Sotomayor and Cultural Bias in Standardized Testing
June 12, 2009
Sonia Sotomayor’s comment about the cultural bias of standardized testing raises a specter that needs to be eradicated. Nowadays, when someone calls a standardized test culturally biased, it is taken as a pejorative remark. In actuality, it should be taken as no more than a neutral description of the way that things are and cannot help being.
If someone says to me, “Standardized tests are biased,” my response is, “Of course; so what?” By that I mean that it is right and proper that American standardized tests be permeated by assumptions rooted in dominant American culture. No one would complain about tests in France that they are biased toward dominant French culture, or tests in India that they are biased toward dominant Indian culture, or tests in any country that they are biased toward the dominant culture of that country. The tests are standardizable precisely because there is a standard, whether it be standard English or a standard body of basic historico-cultural knowledge.
If someone scores lower on a standardized test because he or she lacks the fundamentals of that standard historico-cultural knowledge, the fault is not the test’s. Rather, the fault is the educational system’s because it has not maintained its standards in a way that effectively inculcates such knowledge.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our tests, but in our educators, that we are knowledge-deficient.
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