These Schools Belong to You and Me by Deborah Meier

Author:Deborah Meier [Meier, Deborah; Gasoi, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807024744
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Any choice of subject matter, vocabulary, syntax, metaphors, word associations, and values presupposes a certain social and personal history. Personally, I’m probably good at guessing the right answers because I have been steeped in the subculture upon which the test makers build their system. I do not have to figure out what the test makers might want me to think, feel, or say; I am subliminally tuned in to the same world the tests are tapping, and as a result, I am predisposed to answer correctly. As in the case of a New York Times crossword maven, the right answers are lurking right beneath the surface—until one tries the crossword puzzle of a different elite. (Try doing British ones!) Similarly, when I was preparing for the National Teachers Exam in my mid-thirties, I recognized for the first time that my natural biases might not work for me on a test since my schooling history had not been mainstream. I had to engage in a more cautious and self-conscious process before filling in the boxes. At any age, being outside the culture a test is designed to tap imposes a handicap. At the very least, the need for such intellectual caution slows down “outlander” test takers.

When bias was first raised as a testing issue, test makers obligingly, but superficially, changed the content: some rural scenes were changed to urban ones, some complexions were darkened, a few archaic terms were eliminated; today, literary excerpts from far more nonwhite authors are included. But this is a hollow, irrelevant “victory” for test opponents. This is because, at bottom, test makers must create an instrument relying on a clear definition of what it means to be well educated, and such a definition presumes being a native of one particular, favored culture. Our backgrounds do discriminate between us to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others—even on such mundane matters as making sense of a math problem or reading passage.

Let us consider a slightly altered example from a reading test I encountered some years ago:

The children lived in a pleasant tree-lined street. One morning, trucks came and chopped down the trees in order to widen the road for a new four-lane highway. When spring came, the birds and squirrels, who used to live in the trees, did not come back.

The question: When the truck came, the children were (a) excited, (b) bored, (c) sad, (d) tired.

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