Posted on 04/11/2003 11:04:18 AM PDT by Michael2001
LOS ANGELES -- Demonstrators urged the Los Angeles school board Tuesday to reconsider the use of tests they say are racist and unfair to blacks and Latinos.
Some people believe the California High School Exit Exam and other standardized tests are culturally biased toward whites and Asians.
"We are concerned about the racist tests that are going on in the schools today," said Paige Leven of the Coalition for Educational Justice.
The demonstration was timed to coincide with proposal from school board members Genethia Hudley Hayes, who is black, and Jose Huizar, who is of Latino descent. They want state officials to explore the "legal, financial and policy implications of establishing a moratorium on the high stakes consequences of the (high school exit exam)."
At the same time, Hayes and Huizar want to continue using results from the exit exam as a "diagnostic tool."
Whites and students of Asian descent typically score better than blacks and Latinos on standardized tests. Huizar said the gap was at least a "20-25 percent disparity."
Last spring, the school board voted 4-1 to consider alternatives to the Stanford 9 and high school exit exam after Hayes and Huizar suggested the tests were biased against nonwhites from poor families.
But Superintendent Roy Romer said the two tests are required by state law.
Tuesday, Hayes and Huizar proposed that the district consider adopting or expanding "alternative or interim assessments to improve the quality of information available to individual classroom teachers."
The alternatives would include "language arts performance assignments" for grades 2-9 and quarterly assessments in math.
Hayes and Huizar also want to create a task force to devise an "Opportunity to Learn Index that would provide public information on ... students' equitable access to tools, resources and materials that inform the educational conditions under which they are assessed."
Demonstrators said many inner-city students were disadvantaged.
"We have very little funds. We have very little books," said Victor Banuelos, an 11th-grade student at Los Angeles High School.
Hayes said she was concerned that the district was considering offering two kinds of high school diplomas -- one saying the student passed the exit exam, and the other saying he or she did not.
The school board will vote on the Hayes-Huizar proposal in two weeks.
...meanwhile innocent black and latino bunnies, kittens, and harp seals are being runover by white SUVs everyday!
Notice that Asians are considered de facto "white", as though someone from Burma, Thailand, China, or Korea, etc. didn't have to overcome language or cultural barriers.
In other words, how come Asians are "Racist" because they can 'cut the Mustard'?
"The problems with standardized tests often include a class or racial bias. For instance, the influential Standard Achievement Test (SAT) requires students to be familiar with terms like "conservatory" and "regatta." Another state reading test had a number of questions on a passage, with a chart, from Consumer Reports on frequent-flyer traveler benefits. As one teacher asked, "If students didn't score well, was it because they can't read or because they don't have the background knowledge?" (see "'High-Stakes' Harm," p. 14). Such tests can skew results in a dangerous way, given how scores are used to justify a wide range of stereotyping and tracking."
http://interversity.org/lists/arn-l/archives/mar1999_date/msg00009.html
This is a trick question and cannot be answered. You omitted the color of the pony.
It's the same here ---there are schools that are 95% or more hispanic and they've done everything they could to make them their schools, most classes are bilingual and only Mexican culture is taught, almost all school meals are tacos and enchildadas ---and the whites still do better. What more can be done?
Except that any such questions have long been eliminated from standardized tests. Locating such questions is easy: for each group of test takers having the same score, separate the White and Black results, and see if any question was answered wrongly more often by Blacks. then scream.
The reason you don't hear screams about specific questions is because BOTH WHITE AND BLACK LOW-SCORERS MISS THE SAME QUESTIONS
Nope.
"2+2 before"
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