Standardized Tests: Bias Reduction or Censorship

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

 STANDARDIZED TESTS TAKE ON SHADES OF GRAY
Gannett News Service -- June 29, 2004
by Fredreka Schouten

In the world of standardized tests, Christmas never comes. No one 
celebrates Halloween or birthdays. Kids rarely encounter a French fry. 
And no one dies. Ever

The tests taken by millions of schoolchildren are scrubbed clean of 
topics that might reflect ethnic, cultural or regional biases. Florida 
10-year-olds shouldn't be expected to compose essays about blizzards, 
the thinking goes, just as eighth-graders in Manhattan might know little 
about corn production.

Subjects viewed as inappropriate or potentially upsetting to children 
like death, violence, drugs or sex are out of the question.

"I would never have a story about kids who thought they were ugly or 
being bullied at school," says Kathleen Oberley, who has been writing 
questions for the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills for about 30 years.

"I don't think a test is a place to talk about what it's like to have an 
alcoholic father."

But other test taboos might surprise you: When pets appear on exams, 
they can't bear names like Madison, Cheyenne or Pete. That's to make 
sure your fourth-grader doesn't confront a pet gerbil with his name on 
an exam.

There are other reasons to avoid pets. Mentions of dogs, for example, 
might trouble Muslim students because the animals are considered unclean 
in Islamic culture.

Birthdays are forbidden because they are not observed by some religions. 
Also forbidden: Halloween costumes, pumpkins, Harry Potter, anything 
that smacks of the occult.

One state bars mention of mobile homes on its tests because they are 
illegal there, according to officials with Harcourt Assessment, which 
has testing contracts in at least 17 states from Vermont to Hawaii. They 
declined to say which state forbids trailers on exams.

Even dinosaurs  the objects of ardent devotion among many little and 
not-so-little children  are off limits on most tests for fear that they 
promote the idea of evolution. Many scientists say fossil evidence 
suggests birds evolved from small dinosaurs.

State education officials and testing companies say these policies are 
sound.

"Testing is a stressful enough experience for kids. We want to make sure 
there is nothing that would cause the child to stumble," says John 
Tanner, vice president of testing services for Harcourt and Delaware's 
former testing director.

But education historian Diane Ravitch says anti-bias policies have made 
the tests boring.

"The United States is obviously a country of many, many cultures," says 
Ravitch, a New York University professor and author of The Language 
Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.

"If we accommodate everyone's taboos, then we don't have the kind of 
zone where we can say, 'This is reality, and it's OK to learn about it.' "

The banned words and topics outlined by test publishers and states 
aren't the only restrictions on exams. Once questions are written, they 
undergo field testing to weed out questions that are too easy or too 
hard and those that just stump particular groups of students.

The test items that survive the statistical scrutiny still face teams of 
reviewers  teachers, PTA members, math professors, home-schooling 
activists, administrators of all races and ethnic groups  who generally 
work on a freelance basis to scour questions for bias.

Shabbir Mansuri, director of the Council on Islamic Education in 
Fountain Valley, Calif., who has reviewed exams and textbooks for bias, 
launched his group in the early 1990s  not long after his daughter, 
then 11, saw something amiss in her social studies textbook.

Her book's sole description of the five daily Muslim prayers showed 
Bedouins in the Middle East touching their foreheads to the sand.

"She told me, 'We need to bring sand in the house, Daddy. We are doing 
it all wrong,' " Mansuri recalls.

A. Yvette Alvarez-Rooney works in Phoenix evaluating Spanish-speaking 
students for special education and sometimes moonlights as a bias 
reviewer for the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. She says most test writers 
succeed in crafting questions that span cultural divides.

But occasionally she comes across a question that simply doesn't reflect 
the reality of her Mexican-American upbringing in Douglas, Ariz., or the 
lives of some of her students.

"I remember one question that showed a picture of a couch on a porch and 
asked, 'What doesn't fit?' " she says.

"I started laughing," she says. "The way I grew up, everyone had a couch 
outside."


http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2004-06-28-standardized-tests_x.htm