Tip to civil rights groups: Standardized testing doesn't work

Diane Ravitch - Civil rights groups issued a statement expressing their support for annual testing. The statement makes assumptions about the supposed benefits of testing that are surprising. After 13 years of federally mandated annual testing, how could anyone still believe that testing will improve instruction and close achievement gaps?

Tests measure achievement gaps, they don’t close them. Standardized tests are normed on a bell curve. A bell curve has a top half and bottom half. It never closes. Standardized tests accurately measure family income. One need only look at the correlation between SAT scores and family income to see how closely the scores are tied to wealth and poverty.

For reasons incomprehensible to me, these worthy organizations believe that children have a right to take standardized tests, even though such tests disproportionately benefit the privileged, not children who are poor or children with disabilities or children whose families have been discriminated against because of race or ethnicity. How can one look at the results of Common Core testing in Néw York—where 97% of English learners, 95% of children with disabilities, and more than 80% of black and Hispanic students failed to meet the standard of “proficiency”—and conclude that these children are well-served by standardized testing?