Zuckerberg 's Millions Boost CRT for Standardized Tests
Standardized test questions can’t accurately assess African-American students unless they implicitly endorse terrorism. That sounds absurd, but that is the essential summary and upshot of the work of University of Michigan Professor Jennifer Randall, a giant in the field of academic assessment, who has received five million dollars from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for her work on “anti-racist” assessments at the Center for Measurement Justice.
That point is not articulated in plain English, of course, but rather dressed up in academic jargon. Randall begins her journal article “‘Color-neutral’ Is Not a Thing: Redefining Construct Definition and Representation through a Justice-Oriented Critical Antiracist Lens” this way:
“Conventional views of construct definition and representation have required a narrowed focus on the proposed underlying construct to be assessed void of any additional context, as additional context is considered a distraction from the construct. The context – referred to as construct irrelevant variance – is routinely scrubbed from assessment items in a service to a purified construct representation. See, for example, a modified 6th grade math item depicted in figure 1.”
Randall goes on to formulate the following problem as an example:
“Marcellus is cooking hot meals to hand out to a small group of twelve Black Lives Matters [sic] protestors demonstrating against separating families held at the U.S./Mexico border. He is making a meal of rice, cornbread, and red beans. He wants to make enough red beans for each person to have more than ¾ cup [sic]. Determine whether each inequality or number lines [sic] correctly models c, the number of red bean [sic] Marcellus needs to make [sic] Select Yes or No for each option.”
The mathematical goal is for students to multiply twelve by three-quarters to get nine, and then represent “greater than nine” symbolically. But professor Randall rather butchered the task of making this math question “anti-racist.”
A 6th-grade level literate student might note that the “red beans” is carelessly misspelled in the final sentence. A culinarily literate student might note that the question doesn’t actually ask for the number of cups of red beans that Marcellus needs to make. A generally literate sixth grader might note that Professor Randall misspelled “Black Lives Matter.” A politically literate sixth grader might wonder why, exactly, an organization that recently endorsed Hamas’s rape of women and murder of babies needs to be referenced at all on a standardized test.
But the fundamental idea behind Randall’s work is even more stupid than her exemplar question. In recent years, conservative critics have accused the woke of believing that “2+2=4” is racist. Randall all but agrees that, in fact, it is. “Students are rarely taught ‘2+2=4’ absent of context,” she writes. “And, I argue, that when context is not clear (or seemingly not present), the implied context, historically, has been whiteness.” She is not quite arguing that “foundational math items such as “2+2” are always racist.” But, “[b]ecause we are unaware of this context and the cultural norms/values that students must draw on to respond, “2+2” is not necessarily a neutral item-type and should no longer be referred to as one.”
She means us to believe that it’s better, in other words, to write something like: “Two BLM protestors join two other BLM protestors at a rally against police brutality. How many BLM protestors are rallying for racial justice?”
Even if asking “2+2=4” is the best and most efficient way to know whether students understand the addition of single-digit integers, Randall argues that still shouldn’t ask that question, citing John Rawls. Randall writes, “We understand from the work of Rawls (1999) that policies/practices must be abolished—regardless of their perceived or actual efficiency and standing—if those policies/practices are inherently unjust.”
Professor Randall’s royal “we” here likely refers to critical race theorists (CRT). Her work is shot through with CRT phrases and references to CRT authors.
But that “we” could soon refer to standardized testing experts writ large. And that’s a major problem. Professor Randall is regularly invited to present and serve at conferences and advisory board meetings about the future of assessments. This suggests that her colleagues see great merit in the work and logic represented above. Or, perhaps more charitably, it suggests that her colleagues are too cowardly to insist that it’s stupid to say that you shouldn’t simply ask a student what 2+2 equals. After all, critique an “anti-racist” and you’ll get called a racist.
Either way, the upshot could be the same. Standardized tests aren’t racist. But they soon could become “anti-racist.” And then they would be worse than useless.
