Test Bias

The Black-White Test Score Gap written by Christopher Jencks and edited by Meredith Phillips shed light and much-needed perspective on a sensitive issue with the American education system-- standardized testing as it relates to race in America. For years, people argued that standardized testing has been an illegitimate and unequal source of academic measurement in the United States. Historically, different forms of testing in American culture and society have included elements of bias, thus benefiting White Americans and disadvantaging people of color across lines of racial difference (ex. Voter literacy tests). 

The legitimacy of standardized testing as it relates to the Black community has been challenged many times. Many people standardized tests to be historically racially biased, with the pendulum swinging in the direction of white Americans. Jencks’s writes that test bias is perpetuated in the following regards: Labeling Bias, Content Bias, Methodological Bias, Prediction Bias, and Selection System Bias. Jenck’s explains the fore-mentioned categories of test bias in the following regards:

• Labeling Bias: When a test claims to measure one thing but really measures something else.
• Content Bias: When a test contains questions, that favors one group over another.
• Methodological Bias: When [one] access(es) mastery of some skill or body of information in a way that underestimates the competence of one group relative to another.
• Prediction Bias: When a test’s use has different implications for different groups
• Selection System Bias: When a person is selected solely based on their test-taking aptitude, rather than other relevant skills. 

Test bias as it relates to the American standardized testing system one of the things that gives white Americans an advantage over Black Americans. This extends beyond the American Education System into many other facets of life, oppression, and injustice in America.

https://www.crozetgazette.com/2019/11/08/county-schools-reinterpret-gifted-instruction/