Standardized Testing, Achievement Gaps and the Perceived Education Bubble: Who Really Has Access to Higher Education?

For the past week, I have been working on a blog post about entitlement. We have talked about it in class, argued both sides, I discussed it in office hours, and was putting the finishing touches on it. I planned to wait until next week to post it and spend the first week commenting on someone else’s post to ease into the process of blogging, since the only blog I have ever been in contact with is Black Girl Dangerous. I read a few posts and decided to comment on Dillon’s post about standardized testing. After starting the comment, I became consumed with the idea of white privilege and its manifestation in college, and somehow, I scratched my original plans in favor of an impromptu, emotional statement.

Let me preface this post by saying that I completely agree that standardized testing is not a good measure of future college success. There have been studies, done in part at the University of Michigan, which have shown that the best predictor of college performance is grade point average. If you control for what school the student attended, the correlation is even stronger.

If it has been shown that standardized test scores are neither a measure of intelligence nor work ethic nor ability, why, then is it still being used?

There is a serious problem with our society where students of color are not being admitted to universities at a proportionate rate, leading them to be out-competed for high paying, high status careers, leading them to be in lower income neighborhoods, where their children will attend lower quality schools. In Michigan, the achievement gap between white students and their black counterparts has been steadily increasing in the past few years. (Read: these students in lower income neighborhoods are screwed) There is a cycle of students being denied an education that will facilitate class mobility which would lead to their children being educated in better districts. At the same time, a measure that has been shown to really only reflects race and socioeconomic status is still being used as a filtering device.

In most of the articles we have read thus far for class, many people in power believe there are too many citizens with higher education. When you look at a breakdown of who actually has a degree, there is a pattern of white and Asian students consistently being above the national average while students of color are far below. This shows that not only are students of color performing poorly on standardized tests, they also have a problem with access to higher education. I don't buy that people in charge truly think that standardized testing is the best measure of applicants. There is no way that people whose lives are focused around academia could possibly ignore empirical evidence like this. They must see the correlation of students of color being oppressed by these measures of "intelligence" and the unequal access to higher education.

Perhaps I have been reading too much Black Girl Dangerous. Perhaps there really is no conspiracy out there. Perhaps the people in power really don’t have an interest in homogenizing the population of universities. Perhaps they really, truly believe in the power of standardized testing. Perhaps there is some secret information out there that is not public to the world just yet that would refute all studies about standardized testing. Perhaps these people in power performed so well on these tests and in college that they keep the current system because it fit them, so they assume the system will fit everyone.

Or perhaps there really is a slightly intentional aspect to the current system, that the people in power are all products of privilege and do not want to see the system change.You decide.