In Brookline, our School Committee and Office of the Superintendent talk and write a lot about the “achievement gap” and the need to reduce it in the name of “equity.”

But what do scholars of color say about this framework?

Below are some examples:

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Ibram Kendi

Professor & Director, Antiracist Research & Policy Center

Department of History

American University

Why the Academic Achievement Gap is a Racist Idea

These days, many people are criticizing the testing movement. Colleges are slowly diminishing the importance of standardized testing in admissions decisions. We are seeing unprecedented numbers of wealthy white parents opting their school children out of these tests.

But few testing critics are bursting its biggest bubble: the existence of the achievement gap itself. To believe in the existence of any sort of racial hierarchy is actually to believe in a racist idea. The achievement gap between the races–with Whites and Asians at the top and Blacks and Latinos at the bottom–is a racial hierarchy. And this popular racial hierarchy has been constructed by our religious faith in standardized testing….

What if we measured literacy by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environment: how much individuals knew all those complex equations and verbal and nonverbal vocabularies of their everyday life?

What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know? What if we measured intellect by how open an individual’s mind is to self-critique and new ideas?

What if our educational system focused on opening minds instead of filling minds and testing how full they are? What if we realized the best way to standardize a highly effective educational system is not by standardizing our tests but by standardizing our schools to encourage intellectual openness and difference?

But intellectual difference, and multiple literacies, languages, and vocabularies, are only valued in a multi-cultural society that truly values diversity and difference. The testing movement does not value multiculturalism. The testing movement does not value the antiracist equality of difference. The testing movement values the racist hierarchy of difference, and its bastard 100-year-old child: the academic achievement gap.

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Ricardo D. Rosa, PhD

Assistant Professor

UMass Dartmouth

Identify Affirmed: Agency Engaged: Culturally Responsive Performance-Based Assessment

In Voices of Urban Education

[P]erformance assessments must be culturally responsive in order to truly serve the needs of students from all backgrounds…

If we begin, as I do, from the perspective that institutions, including schools, are designed in the image and interests of those who rule, we must be very cautious about re-creating an educational reform environment where people of color and the poor will continue to be marginalized.

If performance-based assessment is considered in the same frame as current testing regimes, which is entirely possible, it becomes just another reform fad (I don’t mean to suggest that performance-based assessments is a new one) that re-inscribes the power of systems of categorization and the conferring of rewards to those who are already materially, racially, and culturally privileged.

From this perspective, performance-based assessments become another repressive surveillance technique in the lives of children and adolescents.

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Noliwe Rooks

Professor

Africa Studies and Research Center

Cornell University

Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (The New Press, 2017)

Do standardized achievement tests unfairly advantage white, Asian, and wealthy students and disadvantage everyone else? According to a group of educational advocacy organizations and civil rights groups, such as the NAACP and the Advancement Project, the answer is yes…

Opinions differ as to why, on K-12 achievement tests and college entrance exams, lower-income students as well as Black and Latino students consistently score below privileged white and Asian students.

These gaps persist despite decades of research and numerous studies attempting to explain and close them.

One theory posits that students with grandparents who have graduated from college always score higher, suggesting that the tests unfairly penalize students who are the first in their family to attend college.

Whatever the explanation, it is difficult to reconcile why we rely on such tests when there is plenty of evidence showing that they heavily advantage some districts and students and greatly disadvantage others.

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Wayne Au, PhD

Professor

University of Washington Bothell

Racial Justice is Not a Choice: White supremacy, high-stakes testing, and the punishment of Black and Brown students

Teaching for Black Lives (Rethinking Schools, 2018)

[H]igh-stakes standardized testing has not only failed at achieving racial equality, its proliferation has only exacerbated racial inequality and worsened the education for students of color.

The logic of high-stakes testing for racial justice is simple. Standardized tests produce data that we can look at and identify “achievement gaps.” Then, if we don’t see the scores of low performing racial groups increase to close these gaps, teachers, schools, and students are held “accountable” to punishments like funding cuts, charter school conversion, or withholding diplomas, among other consequences. The idea is that these threats will lead to higher test scores for students from low-income families and students of color.

The arguments for using high-stakes testing for racial equality all assume that our standardized tests provide accurate measurements of teaching and learning. This presumption does not hold true. Test scores correlate most strongly with family income, neighborhood, educational levels of parents, and access to resources — all factors that are measures of wealth that exists outside of schools.

This is not to say that schools and teachers are not important in student learning and achievement. However, it is to say that while teachers are central to how our children learn and experience education, these tests offer such narrow measures that they miss most of the processes, experiences, and relationships that define teaching and learning.

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So what in the world are we doing in Brookline, embracing and emphasizing the notion of an “achievement gap” that these scholars of color say is fundamentally inequitable? –Mike O.