High-Stakes Testing History, Racism & Resistance | Wayne Au PhD UWB

[00:00:02]greetings Philadelphia this is way now shooting a video here in Seattle just by way of introduction I'm an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell and i'm also an editor rethinking schools and i'm pretty present as a local sort of activists around high-stakes standardized testing and also most recently around charter schools i'm going to give a shout out to my longtime friend now i guess i could say that kelly calling she's for making the connection and having me provide some remarks the long distance at least and basically you know I was asked to sort of talk about high stakes testing and touch on four different things one is sort of a history of testing and some of the political implications of that history I was also asked to serve a just a question of you know do we need high-stakes testing in order to sort of ensure the quality education of children of color and the third piece I was asked to address was to sort of touch on the relationship between white supremacy and and high-stakes testing and then also to sort of discuss some of the what I see are some of the best strategies to come to combat testing and I'm just going to say this upfront you know I'm sort of shooting this video on my computer and it's a going to be an unedited one-shot deal so please forgive any sort of sloppiness around something if any sloppiness that comes out from this anyways so let's let's get to it you know when we look at the history of high-stakes standardized testing we see we see standardized testing before with high stakes we see standardized testing sort of a rising in the United States in particular you know right around the late 1800s and early 1900s and there are two there's a couple things that are important to note around this first is that when you get to the early nineteen hundreds we're looking at the beginning of mass schooling in this country right and so and this also coincides with sort of the beginning of like having like child labor laws and so they had this literally had this thing like okay all these kids can't work in the factories anymore what are we going to do with them and so the idea of having mass schooling sort of came hand in hand from the perspective of political economy least came hand in hand with with the the with sort of the release of children from from their terrible working conditions in in the factories here in the US and so that's that's one piece of it at the same time we're also going through this huge industrial leap in the US and so you and the modernization in the rise of factories and so we get so the same time math schooling starts we're also we're also getting this the shifts in this framing of schooling as as an in a factory model in a businesslike model right and so you can see this stuff lingering now you know well over 100 years later where for instance you know we have a you know take the modern day high school which still pretty much is this this huge factory and it's set up as an assembly line model right and so you have you know students moving from teacher to teacher at timed intervals and after their after they do their time they they get their diploma and they've been stamped is basically as inspected and they're there a done product you know and so so we can see this framing the reason why testing connects to this to these two things because you know you so you have all these kids you have the rise of mass schooling and the sort of factory bottle of education standardized testing came about as one of the key technologies and we need to understand it as a technology for for the efficient sorting of these huge populations right this period of time also is connected directly to the that's the roots of tracking as well and the tests we're sort of brought in as a way to say you know these administrators policymakers and even you know professors at the time were providing these tests as supposedly an accurate and objective way to sort and rank children according to their you know future life professions all right now we know that they were they were not objective okay we know that for a fact and so and we know that what happened was they ended up reproducing pretty much every single major social and economic inequity that you had at that time and so here's the other piece than the other important piece around looking at the history of high-stakes standardized testing going back to this this period of time early 1900s late 1800s in the US was that this was also during a pretty strong eugenics movement in the United States and by and by eugenics move out you know this whole idea that people's behavior can be attributed to genetic factors and so and the reason why this is important is because what happened is then the Genesis make logged on to the idea of standardized testing at this time because they said hey look oh this is you know these top psychologists say that this testing is is is the way to accurately and objectively measure all these humans and and so these Genesis were like man look and look at the test results wow you know poor people are are by the test results poor people are just less intelligent than rich people and then look you know black people native people they are just less intelligent than white people but then immigrants they are also less intelligent than the us-born and so and so the test results ended up mirroring mirroring all of these race and class inequalities that existed at that time and then that data was then in turn used to essentially reinforce all of these racist ideas and policies that were sort of popping out all over the place you know in in sort of a post-reconstruction United States and so and so we get this sort of mixing of the the the the high-stakes standardized tests the factory model of schools and then all these racist notions underpinning the tests and really if you want to get down to it the the genesis were were essentially supported by all these leading psychologists educational psychologists at the time because basically these guys had brought over what was benet's original IQ test france and Benet was like we're going to eat made this test to test little kids just to see if there were some just to see if they had some developmental disabilities for instance and then these us psychologists and they're sort of crafts pragmatism brought these tests over wholesale and said hey we're going to test these human these large populations of humans particularly