The Racist Results of Teachers Unions
The NJEA continues to push for the end of standardized testing. Their latest tactic: call them racist
In their continued attempt to dodge all accountability, the New Jersey Education Association is pushing to cancel standardized testing. They state that it is unfair to test students because of the pandemic, but what they are really worried about is the public seeing just how much the unions have failed students with their farcical need to continue working from home. Even when they return to in-person learning, unionized teachers hope to hide their failures by eliminating the standardized tests altogether.
The NJEA is clever, though. To gain the public’s support, they have reached for society’s most potent canceling tool: claims of racism. This was evidenced Thursday when NJEA union President Marie Blistan tweeted out an article by the National Education Association called “The Racist Beginnings of Standardized Testing.” The tweet was accompanied by a message that thanked politicians for supporting Governor Phil Murphy’s application for a test-canceling waiver.
Not to give a spoiler alert, but the article fails to demonstrate how the test, or its questions, are racist. It seems they base their conclusion of racism on the mere accusations of racism made by Ibrahim X Kendi, the century’s biggest race hustler.
“We still think there is something wrong with the kids rather than recognizing that something is wrong with the tests,” Kendi is quoted as saying in the article. “Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown [sic] minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.”
Kendi, himself, has a Ph.D. Does this mean he has internalized the racism and is himself an oppressor? Don’t bet on getting an answer to that or any other questions you may have, for the whole argument that the tests are racially biased is nothing more than a textbook example of circular logic.
The first argument the National Education Association writers put forward is that standardized tests like the SAT were formed in part by Psychologist Carl Brigham’s work, who the writers state was a eugenicist. They frame these claims with another quote from Kendi, of course.
“To tell the truth about standardized tests is to tell the story of eugenicists who created and popularized these tests in the United States more than a century ago,” Kendi is quoted as saying.
The argument the authors and Kendi are putting forward here is that since a man who held racist views in the 1920s helped create some standardized tests, the tests are themselves racist. Like I said, circular logic.
However, they later undercut their argument by writing that the tests “were scientific” but were still “deeply biased.” How? That is never explained.
Continuing the nonsensical claims, the writers of the NEA point to a study from an organization called Fair Test that states “on average, students of color score lower on college admission tests, thus many capable youth are denied entrance or access to so-called ‘merit’ scholarships, contributing to the huge racial gap in college enrollments and completion.”
All this point serves to do, is to restate the author’s premise as a conclusion. Furthermore, if enrollments are decreased by testing, it should follow that completion does as well. Since the study lists both, it is fair to assume that they blame admissions testing for poor outcomes of admitted students, which does not make any sense.
The authors further work against their own argument by stating that “the tests are screened for obvious bias but not underlying bias.”
This means absolutely nothing. They admit the test is screened for biases but may still be racist by their very nature of being a test?
The authors fail to prove their point in any way. However, the key point to take away here is that they are not actually trying to. They very well know that accusations of racism are more than enough to reach the conclusion of racism — see Britain’s royal family. And that by declaring the tests an instrument of hate, they hope to bury them to cover failing public schools’ incompetence.
However, the waiver to cancel standardized tests will not apply to the SATs or ACTs, so the argument put forward by the NJEA that the tests “punish students” is a lie. What will actually happen is that the tests will punish the teachers’ unions, which they can’t have.
The pandemic has caused a severe learning gap in poor, heavily minority school districts where unions have kept schools closed. But beyond that, union-controlled public schools have failed to defeat competition from non-union charter schools that exist in the same district. And this divide has been present since before the coronavirus pandemic.
In Camden City, an analysis of students’ standardized tests during the 2018-2019 school revealed that only 2.6% of 10th-grade students in the city’s Woodrow Wilson High School scored proficient in reading. Zero percent of students at that high school scored proficient in algebra 2.
Compare those results with those of the Camden’s Promise Charter School, and you begin to see the damage caused by union control. In the same school year, 21.3% of students tested as proficient in reading at Camden’s Promise, while 17.9% made the grade in algebra II.
The trend is the same for elementary schools. At the city’s Yorkship Elementary School, 13.4% of third graders and 14.3% of eighth-graders tested proficient in reading. While the city’s newest charter school for grade-school-aged children, Kipp: Cooper Norcross, had reading proficiency scores of 20% for third graders and 38.3 for eighth-graders. As an added bonus, 9.6% of the school’s eighth-grade students tested above the proficiency level.
These are alarming numbers if you are a union-controlled school. And the divide between public and non-union charter exists in the state’s other urban areas — Trenton and Newark — as well.
While it is true that that the more affluent communities score better on these tests, that appears to be irrespective of race. Also, it does not explain the gap between schools in the same city. The only difference between those schools, it would seem, happens to be the teachers’ unions.