Explain how standardized tests are biased

On the elementary level, the tests are biased in that kids who come from wealthy families that can afford lots of enrichment activities, from trips to the museum to vacations to places of historic, cultural or environmental significance to private lessons in music and the arts, all have an advantage on reading comprehension. Reading comprehension scores go way up when the reader has had some prior exposure to the subject matter. I have seen this with my kid in real time. When he was in 3rd grade, they did a lot of reading comprehension drills to prep for the state standardized testing. We go skiing every year and (pre-pandemic) would go to the indoor rock climbing gym. He had to read a passage about mountain climbers. He read the passage quickly and got every question right. He also had a passage about quilting. He knows nothing about quilting an has never tried to even sew anything. He got 1/5 right on that passage.

On the HS level, having the resources for test prep is the big divider. My sister's two daughters both bombed the SAT on their first try. My sister and her husband are both Ivy league grads. They got their kids private tutors and sent them to top SAT prep courses. Their scores went way up after all the test prep.

But I think biggest problem with standardized testing, especially on the HS level, is that they punish kids who need more time to develop their reading skills by putting in arbitrary deadlines for demonstrating academic competency. These kids then get diverted from higher education into life long low wage work. A lot of kids especially from communities of color fall behind very early in reading and never are able to catch up. It often starts with reading problems that develop when kids hear broken English at home either because English is a second language or their parents speak black English ("you is") or are not well educated and speak with a lot of slang and poor grammar. These kids come to school and essentially have to relearn English when they are learning to read. They need interventions but rarely get it because under Federal law these kids are not considered special needs. They just get left behind. With intensive interventions, they can get back on track, but those interventions are rarely available later in middle and high school. So, once it comes time to take the SAT it is all over for these students and they are presumed to not be worthy of higher education. But there is overwhelming evidence that the academic problems that come from these reading delays can be overcome through significant interventions. We just chose not to and use standardized testing as a way to justify dooming certain groups to a lifetime of low wage labor.

djaba wrote:

Rich people can pay for tutors and do - poor kids from poor schools don’t have classes on how to master the sat - and usually can only afford to take them once - where rich people take them several times ...

It’s not about paying extra for shet it’s about the families having a stronger emphasis on education. I went to a school with richer families with mostly white and Asian kids. I would get grounded if I didn’t make A’s or B’s and a lot of my friends parents were the same. I didn’t know anyone who had tutors besides the ones who had reading issues.

Banjo wrote:

You guys might not realize it, but yes many POC do not believe that intelligence is at all hereditable. They sincerely believe that all children are born with the same native intelligence, and the only difference in intelligence outcome is privilege of opportunities.

And because stats now show that blck children of blck parents with $250,000+/year family income score the exact same on the SAT as whte children of parents with -$20,000/year family income, they had to invent the concept of systemic white supremacy, and the concept of generational trauma to explain the HUGE gap in intelligence of the races, even when accounting for family income.

It's all politically correct b.s.

Dude. Couldn't someone just use your stats - all families over 250k score the same on the SAT - and say it's not inheritable at all. It's just simply a matter of having money. I don't believe that to be the case but the fact that all rich kids score the same (I don't believe that by the way) according to you, one could conclude that.

Precious Roy wrote:

But there is overwhelming evidence that the academic problems that come from these reading delays can be overcome through significant interventions. We just chose not to and use standardized testing as a way to justify dooming certain groups to a lifetime of low wage labor.

I'm not sure the evidence is remotely overwhelming. Early intervention programs were seen as a silver bullet a decade ago, but those gains often evaporated by late elementary/middle school.

"all families over 250k score the same on the SAT"

You misread my comment. Your cognitive dissonance kicked in, and you resolved it by telling yourself that my comment/the stats say something entirely different from what I/the stats actually said.

White kids from 250k+ families score almost infinitely higher than black kids from 250k+ families. Rich black kids score the same as the very poorest white kids, with families earning under 20k.

So all the "rich kids can afford tutors and private schools" excuse is just that, an excuse.

And I could post the stats here but then the entire thread would get deleted, because it's so awkward for everybody.

