A Test Isn't Racist. Assumptions About Black Kids Can Be

> That was before programs like Prep for Prep, which canvasses the city’s public, charter and parochial schools for promising minority students, gives them an after-school and weekend preparatory boot camp for 14 months and then funnels them into private high schools, where they receive need-based financial aid. This program serves about 650 students a year, many of whom might otherwise be admitted to schools like Stuyvesant. And that’s not counting other scholarship programs at private schools, boarding schools and parochial schools designed to increase the diversity of their privileged student bodies.

This is an under-discussed phenomenon. I've heard the same thing said about public high schools in other cities. There are private schools that peel out many high-performing minority (non-Asian, of course) students, which affects the number of high-performing minority students who end up in the public high schools.

People then wring their hands about apparent racial performance gaps in the public schools, ignoring the effect of these programs.

Believe what you'd like, there's a reason their life expectancy is shorter, their income is smaller, their incarceration is greater. The answer isn't racism, it's the Bell Curve.

Let's start by getting fathers back in the home to raise their kids.

So much of this dialogue misses the point. Tests can be validly used and also often be abused. And when tests are abused enough, it starts to beg the question of whether or not they're too attractive to invalid interpretation to be worth the harms, especially if there are alternatives.

There's a kind of irony in what the author is arguing because part of the backlash against standardized tests is precisely because of this kind of essentialist personological error the author seems to be fighting against.

He seems to be saying there's a lot of potential that is neglected because of racist assumptions about kids' potential or needs, or what it means to be Black, which is true, but aren't those kids the same kids with the same potential later? Why isn't he arguing about how to give them another chance? In a system like the one he describes is a test really the best thing to be using, if it's used as a measure of potential as much as, or more than, as a measure of academic state?

The problem is we use these standardized achievement tests as measures of how a kid is doing, which reflects the kid and the system, but then turn around and use it as a measure of potential, and shrug our shoulders at the system. Just because you can validly use it for one purpose doesn't mean you can't abuse it for another purpose at the same time.

I'm not opposed to standardized testing per se but I'm tired of how naive the positions on them can be one way or another. It's absurd to think they have no validity and should be ignored, but it's also absurd to think they can be (or aren't tried to be) used in the same way as a highly accurate measure of mass, current, or distance, by just reading off a number, that reflects how that person would be in every counterfactual scenario or opportunity.

I feel like he's missing the point in a lot of ways. Most of what he discusses would be true with or without standardized tests one way or another. In fact, I think framing it in terms of testing undermines what he's trying to point out, because it distracts from what he's really focused on.