those enrolled in the army or enlisted in the army and then use these tests to make these broad conclusions that around the different IQ levels of different people now and so we have to understand that current standardized testing has its roots in these very very racist classist tests of these timing and people people now are like now you know we know that that how can that be and you just need to look like even even you know like um look look up Carl Brigham he's you know there's a brigham library connected to the to the original makers this 80 right he was a noted you Genesis he had all these racist the notions behind him and he still gets up Hilde and then even now we can look at you know folks if you're familiar back from the 90s there was like the bell curve was this book that came out that they used tests to supposedly measure the the IQ of different groups and came out to these same conclusions right that that black folks that black folks supposedly have a lower IQ than white folks right and so and so you can see these notions that they keep surfacing they keep resurfacing and bubbling up throughout throughout history and they are a lot they are far from dead especially now as we see sort of the rise of like racist Sena phobia here here in the United States and I think it continues to be used as they the test continue to be used as justifications for our existing inequality you know at that point one of the one of the things I like to always note about this history of standardized testing and what later became high-stakes standardized testing in the United States is that you know you know there's something funky you know there's something going on when the current results of modern-day tests essentially produce almost exactly the same outcomes as these early early standardized IQ tests you know we still have who we still have low for poor folks poor black and brown folks in particular and and and and like PLL students like they these folks are our score more score have lower scores now and guess what same kind of scores happened a hundred years ago so you have that always begs the question you have to just ask ok so what are we really measuring here ok and that's something I think lurks behind all these arguments around high-stakes standardized testing which brings me then to if I want to look at get to the next question on you know are these tests necessary to protect kids of color ok now we hear this all the time and there's been all sorts of there have been all sorts of struggles you know around some very mainstream civil rights groups saying we need we need this testing to hold teachers and schools accountable for educating kids of color right in fact that was the whole impetus behind No Child Left Behind and that's how No Child Left Behind sort of gained its political and rhetorical power right was was won by saying this is literally it's in it's it's in the you know it's in it's in the language of the law right No Child Left Behind right so they took this idea of racial achievement gaps and in the launched education policy around that now there are there's a lot of things to sort of think think through when we when we look at that number one like I just pointed out the outcomes of these tests have basically been the same been the same for a hundred years so you have to ask the question is it actually measuring something of value or that's real with regards to holding schools and teachers accountable right and and one piece we have to be clear on as even as ever has have this discussion discussion we know that that institutionalized racism and individual racism right for instance is rampant in as structurally quality exists in our school system right and really we need to be clear that you know our teachers and administrators and our policymakers our school systems we do need to deal with the the racial inequality class inequality you know elo students need to be better served students and special education you can better serve like that has to be up front for all of our conversations around this because as soon as we don't attend to that then then we run to real difficulties because that's the basis for which these mainstream civil rights groups turn around and say we need the tests in order to essentially hold these teachers accountable right because you know there's a history of like teachers in you know sometimes being like okay you know as long as you're quiet and I'm not disrupting class I'll write you black kids just go sit in the back of the room and just and just you would we're just going to keep going and I'm not going to worry about teaching you right like that kind of stuff happens okay and so that becomes the basis for this argument around do we need the tests to protect kids of color to meet make sure their needs are being met and to hold these schools and these teachers accountable but the issue really the issue really then comes down to like what what do the tests do in terms of kids of color okay we know for a fact right we've had no child behind we've had nationwide high-stakes standardized testing you know going back at this point going back just about 14 years now right and over that period of time if you want to put validity in the test scores we have not seen a single we do not see any closing of any achievement gaps test score achievement gaps across racial groups and so basically we've got this policy we've been using and saying oh we give the tests and it's going to fix an equality and it hasn't done that right and so you know part of my argument is like okay you know if you really have to fix things for kids of color then why are you continue to use a policy and a policy tool that actually has been shown for over a decade now to not to not do the job right that doesn't that doesn't make any kind of sense okay so that's that's one piece of this the other piece is to say okay so what does it mean to like meet the needs of kids of color and are the tests doing this now if we want to look at what's going on inside of classrooms in terms of curriculum for instance kids of color actually facing the pressures from high-stakes standardized testing at much much disproportionately in higher rates than other kids okay then why kids and affluent kids and so what that means is that you're getting more you know test prep drill and kill you here and here in Seattle in particular you know there are some schools in the south partisan south south end of Seattle that only have 15 minutes of recess in a elementary schools