Absurd Defense of Standardized Testing in Jacobin Magazine by Steven Singer

Originally posted at: https://gadflyonthewallblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/01/absurd-defense-of-standardized-testing-in-jacobin-magazine/

A bizarre article appeared in this Month’s issue of Jacobin – a left-leaning, even socialist magazine.

It was titled, “The Progressive Case for the SAT” and was written by Freddie DeBoer.

In it, the author attempts to explain why the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) – though flawed – is a more unbiased way to select which students deserve college admissions than indicators like K-12 classroom grades.

It’s all convoluted poppycock made worse by a baroque series of far left think tank connections, intellectual bias and mental illness.

In short, DeBoer argues that our schools are unfair, so we should embrace unfair high stakes tests.

I know. That doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Let me slow it down a bit, premise by premise so you can see his point – or lack thereof.

The current education system privileges white affluent children, says DeBoer, so they have an easier time getting into college than poorer children of color.

Check so far.

Richer whiter kids often go to schools that are better funded than those that teach mostly impoverished minorities. Therefore, the privileged get smaller classes, wider curriculums, more extracurricular activities, more counselors, better nutrition, etc. – while the underprivileged… don’t.

Then DeBoer says that classroom grades are often dependent on the resources students receive. Richer whiter kids get more resources, so they often get better grades.

Still with you so far.

Therefore, he concludes, we need standardized tests like the SAT to help equalize the playing field. We need so-called “objective” assessments to counteract the “subjective” classroom grades.

But DeBoer admits standardized tests aren’t objective! They are also the result of resources – that’s why richer whiter kids tend to score better on them than poorer blacker kids!

The argument makes no logical sense.

Justifying one unfair system with another unfair system is beyond bonkers.

Plus DeBoer contends out of nowhere that classroom grades are more easily manipulated than the tests and thus the tests are more valid.

Wrong again.

Classroom grades are based on roughly 180 days of instruction a year for 12 plus years. The SAT is roughly one day. More if you retake it.

It is MORE difficult to influence 2,160 days worth of grading than 1 or 2 or 3. Not the other way round.

Moreover, classroom grades are tabulated by numerous teachers, many of whom have little or no contact with each other. Standardized test scores are tabulated by a handful of temporary summer workers who often collaborate on the scores.

Whether students get good or bad grades generally doesn’t affect a given teacher. However, low test scores are actually beneficial to testing corporations because they allow the company to make additional money by retesting and selling remediation materials to the district.

If one group is more subject to bias, it is those grading the standardized tests, not the classroom teachers.

He has a point that getting rid of standardized testing won’t by itself eliminate inequality. But doubling down on it certainly won’t either.

That’s just logic.

DeBoer seems to be ignorant of history, as well.

The SAT test didn’t just spring up out of the ground. It was written by people. Psychologist Carl Brigham building on work by U.S. Army Psychologist Robert Yerkes to be exact.

Brigham devised the SAT in the early half of the 20th Century based on Yerkes' and his own deeply racist eugenicist theories.

And when I say he was a eugenicist, I’m not speaking in hyperbole. They truly believed that some races were just smarter, more moral and downright better than others.

“American education is declining and will proceed… with an accelerating rate as the racial mixture becomes more and more extensive,” wrote Brigham in his seminal A Study of American Intelligence.

“No citizen can afford to ignore the menace of race deterioration,” wrote Yerkes in 1922.

And this idea was the foundation of their application of standardized testing, as Yerkes noted a year later:

“The contrasting intellectual status of the white versus the negro constituents of the draft appear from table 3. Few residents of the United States probably would have anticipated so great a difference. That the negro is 90 per cent. [sic] illiterate only in part accounts for his inferior intellectual status.”

Brigham was basing his ideas on another test created by Yerkes, the Army Alpha and Beta tests.

As noted above, Yerkes used test scores to “prove” black soldiers in WWI were inferior and thus more suited to menial service and the trenches while whites should be given better positions.

And Brigham continued this practice with his SAT test.

In both cases, the psychologists used standardized testing to back up a racist and classist status quo.

Yet it is this same SAT test that DeBoer is suggesting we keep because it reduces racial and economic bias!

Certainly the SAT has changed some since Yerkes time, but it hasn’t changed THAT much!

And that brings us to DeBoer, himself.

Who is this guy and why did an allegedly respectable publication like Jacobin print his crap theory?

DeBoer appears to be a very troubled individual.

Back in December of 2017, he published a blog post about his mental illness, almost being committed to an institution, the antipsychotic drugs he was taking and the break he would have to take from being a “public intellectual.”

I don’t mean to shame anyone who suffers from mental illness. But when someone offers such a bizarre policy suggestion, questions of stability arise.

Next, there’s DeBoer’s think tank connections.

On the same Website, DeBoer talks about “My anti anti-SAT take for the People’s Policy Project” – the same theory he expanded upon in his Jacobin article.

People’s Policy Project (3P) is a left-leaning think tank created by another frequent Jacobin contributor, lawyer and policy analyst, Matt Bruenig.

You may recall Bruenig. In 2015, he criticized schools that provide more resources to impoverished children by dubbing them “welfare schools.” He saw the inclusion of free healthcare, free meals, free pre-K, and other wraparound services as increasing the welfare state and making children and families dependent on the government for survival.

And, yes, like DeBoer, this is a guy who claims to be a far left Democrat.

This is all very troubling.

Sometimes we fall into the lazy attitude that high stakes testing, charter schools and other corporate education reforms are only championed by the right.

Certainly the left – or at least the far left – is immune to this neoliberal agenda.

You definitely wouldn’t expect to get a heaping helping of top down supply side school policy in Jacobin!

It just goes to show you how little policymakers on both sides of the aisle understand education and how ignorant they can be when we don’t force them to include the experts in the conversation.

I am, of course, talking about real, live classroom teachers.

Until we prize what they can tell us about education, we will continue to be led in circles by the ignorant.

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