Most of the children in my fourth/fifth grade class came from homes in which they did not speak English and came from cultures foreign to the one in which they were now living.
We had spent the year in our classroom focused on what we collectively valued most: pursuing our questions, concerns, and interests; learning how to work together and to communicate as speakers and listeners; learning how to carry out research and how to make use of the skills we learned, to make things better for ourselves and for our learning community. We addressed the academic basics through projects, topics that were of interest and relevance for the children, and which allowed them to communicate what they knew and had learned through a range of modalities. They did not bubble in any circles.
I did offer them a two-week course, “testing as a foreign language,” in hopes of helping them learn how tests work, to become familiar with the kinds of questions they were likely to encounter, and to acquire some test-taking strategies. They created tests about Pokémon, which was popular at the time, and the students “administered” their tests to the adults in the school. The students enjoyed the experience and truly enjoyed that we adults failed miserably. But that did not fully prepare them (or me) for what was to come.
These children, who had demonstrated their intelligence, their skills, their compassion, their problem-solving abilities, their caring and respect for themselves and others, their critical thinking, their resilience in dealing with the extraordinary ups and downs that many families of recent immigrant as well as many non-immigrant families face, hit an impenetrable wall with the tests, which many were taking in their second or third language.
Just that fact alone, that children who could speak two or three languages were more likely to fail or struggle than children who only spoke English, made clear how wrong these tests were.
Watching the students dissolve into tears and sink into their chairs in utter frustration as they tried to negotiate page after page of contextless test questions broke my heart, and made me wonder why these harmful, destructive tests existed at all. I decided to look into the history of standardized tests and how they came to be as they are.
It turns out that standardized testing actually began in France. Alfred Binet, a psychologist, devised the Binet scale of intelligence that would help educators to identify how best to serve very young children from impoverished homes who were coming to school in Paris. He designed his test to help assess the current intellectual abilities of those young children as they entered school and he believed that their intellectual abilities could be improved with good teaching and support.
U.S. cognitive psychologists Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman, and Robert Yerkes had a very different agenda as they transformed Binet’s work to fit their race and class politics at the turn of the 20th century. They were a part of the eugenicist movement, a movement that believed intelligence was fixed for life and was a result of heredity. Eugenicists were convinced that the human race would be improved if those with good genes (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, like themselves) would reproduce more, and those with inferior genes (people from southern Europe, African Americans, Jews, other people of color) would reproduce less.
In 1917, Yerkes worked with Goddard, Terman, and others to develop the Alpha and Beta Army tests to sort incoming soldiers and to determine their “mental fitness.” Yerkes drew several dubious conclusions, including that the intelligence of European immigrants could be judged according to their country of origin. He “found” that peoples of eastern and southern Europe were less intelligent than their white, western and northern European counterparts, and that African Americans were the least intelligent of all people, and they ended up being sorted onto the front lines as cannon fodder during World War I. Those from northern and western backgrounds were more often sorted into the officer corps.
The test that Terman designed produced the same results as the army tests, identifying people of eastern and southern Europe descent and African Americans into the least intelligent category. These tests led to the belief that it was possible to measure intelligence and reduce it to a single number and that this intelligence measure was fixed, unchangeable, and based on heredity. This testing led to the tracking of large numbers of students into an educational sequence that prepared them for low level work, while advanced classes were reserved for students from white, western and northern European backgrounds. It also led to 30 states making forced sterilization legal. More than 70,000 women and men from those “inferior” groups were the victims of forced sterilization in the first half of the 20th century, legitimized by the Supreme Court in its 1927 Buck v. Bell decision.
What makes a test a standardized test?
Standardized testing is a direct outgrowth of the eugenics movement and its assumptions that intelligence can be reduced to a number, that there is one way to be intelligent, and that the purpose of testing is to sort and rank students. A test is considered a standardized test if it offers the test to all in exactly the same way: same questions, same instructions (including what to do when students throw up on the test), same time constraints, and same scoring routines, so that the results can be compared. The questions are mostly multiple choice so that they can be scored easily and quickly, and they are mostly comprised of questions that have one right answer, which discourages complexity or multiple points of view or ways of understanding.
There is a direct contradiction between high stakes testing and state standards. If everyone passes the test or the tests don’t provide the desired scores, the tests are revised until they “perform” as they should, with the right number of students passing and the right number failing. In Massachusetts, those students who fail the MCAS (our standardized test) do not receive their diplomas, even if they have met the state’s educational standards. Does this make sense?
I also note that private schools are not required to administer standardized tests. If the tests truly enhanced the learning of their students, these private, well-endowed schools would surely offer the opportunity to their children.
The evidence is clear: those who struggle most on these tests are students like mine — second, or third language learners, students of color, students with learning challenges, and students living in poverty — the very categories that Terman, Yerkes, and their eugenicist colleagues designed their tests to identify as inferior more than 100 years ago.
While the eugenics movement continues to cast a long shadow over public education, significant steps have been taken over the years to bring greater equity and justice to all students. Clearly there is more work to be done, beginning with reducing the power and impact that standardized testing plays in education. One way to do that is to remove standardized tests as a high school graduation requirement, an act that Massachusetts voters are seeking to do this year.
Doug Selwyn taught at K-12 public schools from 1985 until 2000 and then at university as a professor of education until he retired in 2017. He is the chair of the Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution education task force. You can reach him at [email protected].