okay and it's because these schools which are which are predominately students of color have low test scores and so the schools are moving more and more to test prep and just cutting out you know the things that aren't tested and so recess you know which which is crazy right we know that recess and movement we're talking about kids right so we know that recess we know that movement is actually is so critical for good brain development and then there's all the social emotional stuff that I mean like there's so much that gets wrapped into even something is with seemingly simple as recess in terms of kids learning in their own healthy development as human beings but that that stuff gets cut in response to in response to trying to raise test scores like when the when the education goal becomes the test scores and so we see this here in Seattle it's happening nationwide and so so I to that degree you could say that the testing is actually causing a degradation in the quality of education for kids of color specifically another piece of this is we have to talk about kids identities in the classroom to write and do we have a curriculum that can speak to the identities and also speak to the social cultural conditions in terms of dealing with racism in terms of dealing with depression inside and outside of schools right and so then what we see is school start to move towards the tested subjects of language arts and mathematics what that means is that there is no snot only is there no space but you know it just gets shrunk and shrunk there's no room for like multicultural education cultural responsive education let's have let's talk about ethnic studies right I mean we've got research that shows that you know having an ethnic studies curriculum that can speak to the kids speaks to the kids identity speaks to that dennys their communities is good for their education okay I can improve their high school graduation improve their college entrance rates but but you know in the face of trying to teach to the test again which is concentrated and these effects are concentrated much more disproportionately in low-income communities and committees of color that these curricular decisions that could be having a really really strong impact in those communities they're getting squished away they're getting they're getting squeezed out of the curriculum because the stuff that's not on the test okay and so I would argue that when you just sort of look at it you know even though there's this whole thing about needing to hold folks accountable is to say look but but at the same time you're actually creating a really really low quality education for kids of color and is that really what you want is that your goal here also you know part of the discussions to be okay if we like we need to look at okay so maybe the tests aren't really measuring teaching and learning okay you know the strongest correlation we have for the tests is actually like family income right it's about wealth and educational opportunity that exists outside of schools so that's what you're measuring then why are you using this tool that mainly measures family wealth and income that exists outside of school to hold teachers at schools accountable right there's all sorts of other things we can be looking at whether it's discipline rates whether it's you know where we look at attrition and graduation I mean we you know we are you I want to have us and there's folks of us folks some of us here in Seattle been talking about doing this work around let's create a different sort of quote-unquote accountability system and I hate that word accountability right now especially in this current context but let's let's talk about creating a different kind of accountability system where we set out these measures about what what means what you know what what counts for a quality education for our children right what like do you have art do you have music okay do you have a language program are their counselors you know staffed and funded councils at your school are their nurses okay do you have libraries and librarians what's the ratio of counselors to kids you know like like there are so many other other metrics we can use to say to say okay this is what it means to have a good education and this is what we want to hold our schools accountable for right um and I'd encourage us to sort of think about that is there multicultural is there strong community engagement you know you know what and and and these should be tied to other kinds of educational outcomes you know how can cap we find ways for kids to demonstrate their knowledge and learning in you know how can we find ways for them to do that that are connected to who they are as people that are connected to the communities that are a value to them and that and that like part of this means rejecting the idea that that you know educational outcomes have to be a value for the Prophet makers like they do not have to be a value for Pearson or for any of these any of these outside entities it's about what's valuable for us as a community and what do we think makes a you know educated kid and so I don't think we need high stakes tenderize testing to ensure a quality education for kids of color in fact it's doing just the opposite and we need to work on better and true and true and in this case more democratic and more process-based metrics for understanding for protecting the needs and and of kids of color making sure that they are being treated well as whole human beings as cultural beings as active and activist beings in our world society and again so this this again would then lead me to wrap around to the third point which is how does high-stakes testing relate to white supremacy so part of it to me is that when you is is this knowledge question in the curriculum question okay where we have you know testing is essentially you know here we have these standards created by outside outside entities and we have this test also created by outside entities supposedly to measure those standards and then those are essentially rock down on afar and basically dropped on us right there dropped in our local communities and so then you gotta say okay wait a minute like liked what degree is that an act of colonization okay you know art like is like it is the knowledge of the community um you know are the kids identities the the the you know the various facets their identities you know it like like is that included are those included in this in these standards are we are we