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The difference between achievement tests and aptitude tests is that achievement tests measure what students have learned, whereas aptitude tests evaluate their potential to learn.
It’s self-explanatory, right?
According to Livia Gershon’s essay A Short History of Standardized Tests (2015), the earliest widely adopted standardized school tests were aimed at measuring aptitude rather than achievement. Testing aimed to discover talented students and avoid wasting resources on ‘slow children.’ This coincided with the rise of academic tracking to set students on a career path that was appropriate for them. In the 1960s, the federal government began promoting new achievement tests to evaluate educational methods and schools. The importance of those assessments rose over the decades as the globalizing economy focused attention on schools’ ability to produce qualified workers.
Gershon suggested another reason for achievement tests that wasn’t self-explanatory: to evaluate teaching techniques and school effectiveness.
Chalkbeat Chicago reported two months ago that Chicago public schools’ performance on state tests had returned to pre-pandemic levels. The only problem is that the pre-pandemic level was not particularly impressive. This year, 31 percent of Chicago’s public elementary school students were proficient in reading, up from 26 percent in 2023 and 28 percent in 2019 before the COVID pandemic.
Clearly, those who criticize Chicago’s public schools point to the 31 percent reading proficiency on standardized tests as evidence of the school system’s general failure.
Recently, the President of the Chicago Teachers Union, a Black woman, was asked to reply to this criticism. The real problem, she said, was measuring student achievement through testing. She claimed that the eugenics movement, which held that Black people were inferior to non-Black people, gave rise to standardized testing, which she characterized as junk science rooted in white supremacy. She went on to say that Black students shouldn’t be tested with an instrument created to prove their inferiority. She emphasized the significance of liberating black students from a failing standard.
Let’s disprove these statements one by one.
Tests are rooted in White supremacy
The earliest record of standardized tests is from China. These examinations were used in China to select employees for bureaucratic positions. Standardized tests were not always a feature of European education. Western education drew its foundation from the classical Greek open-ended debate, eventually evaluating students through written essays. In the nineteenth century, British company managers used the Chinese standardized test approach to hire and promote employees. They implemented a uniform model to prevent favoritism, nepotism, and corruption. The industrial revolution, compulsory education laws, and increased school enrollment made subjective, open-ended assessments, like essays, ineffective. Standardized testing was a more effective method of assessing large groups of students. As a result, standardized testing expanded from Britain to the rest of Europe and eventually to the United States.
Testing is junk science
To be fair, the president of Chicago’s Teacher’s Union called standardized tests “junk science” and highlighted White supremacy because she believed these tests started with the eugenics movement. Eugenics was a progressive movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that proposed selectively breeding people with desirable hereditary features to improve the genetic quality of the human race. Because intelligence is a desirable quality, eugenicists employed IQ testing to reveal the difference between races. Because Blacks scored lower than Whites on these aptitude tests, eugenicists promoted the notion that Blacks were genetically inferior to Whites. Today, we rightly refer to eugenics as scientific racism, and many people consider testing that determines intellectual differences between races to be junk science. The President of Chicago’s Teacher Union may have had a point if the elementary school students performed poorly on aptitude tests, but the students took achievement tests, which have never been dismissed as junk science.
Released from standards
The president of Chicago’s Teacher Union asserted the need to release Black students from a standard that is designed for them to fail. However, Chalkbeat Chicago reported, “A recent study from Standford and Harvard Universities found that Chicago students have outpaced most other districts in reading growth since the pandemic. District officials have pointed to this study in recent months to bolster their argument for more state funding …Black students saw the highest increase in reading proficiency rates, with a 6-point increase compared to the previous school year—a jump from 17% in 2023 to 23% this year.” The district officials understand that these low test scores reflect more on the school’s quality than on the test itself. The district officials attribute their failure to a lack of funding for their schools.
Praise for these tiny advances in reading proficiency for Chicago’s Black elementary school students exemplifies the bigotry of low expectations; nonetheless, a low expectation is still an expectation.
The head of the Chicago Teachers Union has no expectations for Black students, only junk excuses for failure.
For example, Oprah Winfrey chose Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt for her 2020 book club. Winfrey commented, “Cummins’ accomplished a remarkable feat, literally putting us in the shoes of migrants and making us feel their anguish and desperation to live in freedom.” However, several critics rejected Winfrey’s choice, and some bookstores canceled Cummins’ promotional events.
Why? According to Vox, American Dirt was a book about Mexican migrants, and the author, Jeanine Cummins, identified as White. Cummins wrote a story that was not hers. American Dirt became a story about cultural appropriation, and it revolved around a question that has become fundamental to the way we talk about storytelling: Who is allowed to tell whose stories?
Many new Baldwin fans were quick to disapprove of Cummins’ work regarding Mexican migrants, but how would Baldwin have handled this literary controversy?
In the 1960s, a similar dispute erupted around William Styron’s novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron, a White novelist, was born in Virginia in 1925, 100 miles from the site of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. As a child, Styron heard about Nat Turner and knew that one day he would turn his childhood fascination with the local folklore into a novel.
Unfortunately, Styron’s fictitious Nat Turner was not a heroic figure. Styron’s portrayal of Nat Turner exemplified every negative stereotype that White culture has promoted about Black men since slavery. For that reason alone, The Confessions of Nat Turner merited unfavorable reviews from Black readers who hero-worshipped the leader of America’s most famous slave revolt.
However, there was a collective of Black literary figures who believed that Black artists had a responsibility to change the negative images that White racist society had imposed on Black people. These Black literary luminaries did not merely object to Styron’s inadequate portrayal of Nat Turner; they contended that a White writer had no right or artistic license to write about “Black subjects” at all. The word “cultural appropriation” did not exist at the time, but these Black writers were among the first to express it and accused Styron of committing the offense.
Baldwin defended Styron, stating firmly, “No one can tell a writer what he can or cannot write.” Baldwin stressed that Styron was probing something very dangerous, deep, and painful in the national psyche. “I hope it starts a tremendous fight,” Baldwin stated, “so that people will learn what they really think about each other.” More importantly, Baldwin declared that Styron had “began to write a common history—ours.”
Baldwin was also a literary historian who was well aware that renowned Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) authored three novels with White main characters to challenge the publishing industry’s idea that Black authors can only write about Black people and Black concerns. Black authors featured White main characters in Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door, Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Sewanee, William Gardner Smith’s Anger at Innocence, Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday, and Baldwin’s own work, Giovanni’s Room. All of these writers recognized that serious literature investigates the human condition, and that, with careful inspection, readers will discover that humans have more in common than differences. All of those novels were produced before the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which transformed many Black writers into overprotective champions of Black culture.
In his 1972 book No Name in the Street, Baldwin recalled an argument he had at a friend’s house. He wrote, “My friend’s stepdaughter is young and considers herself a militant, and we had a brief argument over Bill Styron’s Nat Turner, which I suggested she read before condemning. This rather shocked the child, whose militancy, like that of many, tends to be a matter of indigestible fury and slogans and quotations.”
Too many new Baldwin fans merely seek out the “White America critiquing Baldwin” Ta-Nehisi Coats imitated; in doing so, they miss out on the depth of a literary mind that explored much more.
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