The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned the use of literacy tests for voting, because the tests were being used as a tool of racial disenfranchisement. But New York is going a lot further than that — it’s abolishing its literacy test for…teachers.
Yes, the state is getting rid of the literacy test it has been using to test teachers since 2013 because too many black and Hispanic teacher candidates were failing it. The New York Daily News gives this decision as sympathetic a headline as I think possible: “Test meant to screen N.Y. teachers instead weeded out minorities.”
Leaders of the education reform movement have complained for years about the caliber of students entering education schools and the quality of the instruction they receive there. A December 2016 study by the National Council on Teacher Quality found that 44 percent of the teacher preparation programs it surveyed accepted students from the bottom half of their high school classes.
The reformers believe tests like New York’s Academic Literacy Skills Test can serve to weed out aspiring teachers who aren’t strong students.
But the literacy test raised alarms from the beginning because just 46 percent of Hispanic test takers and 41 percent of black test takers passed it on the first try, compared with 64 percent of white candidates.
The thing is, this test is designed, at least in theory, so that any high school senior at grade-level in reading can pass it.
I’m completely open to the possibility that this test is defective, but bias isn’t the only explanation for the result they’re getting. This might also be the result if one kept sending semi-literate teachers into schools in black and Hispanic neighborhoods because of low teacher standards. If you provide the students there with a subpar education for decades that focused on teacher employment and job security rather than educational quality, there’s a real chance people who emerged from those schools hoping to teach would end up poorly equipped to do so.
If that’s the problem, then the answer is probably not to extend that failure to another generation of students, but to tighten standards so that the next crop of teacher candidates has a smaller ethnic gap.
It’s pretty clear from the sample questions available online that this test isn’t easy. But that’s probably a good thing. The people who take it, after all, are going to be preparing the next generation for life in a highly literate world. Literacy — specifically, the ability to understand, interpret, and analyze paragraphs well enough to select a multiple-choice answer, seems like a pretty basic requirement for that job.
Is education supposed to be a jobs program, where we worry most about the demographics of those being hired? Or is it a specialized, skilled trade like engineering, where we would never consider hiring people if we had any reason to doubt their ability to build things buildings that don’t collapse?
