ZimBlog: The NACAC Report on Standardized Testing in College ...

The academic underperformance of poor children is one of the most persistent and serious failures of American public education. I don't know all of the mechanisms that contribute to the problem, any more than anyone else does. But I do know that if the tests go away, then we are flying blind. Last year, 12% of African Americans taking the ACT scored high enough to indicate likely success in college math; whites were four times as likely to score at college-ready levels. (See here, Figure 3.) If the ACT goes away, then so does this damning statistic; and so also disappears our ability to chart growth in response to interventions.

When progressives argue that the tests have to go away because of the way they correlate with poverty, they are cruelly wrong. The time to drop the tests is when they no longer correlate with student poverty.

Highlighted by cburell