Pandemic Openings: The Bones We Carry in Education Research and Policy

Interrogating the Taken for Granted Role of High Stakes Testing

By Rachel E. Williams

The ongoing global pandemic works within the well-worn historical grooves of racial injustice at the nexus of various systems of oppression, which laid bare the ways that our current arrangements are unsustainable. These realities generate the potential for a more radical public consciousness about what our world could look like, including in public education. At the onset of the pandemic, K-12 leaders canceled in-person classes and anticipated a return to normal at some near point in the future, a point that became an ever-expanding horizon, pushing normal further and further away. The fundamental features of educational systems that tend to remain amidst reform were in flux as the launch of the virtual schoolhouse took flight in homes across the country. What became clear by the end of March 2020 was that high-stakes standardized testing, a U.S. springtime ritual cemented with the No Child Left Behind Act, would be virtually impossible. In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Department of Education announced that states could request a waiver for relief from federally mandated testing requirements. Some education experts offer that the pandemic created an opening for a conversation that would have been unlikely without such emergency conditions: the future role of standardized testing in K-12 education and higher education (Strauss, 2020). I ask, If the pandemic is a portal (Roy, 2020), what more is on the other side than merely tinkering with closing the racial and socioeconomic test score gap and the web of policies that flow from this preoccupation?

The ongoing pandemic provides an opening to rethink the taken for granted role of high stakes testing in public education and to potentially contend with the way it upholds an 18^th century framework rooted in a hypothesis of Black inferiority. As science displaced religion as the paradigm of truth, Thomas Jefferson called on the field of natural history to make Black inferiority the object of scientific study (Skiba, 2012). A research agenda to investigate racial differences in intelligence was born to address Jefferson’s hypothesis, and it focused on measuring anatomical and physiological differences between Black and white people, which white researchers believed provided evidence that Black inferiority was fixed, immutable, and biologically determined (Skiba, 2012). The evidence that flowed from this now discredited body of research was central in justifying African enslavement, white Southerners’ backlash against Reconstruction, and the Eugenics movement (Skiba, 2012).

Hereditarian and biological views of intelligence also shaped IQ testing in U.S. schools and the way experts and education administrators justified categorizing and sorting students in ways that reflected the race and class order of the day (Tyack, 1974; Au, 2016). Under the guise of “scientific” objectivity, American cognitive psychologists distorted the original uses of standardized IQ tests by imbuing their use with racial presumptions of hereditary intelligence, arguing that objective measures proved the inherent inferiority of those at the bottom of U.S. social, cultural, and economic hierarchy: Black people and other racially minoritized communities and the poor and working class (Au, 2016). The historical origins of testing function as the skeletal bones that give contemporary education research and policy agendas their shape.

The Bones We Carry: Historical Remnants in High Stakes Testing

The skeleton of racial differences research and standardized testing in education hold together a body of research and policies that leave uninterrogated whether tests actually measure learning and how they continue to reproduce racial and economic hierarchies in new ways. These are the bones we carry. In life, bones do the work of sheltering vital organs; they are the foundation for our bodies (Colwell, 2017). However, bones outlast their original owner. They hold the story of the life lived, and they can be used to piece together the past from a geographic and sociohistorical lens (Corrieri & Marquez-Grant, 2015). It’s all in the bones. Though Jefferson’s hypothesis and the research agenda it birthed no longer lives as it did in the 18^th century, what lives in its afterlife? How do we carry these 18^th century bones in our contemporary moment?

Rather than focus on the overt linkages tying Jefferson’s hypothesis to modern research, such as those who continue to investigate racial differences from a biological standpoint, I argue that we have to think about how the contemporary use of test scores reproduces racial power dynamics. Lucas (2000) offers a compelling example of test construction, which illuminates how new test questions are selected on the basis of whether students on the top of the previous tests’ distribution answer the proposed item correctly:

After the testing has been completed, analysts evaluate how the candidate questions performed. A key aspect of the evaluation considers which students answered the candidate questions correctly. If test-takers who obtained low scores on the existing test were more likely to answer a candidate question correctly than did test-takers who obtain high scores on the existing test, then the candidate question is rejected because it is seen as failing to differentiate appropriately between high and low scorers…That this procedure is accepted virtually without reflection by many test-makers suggests just how discrimination against the disadvantaged is sedimented into the standard operating procedures of many of our institutions (p. 469-470).

When tests are utilized for gatekeeping access to higher education, this issue of test construction sheds light on how the achievement gap and its concomitant education reforms take for granted that test scores actually reflect a true distribution of student achievement. Under the auspices of a color blind and purportedly objective measure, “testing work[s] to ease the intergenerational transfers of power (Lucas, 2000, p. 470)” on racial and socioeconomic terms without interrogating “racialized hierarchy of valued knowledge” embedded in test construction (Wells, 2019). The bones give shape to research agendas that take for granted what we can know from standardized tests and what should be done about disparities in outcomes.