testing on those things are we trying to measure those things right and so these tests again from outside entities that that batter that are that are made to be essentially decontextualized decontextualized from our kids from their cultures from their communities I just brought in and plopped in and us and get used literally to attack right low-income communities and schools and schools of color of schools that have predominantly kids of color so and so to me there's there's a couple there's a there's a piece of colonization within that it's a cloning it's a colonial model excuse me okay sorry my computer fell asleep right then all right so then the other pieces then is then let's think about how they raise to curricula right so as we have like multicultural curriculum ethnic studies curriculum being pushed out right in order to and supposedly raise test scores that's that's what people say we got to teach to the test so we can't have this other stuff it doesn't really count right and so so there's a couple things what does it mean to say like oh hey you know your knowledge in your history in your culture that doesn't really count okay so that's again there's there's an act of white supremacy that comes down through that it says you know what this set of knowledge is important but this set of knowledge that's not important you know what matters for you you know maybe what's going on your own knowing some of your own history in your own culture and making sure that's part of the curriculum oh that doesn't matter because it's not on the test okay and that's that's that's a critical thing here in terms of thinking about the relationship between high-stakes testing and and white supremacy is this is this curricular piece there's a couple other pieces to you could look at we could look at DMV the disproportionate impact on teachers of color right where there's a lot of there's a lot of teachers of color who go into teaching because they want to foster and strengthen the identities of the kids in in their community right but again with the pressures from the testing it creates the space where these teachers of color like man I can't be who I want to be and I can't I also can't help these kids be who they are because of the tests okay so you get you get this this whole this the cycle where essentially whiteness ends up being reproduced in and and Riaan Stan Shih ated through the tests both in terms of the teaching core and then in terms what the kids get to learn and then finally one of the biggest things and one of the things that people don't like to talk about is the fact that you know there there's been some research to actually show that when you have for instance a high-stakes exit exam that increases the chances of being incarcerated for youth by 12 and a half percent and this is a study from Baker and laying in 2013 right and I'll say it again when you have a high stakes high school exit exam a standardized test that's tied to a school graduation it increases the chance of incarceration for youth by 12 and a half percent all right so and then so then you gotta say okay so let's connect that dot because the next item say okay well who who fails these exams and it's predominantly low-income brown kids all right and so by having these exams if one of the major outcomes of these of these exams is is results in the increase in incarceration rate of low-income brown kids by twelve and a half percent right like this again ends up being a way that this kind of testing ends up in forcing a forcing white supremacy and being an active part of the schools to Prison Pipeline okay and as my man Dave Stovall was just here in town this weekend he doesn't even call it a pipeline Maurice is as a nexus because schools become a place where this kind of disciplining and and and this is Stan Shih ation of white supremacy happens at the school level and schools you know through testing and through various discipline policies and obnoxious as a pipeline they sort of act as a space of where you get the embodiment of the prison like stuff happening in the schools right and so these are the ways I sort of see high-stakes testing being in addition to the races history and their the routing in eugenics the racialized outcomes of the tests now and the disproportionate policies the disproportionate discipline are ways i see high-stakes standardized testing contributing directly Twite supremacy as for best strategies first of all you although need to tell them that you don't y'all don't need me to tell you about best strategies the folks in philly i know i've been holding it down and just just raising a ruckus around testing and we see it you know we see in chicago we got folks are in seattle I mean you know there are folks based in the community resisting the tests in myriad of forms right and so I I can't say I have any particular you know hold on what we might consider to be a quote-unquote best strategy now I do know that if we opt out if we say this kid is not going to take this test or these kids aren't going to take this test right if we do that opting out and as a parent this is hits home for me I'd literally just this morning my son is in kindergarten here the school down the block and they started doing map testing right which is a computer-based test for five-year-olds five and a half year olds it's crazy okay and so and so I just wrote my opt out note this morning and sent it off to the principal and and fortunately for me you know there are multiple teachers at my son school that are that are sympathetic are actually very supportive opting out and at this point the administration is at least willing to put up with me okay so that but this whole thing about opting out hits home for me right now because literally right now my son today had had it had to have a different opportunity different activity while everyone else tested in his kindergarten class um anyways what happens is is when we when we refuse the test okay we had to think about it sort of in the same way we might think about you know conscientious objectors were for World War two for Vietnam okay it's this whole thing that here's this whole entire education reform machine right every like every single attack on public education is based on test scores okay so when we when we opted out of testing we pull the data away from the system and the whole system runs on data right and so the op with the opting out does it just takes the fuel away okay you know it just takes it takes the oxygen out here's