“Educational Assessments” are not equivalent to “Standardized Testing.”
This is most commonly and directly expressed as resistance to the SATs, but opposition to educational assessment writ large has become a key part of liberal cultural identity and is a growing concern in leftish climes, driven in part by affluent parent resistance to state standardized tests that frequently confuses fair questions about the extent of testing and its uses with misguided swipes at their effectiveness in assessing and predicting student ability.
Hey guys, is it leftist to want your kids’ teachers to assess the kids they teach based on the courses they develop instead of a third party assessment program that requires teachers to throw away any educational plan they make and teach exclusively to the test the third party makes?
liberal skepticism towards educational assessment is totally unjustifiable through reference to the evidence
I did not go to public school in a liberal place, everybody complained about the standardized tests in the deep red state I grew up in.
They attack the tests for **revealing ** racial stratification without acknowledging that literally all educational data (grades, SAT/ACTs, state standardized tests, NAEP, graduation rates, disciplinary rates, and a vast number of ancillary indicators) show racial stratification, which suggests that the tests are more valid rather than less.
No, Freddie, the tests don’t just reveal racial stratification, they enforce it. That’s the critique. We already know there’s racial stratification, nobody needs the calipers measuring a kid’s head to figure this out.
To put it simply: liberal skepticism towards educational assessment is totally unjustifiable through reference to the evidence.
Education assessment is not the same thing as standardized testing. Me getting a bad grade on a vocabulary test and getting a low score on an IQ test will not have the same consequences for my life. One gives my teacher some means of figuring out if I need to work harder to learn the vocabulary, of it there is some issue that is keeping me from learning the vocabulary. Your SAT score isn’t something that tells somebody where you need to do more learning, it categorizes you individually or as a group and allows for that score to be used as a shortcut in deciding whether you get into another educational program.
