High-Stakes Testing: A Tool for White Supremacy for Over 100 Years

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: What's Race Got to Do With It: How Market-Based School Reform Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality

Abstract

. Objectives or purposes
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ways that high-stakes standardized testing, as a central tool for education policy and reform, has operated as a tool for the maintenance of White supremacy in the United States over the last 100 years. The paper also briefly discusses the kinds of resistance mounted by communities of Color against high-stakes testing.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Broadly speaking this paper draws upon critical education theory for its theoretical framework. More specifically the analysis of how high-stakes testing supports racism and white supremacy makes use of historical materialism as a framework for offering an overview of key concepts of high-stakes testing and a brief, modern-day history of high-stakes testing in education policy—including its foundations in the racism of IQ testing and the Eugenics movement. Further this paper draws on critical analysis of empirical data with regards to the curriculum, pedagogic, and classroom outcomes related to contemporary high-stakes testing, and is informed by critical race theory’s presumptive understanding of the role of institutions in the United States perpetuating racism – in this case high-stakes testing, education policy, and systems of education.

3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Functionally this paper makes use both of historical analysis to illuminate specific traditions and logics embedded within high-stakes, standardized testing as well as a less formal use of qualitative metasynthesis to draw more general conclusions about the empirical effects of testing across multiple studies.

4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Data sources and evidence for this analysis include historical data drawn from various already published accounts of educational history during the early 20th century and the findings of empirical research of classroom practices, curriculum, and outcomes associated with contemporary high-stakes, standardized testing.

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
A review of educational research shows the disparate impacts of high-stakes testing on students of Color specifically. I highlight how the concept of meritocracy is fundamentally racist and address how testing is weaponized against students at the intersection of race and disability. I conclude by briefly discussing how communities of Color have mounted resistance work against high-stakes testing as a tool of capitalism and white supremacy.

6. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
While there is ample research and analysis of the negative effects of high-stakes, standardized testing in the existing literature, including more racialized analysis of disparate impacts of testing on children and communities of color, the analysis done in this paper is significant because it continues to expand a recognition of how high-stakes, standardized testing continues to be racist and functionally white supremacist at its foundational core.

Author

• Wayne Au, University of Washington - Bothell