The test scores have been a reasonably significant predictor of scholastic success. Nevertheless, that sentence is itself fraught. First, further scholastic success is often founded on the ability to excel at more tests of the same format: those who excel at the 4th and 8th grade tests are likely to have the tools to excel at the SAT and ACT, and later at the GRE, GMAT, MCAT, LSAT and so on. Second, social privilege itself is a significant predictor of scholastic success, so if the tests select for privilege, they are bound to correlate.
When you fit to data obtained from a biased system, you wind up modeling systemic bias. The tests yield unfair results because they are overfitted to an unfair system.
To be sure, 1980’s affirmative action, as implemented, was not much better. In my academic days, I had the dubious privilege of attempting to teach freshman computer science to some students who had not yet mastered fourth-grade-level arithmetic, with the expectation that if they failed, it was my fault for not having offered enough additional help - virtually an order to pass them in order to keep the department’s numbers from looking bad. I bent over backwards to try to teach some out of class, and kind of managed over the course of a semester to take some from the fourth grade to the ninth. That was not nearly enough to have them actually ready for the course, but maybe the basic numeracy helped them farther along the line. (It was most emphatically not my job at the university to do it. It was my job as a human being.)
I know this isn’t what you’re saying, but it’s easy to misread this as saying that we shouldn’t teach mathematical skills, or evaluate students’ performance at them. The privileged have outperformed the underclasses at … well, at practically anything intellectual. But that’s a reason to teach more, not less.
As far as the ‘not for girls’ thing goes, my daughter came close to buying into it: some of her teachers were all too willing to accept, “This is hard for me. I must not be good at it.” It’s no longer an explicit, “girls can’t do math,” but more a tacit, “this individual girl is struggling, I’m going to pat her on the head and tell her not to worry about it.” And in my daughter’s experience, the female teachers were the worst offenders at that!
It sometimes seemed as if her mother and I were the only ones to tell her, “Of course it’s hard for you! It’s hard for everyone! The people you know who are good at it, whatever it is (music, dance, art, mathematics, athletics, writing, …) put in a lot of hard work getting good at it.” That’s a lesson that we all too often fail to teach whenever anyone is trying to get good at something that’s non-conforming to gender roles, or class roles, or other social expectations.
In many cases, privilege consists in being given the opportunity and encouragement to put in the hard work, and the privileged see only that the achievements were the fruits of their labours, without also seeing that those labours were possible only on a foundation of privilege. The protest, “I worked hard to get where I am today!” is often entirely true; what is false is the assumption that the opportunity to put in the hard work was open to everyone.
Challenge the testing process, and the abuse of the test results, all you please, and I’m with you! Challenge the system that has damaged students, possibly irreparably, long before they see an SAT, and I’ll agree - although I have very little idea what to do about it.
Challenging the material being tested - when the material comprises things like basic physics and mathematics - is, in effect, challenging the assumption that there is a quantifiable reality anywhere. If you want to have airplanes that don’t crash, steam boilers that don’t explode, electrical wiring that doesn’t burn down the house, you simply can’t just measure everything every time. You need those abstractions to be able to cope with designing the things, and then take lots of measurements on top of that to verify that the system you’re building actually behaves as your model predicts. The abstractions that we work with were built from a couple of thousand years of cut-and-try - a couple of thousand years of experience that we can’t simply rebuild from scratch for every job.
That may be an elitist, technocratic statement. Mother Nature doesn’t care about the labels. She doesn’t reward or punish. She doles out consequences. One of my engineering professors once told me, “Every number in every engineering handbook was measured because something failed. Most of them are written in blood.”
That’s a valid enough point, I suppose. Then again, a working knowledge of Freedom Units is probably essential to functioning within US culture. That’s a separate problem entirely, and I curse Imperial measure every day. But there’s an interesting philosophical question: to what extent is it reasonably to have a culturally biased test, when the goal is to predict academic performance or social functioning in the context of a particular culture? In the US, even a truck driver needs to know how to work with feet/inches, or pounds/tons, because figuring whether things like axle loads fall in the permissible range is part of the job. It’s most assuredly not a metric of innate ability, but possibly a measure of a teachable skill that will be useful in the current milieu.
Of course, knowing that manipulation of US customary units will be on the test, and drilling in them, is something that’s itself a marker of social class; students of a certain stratum are carefully taught and drilled in what is going to be on the test. It makes a huge difference.
Given everything else that’s screwed up about the system, the teachers are among the last people I’d blame! (I also hold that ‘lazy teacher’ trope with considerable suspicion. It sounds far too much like a soundbite from Prager U, advocating the demolition of public education.)
And now our society loves to hold up East Asian-Americans as a ‘model minority’ in order to discriminate by contrast against Those Other People.
In an ideal world, which we don’t inhabit, it’s a cross-check, so that a total idiot with rich parents can’t just buy his way through the entire system. (Even if all the teachers can be bribed or bullied into giving stellar reviews, the test will reveal something.) It’s also, ideally, a way for schools to calibrate their own performance standards against those of their peers.
Yes, I know. That’s not how it’s worked out.
We’re surely on the same page.
In the fields where learning has to be rigidly sequential (because you can’t understand something without being familiar with everything that has gone before), there may be a role for placement testing, not as competition, but simply to sort out what to teach to whom. Throwing kids who are learning complex analysis into the same room as ones who are still learning kitchen arithmetic is not going to help either cohort very much.
And still, I want to live in a society that has people who can do both. I’d have been dead long ago without them. (My life has been extended several times by medical interventions that have depended very much on modern technology. I also depend - for the supplies of daily life - on truckers’ being able to figure their axle loads, or aircraft load masters being able to calculate a weight-and-balance schedule.)
