“Testing, the Easy Target”
June 10, 1999

By Abigail Thernstrom

Lexington, Mass. — In case you missed it, the Federal Department of Education may have signaled the end of standardized testing, from college boards to elementary school assessments. This certainly seems the intent of guidelines issued last month by the department’s Office of Civil Rights warning of the potentially discriminatory impact of “high-stakes testing.”  If the guidelines are approved, it will be hard to justify using tests to sort students at any age for any purpose.

Here’s the problem:  At the moment, standardized tests have a disparate racial and ethnic impact. White and Asian students score, on average, markedly higher than their black and Hispanic peers. This is true for fourth-grade tests, college entrance exams and every other assessment on the books.  If a racial gap is evidence of discrimination, then all tests discriminate.

The Office of Civil Rights allows schools to prove that their exams are “educationally necessary” and have no “practicable alternative.” But tests with a disparate impact are guilty until proved innocent, and such proof will be hard to come by.

Colleges, for instance, can show that S.A.T.’s are good gauges of college performance, but the guidelines explicitly dismiss this fact. If tests suggest an applicant “is probably going to be a poor student, a school cannot on that basis alone” deprive the candidate of an “opportunity to improve and develop the academic skills necessary to success in our society.”

In other words, tests identify “poor students,” but refusing to admit them on that basis denies educational access, which may be discriminatory.

Twelve times as many Asians as blacks score above 650 on the math S.A.T.’s; that’s a disparate impact in stark relief. When Princeton admits proportionally more Asians than blacks, has the school denied its rejected black applicants equal “opportunity”?  Have Asians been granted excessive access? For the Office of Civil Rights, the answer is a presumptive “yes.”

The guidelines, if adopted, would have an even worse effect on elementary and secondary schools.

The racial skills gap is our most worrisome educational problem. On average, black twelfth graders read at an eighth-grade level, and the picture in science is even worse.  Yet good tests inspire higher academic expectations and better instruction.  Teaching to the test works when the test is academically solid.

New statewide tests in Massachusetts, Texas, and elsewhere give students, families and teachers the sort of detailed information upon which better education can be built. They force schools to focus on the core subjects: English, history, science and math.  Removing the tests simply shoots the messenger and undermines the drive to raise academic performance.

The Federal guidelines do sign on to “challenging standards for all students.” But equating disparate impact with discrimination and threatening litigation deprives already disadvantaged students of the educational improvements they need most.

Wiping out racial disparities in academic performance through better education will be a long and complicated process. But there are no shortcuts.  Banning tests or employing different standards for different racial and ethnic groups, as Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew appears ready to do in New York, are bound to fail as strategies.

Eliminating standardized tests is bad for education, and for civil rights. In the winter of 1997-98, Public Agenda, a nonpartisan polling group, found that 78 percent of black parents agreed that testing “calls attention to a problem that needs to be solved.” The Education Department should understand what parents already know:  In the push for racial equality, tests are an indispensable tool.

Abigail Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and the co-author of America in Black and White.

©1999 The New York Times

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