More on test scores

For a high school math teacher, few times of the year are as fraught with tension as the end of April. As the rest of the nation is recovering from tax day, the public schools are gearing up for the annual standardized tests. What’s sad is that the scores on these tests actually depend less on where the students go to school or what they learn there, and more on who the students are.
Let’s look at the ten comprehensive high schools in San Francisco. In particular, let’s look at the three high schools that scored highest last year (Let’s call them the “Big Three”), and the three that scored lowest (We’ll call them the “Bottom Three”). I won’t say their names, but chances are that if you live in San Francisco you know which schools they are.
What’s interesting is that if you look to see which schools have the highest percentage of white and Asian students as compared to black or Latino students, it just so happens that it’s the Big Three! And would you believe that the schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students as compared to white and Asian students are the Bottom Three? How can we make sense of this remarkable coincidence?
As I see it, there are three possible explanations. The first is that the Big Three actually are the best schools in the district and that the Bottom Three are the worst. If that’s true, that means that we are sending our white and Asian students to the best schools and sending our black and Latino students to the worst schools, and we’re right back where we were before the civil rights movement, in a city that prides itself on being the capital of American progressive action.
The second possible explanation is that the Big Three score highly because of the inherent superiority of the high percentage of white and Asian students there, and that the Bottom Three score poorly because of the inherent inferiority of the high percentage of black and Latino students there. If you want to believe in some sort of inherent superiority or inferiority of the races, there are plenty of indicted war criminals in the Hague that would probably love to have you as a pen pal. Hopefully, however, we are able to reject that option out of hand.
That leaves me with my third option: that there is some sort of inherent bias against certain groups of students in society which the test scores reflect; and that bias ought to invalidate the tests as measurement tools for comparing student performance, especially since the scores are used as a basis for decisions about funding, staffing and student placement which only serve to increase the disparity between groups of students in public schools. This is the view held by most of the teachers with whom I’m acquainted. That doesn’t stop us, however, from hyping up the tests to our students as if their entire future depended on their results, putting enormous pressure on minds too young to comprehend how useless the test scores actually are.
So, this year, I have decided to abandon the grueling ritual of test prep. Rather than leaving behind my actual curriculum for several weeks in order to train students in test-taking strategies, I will continue teaching math as usual, up until the first day of testing. If the tests actually measured how much students have learned, my regular teaching ought to be all the test prep they need. I have neither the training nor the inclination, however, to prepare them for a test that seems to measure their ethnicity more than anything else.

- "But... you're bleck!"