Math genius wrote:

Precious Roy wrote:

But there is overwhelming evidence that the academic problems that come from these reading delays can be overcome through significant interventions. We just chose not to and use standardized testing as a way to justify dooming certain groups to a lifetime of low wage labor.

I'm not sure the evidence is remotely overwhelming. Early intervention programs were seen as a silver bullet a decade ago, but those gains often evaporated by late elementary/middle school.

Liberals just want to throw more and more billions of dollars at an unsolvable problem. It's a good racket because as an unsolvable problem, there will always be an excuse to demand more and more money to address "systemic racism" in the education system.

But none of these liberals/educators will ever suggest actually PAYING POC kids for academic performance. It's awkward and embarrassing because white and Asian kids don't need financial incentives to try hard in school, other than the future/long-term financial incentives of a good career. This ability to even think abstractly about the future is greatly lacking in certain kids due to low intelligence.

The key to POC academic improvement (with Asians now not considered POC because they are too smart, lol), is a reduction of expectations and real financial incentives in school.

In fact, the ULTIMATE improvement in POC education would be for the dumbest kids to get on-the-job training in their childhoods, in place of a full-time school schedule. Really dumb kids should be given the option of working a part-time job, with adult supervision, for half of the school day, and basic literacy/money management the other half of the day.

Dumb POC kids never learn the basic skills required to hold down even a custodian job while they are in public school. They never learn to dress appropriately for a job interview, how to speak proper English, or the importance and necessity of showing up for work every day and on time.

Then they also don't learn how to open a bank account, how to stay out of predatory debt, and how to pay their electric bill and write out a weekly budget.

We waste billions and billions "educating" kids who were never really meant to be in school beyond the 3rd or 4th grade.

I think most runners probably have a hard time thinking a portion of IQ isn't inherited. I mean look how on a high school team two runners can do the same training but one can run 9 minute in the 2 mile and another 11 minutes. Or look at how good the Kenyans are, etc. If running ability is inherited to some degree, why wouldn't IQ? I don't think that type of logic does us much good as a society however. Should Galen Rupp not be allowed to run since he was born in the US? THe reality is there is so much overlap between groups and so much is changing year by year. I read a great article on the WSJ about it last month about the work of James Flynn. It's pretty fascinating. Here is an excerpt I liked:

WSJ wrote:

Why did studies show that black orphans raised by white families had average IQs of 106 at a time when the average score of blacks nationally was 85 and the average score of whites was 100?

Theories of genetic determinism couldn’t explain these findings. Nor could they explain Flynn’s voluminous documentation that IQ scores among racial and ethnic groups world-wide have risen considerably from one generation to the next. In the 20th century, he discovered, the scores of entire countries rose by more than the black-white disparity in the U.S. In a study released in 2006, Flynn and a co-author, William Dickens, concluded that blacks had gained as many as seven IQ points on whites since the early 1970s, which is hard to explain if intelligence is genetically fixed.

The comments to that article talk about his TED talk which I haven't listened to :

This article was also interesting:

Um...Willis and Arnold Jackson exposed this on Different Strokes in the 70s, and things are the same today.

"I don't think that type of logic does us much good as a society however."

Living a lie due to political correctness HURTS society. When we dumb down the smart kids' classes to "leave no child behind", we are HURTING society.

When we tell dumb kids of color that they are smart, we are not helping them, we are HURTING them, and then they go on to hurt other people as "payback" for a "victimization" that never happened.

And if it takes WHITE parents/adults elevate black kids above their normal intellectual performance, that too says something BIG about racial differences.

Humans are religious by nature, an in an increasingly post-religion society, there is a very real and destructive white liberal worship of sacred black people.

They say that the average lifespan of an empire is about 250 years, and Western Civilization looks to be destroying itself as quickly as possible, all in the worship of sacred black victimhood.

Meanwhile, China and Israel are laughing at us, knowing that they will control the future, because they are not committing civilizational suicide by pretending that Sacred Perfect Racial Equality is a real thing.

Remember, the same "Tikkun Olam" Semites in the US lecturing about systemic white supremacy, they fully support their own Semitic ethno-state that has already vaccinated 50% of their tribal population for Covid-19.

