The Roots of Traditional Assessment, White Supremacy, and Educational Debt

  Assessment, especially standardized assessment, has rarely been about checking to see the effects of what a learner understands. It has historically been utilized as a tool to uphold systems of white supremacy and hegemony in the United States of America. Willis (2008) firmly establishes the link between intelligence testing in the U.S. and reading comprehension and how, historically, these tests have been used to maintain and grow dominant narratives about white supremacy. With “two-thirds of the educational tests published in the United States” focusing on standardization and the measurement of reading comprehension, the white elite attempted to unite Science, Psychology, and education to empirically demonstrate test results that failed to account for historical and social variables (Willis, 2008, p. 137). Through testing, a hierarchy of races was constructed through pseudo-scientific processes that privileged white people born in the USA over white people of all other races, including those who recently immigrated to the country from Ireland and Poland. Testing would become how the “dominant group uses language or discourse to shape and name reality” (Willis, 2008, p. 51). In reality, all these tests demonstrated was who has “access to literacy” and who the test was designed for (Willis, 2008, p. 52). All tests, by their nature, bias the test creator; the more the student resembles the creator of the test, the better they will do on the test.

Public, or common school has historically always been controlled by a group of elite white college-educated men (Kendi, 2016; National Education Association of the United States, 1918; Willis, 2008). Willis (2008) does not acknowledge the religious component or marrying Christian values with white supremacy and how this double-edged sword was used to further cut People of Color (POC). While values are mentioned, naming Christianity as part of the dominant hegemonic belief system emphasized that even God believed that Blacks were less valuable than whites (Kendi, 2016). In the same way that the Bible was used to inculcate Black people about maintaining subservient values, literacy education was used to inculcate dominant and hegemonic values. 

Willis (2008) argues that “access to literacy instruction was used to instill and maintain the cultural and political worldviews and values of the dominant class,” stating that literacy education was “purposive” beyond the sole purpose of educating learners (Willis, 2008, p. 55). Textbooks, instructional materials, and instructional practices such as repeated readings hardwired racist and white supremacist ideals into classrooms across the country. While it is a contemporary belief that teaching is political (and some say that it should not be), education has always been political (Fleischer & Garcia, 2021; Postman & Weingartner, 1969; Willis, 2008). Literacy education has historically been a “conduit for social control,” with testing as the arm swinging the scientific baton (Willis, 2008, p. 55). Frederick Winslow Taylor built on the work of early American Pragmatists, especially Comte and Spencer, and argued for what would become standardization that would seek to “classify, standardize, and socialize” youth which would become an educational movement known as Taylorism (Willis, 2008, p. 66). This standardization movement and the attempt to instill dominant white views about POC is the very idea of terrorism and racial genocide in U.S. history.

Counternarratives from Black scholars and authors worked to improve literacy and our understanding of reading comprehension. The Lippman and Terman Debate pushed back against the intelligence testing industry that sprang up following World War I, and “raised questions about defining intelligence, the inheritability of intelligence, and whether tests actually measured intelligence” (Willis, 2008, p. 170). The Brownie’s Book was a magazine published by W.E.B. Du Bois with amazing contributors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and Langston Hughes, as well as “other Harlem Renaissance noteworthy authors and poets (McNair & Sims Bishop, 2018; Willis, 2008, p. 169). Black people and POC were not passive victims during this time of oppression or at any time in history. Just as long as there have been voices pointing to a “gap” in education between whites and POC, there have been scholars pointing to, and later named, the educational debt that continues accumulating (Ladson-Billings, 2006).

 

References

Fleischer, C., & Garcia, A. (2021). Everyday advocacy: Teachers who change the literacy narrative (First edition. ed.). W. W. Norton & Company. 

Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Nation Books. 

Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3-12. 

McNair, J. C., & Sims Bishop, R. (2018). "To be great, heroic or beautiful": The enduring legacy of the "Brownies' book. The Horn Book Magazine(May/June), 28-34. 

National Education Association of the United States, C. o. t. R. o. S. E. (1918). Cardinal principles of secondary education: A report of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, appointed by the National Education Association. Government Printing Office,. 

Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. Delacorte Press. 

Willis, A. I. (2008). Reading comprehension research and testing in the U.S.: Undercurrents of race, class, and power in the struggle for meaning. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.