 Too often, test score outcomes function as public rationale and justification for education policies that limit Black control over public education. Despite efforts to purportedly address “the civil rights issue of our time” by closing racial test score gaps (Au, 2016), market-based reforms are advanced in ways that obscure the disproportionate power of political and economic elite over the education policy agenda for market-based reforms, such as school choice (Scott, 2009; Scott, 2013). Additionally, although test scores serve as public rationale for state takeovers, evidence illuminates that they are more often and punitively advanced in districts with Black political representation on school boards and city councils, dismantling Black power over public education, despite similar low performance in white districts (Morel, 2018). Test score outcomes have also been arbitrarily used to advance school closures in Black neighborhoods and to justify re-opening traditional public schools as charter schools (Lipman, 2013). High stakes accountability and school choice work together to reinforce scarcity perspectives that schools produce relative success between individuals that create competition for the best schools. In the context of the advantages that map onto segregated spaces, white parents not only make schooling decisions that reinforce and cement their advantages in racially isolated white schools, but advance county secession efforts to cordon off educational opportunities through newly reconfigured district boundaries resulting in white, affluent homogenous districts (Siegel-Hawley, Diem, & Frankenberg, 2018; Houck & Murray, 2019). In the afterlife of Jefferson’s 18^th century hypothesis, test scores continue to serve as a vehicle in an ongoing process to secure power dynamics in which Black communities are negatively impacted by test scores used for gatekeeping or used to justify reshaping Black political stewardship over public education.

Burying the Bones: Alternative Forms of Educational Life

The national discourse concerning educational inequality has been locked in the framework of the racial and socioeconomic standardized test score gap for decades. The collective preoccupation with “the achievement gap” has devolved education to high stakes accountability on terms that narrow what it means to be educated, what constitutes a quality school, and who is a good teacher (Wells, 2014). In her 2019 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Presidential Address, then-AERA President Amy Stuart Wells stated,

“Accountability has been measured almost exclusively by asking every student to find the same right answer to a limited number of questions on a limited number of topics. Scores on a handful of multiple-choice tests is what it now means to be educated. This is the inconvenient truth of our field, because in fact, the evidence shows us that today’s regime of high-stakes standardized testing should have never become the sole or even the primary measure of what it means to be educated” (Wells 2019).

Scholars have intervened in the achievement gap discourse to deconstruct the commonsense efforts toward its mitigation. They have redirected the focus on the educational debt accrued to communities historically marginalized by the U.S. education system (Ladson-Billings, 2006) and recast attention to the opportunity gap in order to make visible the insufficient inputs that construct the patterns we see in test score outcomes (Carter & Welner, 2013). Despite these analytic interventions, high stakes testing remains the skeletal bones of the framework delimiting political will and policy imagination in lieu of more robust alternatives for education. This is particularly revealing when Black students are centered, whose educational experiences are “qualitatively different” as a result of high-stakes testing, due to less time on untested subjects— such as science, social studies, and the arts—and the disciplining threat of school closures, reconstitution, or charter or state takeover (Au, 2016).

What to make of these bones that hold together the body of the taken for granted education system, where the dominant vision of educational opportunity is narrowly and solely linked to closing test-score gaps? What might it mean to see that to carry these bones is to actually be “in the wake”, in which “the means and modes of Black subjection may have changed, but the fact and structure of that subjection remain (Sharpe, p. 10)?” When the imagined students, teachers, schools, and districts in need of so-called reform are Black, what rises to the top of decision-makers agendas? What often rises to the top are policies that leave unaddressed the myriad of historical and present-day structural forces shaping Black life beyond the education system that are figured into the calculation of test scores. In attending to the bones that make the shape of the current educational system, scholars argue that an abolition framework provides a way to “build spaces where education is supported over ‘school’ (Stovall, 2016, p. 57),” which challenges the weight we assign to high stakes testing and the web policies that flow from it and are justified by it.

More and more higher education institutions are removing the SAT and ACT admission requirement for incoming students for multiple years as a result of the pandemic. Many K-12 education reform efforts devolved the meaning of what it means to be educated into test score outcomes that translated into college acceptance and enrollment, hoping it would facilitate individual economic mobility, especially for students historically underserved by public education. How can we push on this opening in higher education to broaden K-12 policy imagination into something that moves us towards education as opposed to schooling, something that decenters a fixation on test scores in isolation of broader measures? And how would centering this imagining in the experiences of Black students land us in a different place? We must find ways to tend, bury, and lay these bones to rest in order to give life to alternative ways of knowing from which to build alternative institutions that make education more possible.

References

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