings according to a “merit” based on the scores earned on these same tests. Many educators are still unaware of how harmful their complicity in the perpetuation of the practice of standardized testing is. But once they are all woken to the nature of the harm done they will join in the liberation efforts of those of us calling for a ban on standardized tests because:
- the tests are racist.
- they reinforce the sense of entitlement for the high scorers and the sense of unworthiness in the low scorers.
- they introduce unhealthy levels of stress into the school community.
- they reduce the learning experience to mere curriculum based on standards generated by distant technocrats.
- of the intoxicating quality of bias confirmation.
There are far too many arguments against the practice of standardized testing to repeat here, from their lack of validity to their inherent biases. It is not my purpose to catalog the erroneous notions about it. Instead, I am focused on the single most significant fact about standardized testing, its racism. And the mental lock that has been put on the well intentioned educators who continue to support it.
Here’s the conundrum for people who put religious faith in standardized testing. For all I might rail against standardized testing and the standards they purportedly measure, I actually want to raise standards not lower them. I want more not fewer standards. I want a set of standards so large that no matter what standards an individual chooses to master, there is a standard for them to use. I want individuals to each master the standards they have chosen from a set of standards as unique as they are. Without prescribed standards we can customize education for each individual's practical needs rather than base it on some unrealizable ideal.
Fighting against standardized testing is part of a liberation movement not just for the students who continue to be abused by the practice but also for the educators who labor under the misconception that testing provides some sort of social good, that testing will help make our society more fair and just because it will help eliminate racial inequality. The exact opposite is the truth, they perpetuate racism, not eliminate it. The achievement gap itself is a racist idea.
We are not going to bargain this because there is nothing to bargain. There is no compromise. We will end racism and to do that we need to ban standardized testing. Once we do that we can focus on helping students make sense of their world rather than trying to standardize them according to the racist premises of our society.