Notice how we're supposed to praise blacks for their obvious superiority in some areas, but then we're supposed to make any and every excuse possible to pretend that they have no weaknesses as a race.

And do you want to know why this is so popular with women and effeminate men? It's because women resent that men are taller, and stronger, and better at S.T.E.M. fields than women.

So women/white women, in their resentment of men/white men, are all too glad to pretend that blacks are exactly equal to whites in all areas except those in which blacks are superior to whites/asians.

It's a similar dynamic with liberal/effeminate men. Passive-aggressively support the notion of black superiority to whites, and support the notion of female superiority to males, all stemming from a sense of shame for not being a more masculine man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxpX6IQ3GY4

https://www.outsideonline.com/sites/default/files/styles/full-page/public/2016/11/14/inside-letsrun-feature-december_h.jpg?itok=8SRte4lp

Thanks for the thorough, well stated explanation!

So your argument is that we should spend less money on education of POC and that poor white Americans are being wiped out?

The best measure of whether the test is biased is whether it accurately predicts future academic success. The data shows that it does not.

The bogus idea that all humans are the same race except for skin color is dramatically, factually incorrect.

And with new DNA research, we are finding out just how dramatically different Sub-Saharan Africans are.

Sub-Saharans are the only humans without Neanderthal DNA, for instance. That alone is a huge difference in the races. But there's more:

'Ghost' ancestors: African DNA study detects mysterious human species

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists examining the genomes of West Africans have detected signs that a mysterious extinct human species interbred with our own species tens of thousands of years ago in Africa, the latest evidence of humankind’s complicated genetic ancestry.

The study indicated that present-day West Africans trace a substantial proportion, some 2% to 19%, of their genetic ancestry to an extinct human species - what the researchers called a “ghost population.”

“We estimate interbreeding occurred approximately 43,000 years ago, with large intervals of uncertainty,” said University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) human genetics and computer science professor Sriram Sankararaman, who led the study published this week in the journal Science Advances.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-ghost/ghost-ancestors-african-dna-study-detects-mysterious-human-species-idUSKBN2072X9

https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2019/12/AP_19184573645295.jpg

your parents wrote:

So your argument is that we should spend less money on education of POC and that poor white Americans are being wiped out?

We should spend the same amount of money on POC children, but we should do so in a more realistic, level-headed, productive fashion.

Our entire American/European education system was designed for generally high IQ white kids, and even then a huge percentage of white kids only attended school until the 3rd grade, or some other grade short of 12th grade.

It's not just POC kids that could benefit from on-the-job paid training as part of their public education, it is also poor and low IQ white kids who would benefit.

Today's kids grow up without any respect or even ability to maintain employment in even the most rudimentary job fields. Some college graduates can't even do basic things like change a tire or do laundry or know what an oven pan is for.

The current education system is a complete and total disaster for most POC kids. They show up to school hungry, they go home and don't get fed by their parents, and at school they learn nothing about the skills needed to actually hold down ANY job at all.

Banjo wrote:

Liberals just want to throw more and more billions of dollars at an unsolvable problem. It's a good racket because as an unsolvable problem, there will always be an excuse to demand more and more money to address "systemic racism" in the education system.

I do agree that we are approaching something like an Anti-racism Industrial Complex. Whole industries and political systems seem to rely on the existence of an ever-present threat of racism to stand against.

But none of these liberals/educators will ever suggest actually PAYING POC kids for academic performance.

Roland Fryer did a study on paying kids for grades...it was in Dallas (or maybe Houston). I believe it worked.

The rest of your post is crazy racist stuff.

Banjo wrote:

We should spend the same amount of money on POC children, but we should do so in a more realistic, level-headed, productive fashion.

It's not just POC kids that could benefit from on-the-job paid training as part of their public education, it is also poor and low IQ white kids who would benefit.

So the race isn’t relevant to the system - just have on-the-job training for underperforming students.

Blacks score worse on standardized tests than whites. But you are stating that they go on to have equal success in college and in the workplace as whites? There is not one bit of data to back your ridiculous assertion.