The Foundation of Racial Disparities in the Standardized Testing Era

Abstract

We present a historical outline of racial inequality in Virginia's kindergarten through 12th grade educational system focusing on de jure school desegregation and subsequent massive resistance following Virginia's role in Brown v. Board of Education. Currently, standardized tests are used to evaluate students' educational progress and knowledge, evaluate teacher and administrative effectiveness, and measure states' educational efforts. In this article, we use school district-level data to examine racial disparities between black and white students in Virginia in 2010. We find widespread disparities in standardized test score passing rates with the exception of black students' performance in history and social science before high school. Black students are consistently less likely than white students to earn passing scores in all subject areas at each grade level. We use state-level education data such as school district size, teacher-student ratio, and school funding to contextualize the standardized test data. We find that the locale of schools and their close links to white

Preparation and The Real World of Education: How Prospective Teachers Grapple with Using Culturally Responsive Teaching Practices in the Age of Standardized Testing

“…Starting with policy, it is important to first recognize that the spirit and intent of local, state, and national policies aimed at holding schools and stakeholders accountable for student achievement is noble. Standardized testing was meant to evaluate students’ educational progress, teachers and administrative effectiveness, and measure states educational efforts (Brunn-Bevel & Byrd, 2015). However, unintended consequences have emerged and change in policy is needed.…”

The Correlation between Budgets and Matriculation Exams: The Case of Jewish and Arab Schools in Israel

“…As such, most of the scholarship has focused on black-white differences in America. These locations included Virginia, North Carolina, New York, and the Midwest [31,34,38,39,44,45,47,48]. Ball [32] observed schools in England, Cobb-Clark and Jha [45] studied Australia, and several scholars focused on Israel [28,40,42,43,49,50].…”

“…According to Eagle [29] (p. 13), the most concrete discovery was the uncontested importance of a family's financial state. Most of the current research validates socioeconomic factors as having the most significant effect on the achievement gap in racially diverse school systems [30][31][32][33][34]. While we do not discount the importance of socioeconomic factors in influencing individual student achievement, this paper seeks to critically evaluate systemic shortcomings and policy pertaining to the systemic nature of local socioeconomic conditions, rather than the individual.…”

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“…Standardized tests have been at the center of educational debates for decades. Research has shown longstanding issues with standardized tests serving as an indicator of what students have learned or predictor of how well they will do in school (Brunn‐Bevel & Byrd, 2015; Kim, 2021), yet it took the pandemic for us to eliminate standardized test as a metric of success. More specifically, these tests have a disproportionately negative affect on Black children who tend not to fare well on standardized tests for a host of reasons including evidence of cultural bias (Lee, 2002).…”