this fire it takes the oxygen away so that fire can burn okay here's here's this machine that runs and that's like that's like closing schools and pushing charters and doing all this stuff you know attacking teachers the teacher profession at acting teachers unions whole thing runs on test scores you take the test scores away it has no more fuel and it has to shut down it cannot run without that data so to me that's that that's the most critical thing but we know that's different like it's it's it means different things for different communities sometimes opting out it's going to take away some future educational opportunities and so I recognize when folks have to make that decision around their kids I understand that and we also opting out for teachers is very different than for parents when it comes to opting out parents have that power okay you know schools can figure out ways to penalize people but it's not like they're gonna take away my job Brock for for me opting my son out of out of the tests okay teachers that's a different space and so the main thing around all that though is just to be like look it all has to be collective action a you know when when the map test boycott happened here at Garfield High School going back a few years now it was basically it was all those teachers it was unanimous decision and sams 1 1 abstention for one of the flagship high schools here in Seattle that decided to not give this test okay and that very sound reasons for it and then they built up collective power around that they had the PTA came on board and supported them student leadership then came on board and support them and then support started pouring in from like around the country and even around the world right and so what happens is when you make the when you make these things more collective it makes the political cost for retribution from the administration or the district or the state or whoever the authority might be it makes that political cost much higher than if it was an individual teacher right or an individual student just designed opted out because then they got to be like man okay we might look bad if we do this this or this or we can't fire all the teachers in our school at the same time like we just couldn't recover from that so so the piece I really want to highlight dentist and push on is that is sort of the the organizing the coalition building and the collectivity of do of doing our resistance to high-stakes standardized testing and then the you know the smallest piece the thing I tell people when I go out and give talks around opting out and the problems with the high-stakes standardized testing it's just to say there's a range of things you can do and lyla is dependent on your local situation you know some spaces we have principals who are vocally and supportive opting out and they support their staff so I'm pated places we have principals who support it but they can't they don't feel like they can do it publicly so they're like working quietly maybe with teachers and parents in their school community and and doing small things like saying okay you know it will pay for food at your meeting or maybe we'll pay for a translator that kind of stuff and then some places we have principals who are on board with high stakes testing and we'll work to essentially try and crush anyone who resists them right we have principles here in Seattle who are who are essentially lying to immigrant communities giving them misinformation because they don't want them to opt out of the test right so I mean we can have a range of responses and I think our sponsors are going to be dependent on our particular context and I want everyone sort of keep that in mind that there isn't sort of a universal you know response um i would say unless we have like a nationwide opt-out movement that was coordinated and ready to go and we just shut it down which I would love to have happen by the way but in that range though a lot of it has to do with education and so I'm negotiating this now as a parent with my son school you know because i needed to scoop full professionals their professional teachers staff etc etc administration and a lot of us like folks just don't know stuff right and so I feel like at the very least you know short of opting out and you know we got we have to be spreading the word and doing as much educating as possible initiating these conversations okay it'll a lot of schools here in Seattle these conversations are being pushed by the PTAs man because the PTAs again because of the parents have a particular kind of power that they can operate and put out there in a way that that's of less risk than then the teachers but we have to start doing this education because people don't understand the assessments they don't understand high-stakes standardized to understand standardized testing then they don't really understand high-stakes standardized testing and instead they tend to get caught up in in sort of the you know the media machine and its presentation of these tests and again here in Seattle in the backyard of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation you know our local newspaper is just terrible about any of this stuff so anyway so to me you know I you know broad-based coalition and do as much education as possible when you're broad-based coalition's and we need to be pushing for you know organized strategies what amongst them could be opting out and or in the very least making sure parents are informed of their rights top down okay because we're in this sort of it we're in this very odd period of history where where parents are being where districts are basically communicating to teachers and administrators you cannot inform people of their rights okay and there's nothing sort of more anti-democratic than that it's a Tamiya I don't know there's there's there's something happening here when that's the case when that's the fight you are not allowed to know your rights so you're not allowed to X she writes anyway so that's what I see in terms of in terms of best strategy and none of it's easy and I'm trying to do it myself in my own context and you know so with that at the 30 I just burned 30 minutes you know thanks again it's it's always an honor to get a chance to speak to folks i wish i was there in person but schedules and resources just didn't didn't work out in order for that to happen but you know keep pushing Philly I know y'all doing good out there and yeah let's continue the conversation all right take care