Also profiling the disabled to work on separating them out as well.

It depends on who makes the tests, and how hard they work to take race out of the equation. If it's possible to have tests that aren't racially biased, then it doesn't matter if they're standardized or not. Create non-racially biased standard testing and make those the standard tests.

That being said, I'm not a big fan of standardized tests in the first place. They're like tweets - they reduce big, complex issues into narrow views. People aren't standard. They don't think in the same ways, they don't learn in the same ways, they don't exist as equally square pegs to be pounded into a one size fits all set of holes.

of high stakes testing. A standardized test now and then as a small part of a big picture? Okay, if you can find a non-biased test. Good luck with that.

There are many other, better ways for students to demonstrate learning.

so I'm not sure that the "white supremacist" theory really works.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-why-do-asian-american-students-perform-better-than-whites-20140505-story.html

my first thought when I read your post title was "that's a cultural thing."

Because, as a teacher, I have seen the difference.

Then I clicked on your link to read it, and found this:

"Asian and Asian American youth are harder working because of cultural beliefs that emphasize the strong connection between effort and achievement.
"

When I read further: "Studies show that Asian and Asian American students tend to view cognitive abilities as qualities that can be developed through effort, whereas white Americans tend to view cognitive abilities as qualities that are inborn."

How are those supposedly "inborn" cognitive abilities determined? Through standardized tests.

The test's function is to cull the herd, not to educate all of us. To select out the ones that get special care. And it is easy as pie to slant the tests in favor of any group one chooses.

I happen to be such a person, and I am white as can be.

I've pulled out very high scores on topics that I don't actually know much about, because I understand how to take them.

I walked into the GRE in 1974 a math undergrad with a B average and no other prep whatsoever and got 99% verbal and quant, 87% math aptitude. At the time I worked in a sawmill. I got into Berkeley on that. Didn't stay. but I got in. It was always like that with tests. They gave me an IQ test in 4th grade and never would tell me exactly what it said, but things got strange after that. But I'm obstinate about what I get interested in. Hence the sawmill for instance, I was enjoying that at the time, but I could see it would break me down if I stayed.

I've read a few articles about standardized testing for gifted education classes, and how, before standardized testing, teachers recommended kids for gifted classes. Almost all kids who were found to be gifted were white. Then they started using standardized testing, and it was much more diverse, although still not as diverse as statistically it should have been. Even with how biased standardized tests are, using teacher evaluation is generally more biased.

People of color get racially profiled and kept away from resources no matter what current system is used. We don't need to shift from one current evaluation system to another - we need to tear things down and rebuild something new without bias.

with extra certification in gifted ed, I can tell you that both the general public's and much of the general ed teaching pool incorrectly view "gifted" as synonymous with "high achieving," which is simply not the case.

As far as the identification of students for gifted education programs...that's a snarly mess.

Gifted ed is an unfunded mandate. Every state, and often, every district within a state, can decide how to identify and serve students differently. There are some hard requirements, of course, and states that choose to fund their programs also tend to exercise a bit more control over the process, but in all, it's a mess.

And, of course, the identification for the purpose of a gifted program in public ed is very limited, by intent. First of all, gifts that can't be served in a public school setting aren't going to be identified, simply because the school can't provide service. Secondly, the funding simply isn't there. We get federal funding for Special Ed, but there's an underlying assumption that gifted students don't "need" special support; they get by on their own. Of course, that broad assumption is blown out of the water by case studies, but nobody actually reads those.

In the end, the best system for identifying students for gifted programs I've seen was in a district and state I worked in 15 years ago; they used a couple of standardized cognitive tests: a common test, plus the Naglieri, which is a non-verbal test. Non-verbal tests are becoming more common as it's recognized that the more common tests are heavily dependent on verbal abilities.

Anyway, those tests were one part of a large matrix of data which included parent, student, and teacher surveys, a portfolio of student work, and various other sorts of data.

As a teacher, I am inundated with mandated standardized tests throughout the year, and special meetings to crunch all that data and design instruction around it. I do a damned good job dissembling. I spend some time bloviating about data on required evaluation forms, but other than that, I get the information I need to serve my students from observing them and talking with them, and that's the information I use to "inform instruction."

It would make more sense if the conclusion was that it is not a method of racial profiling but income profiling unless the poor white kids have stellar results while the non-white kids in the same neighborhood and class do worse.

What measuring stick should we use? Unfortunately, phrenology, is no longer popular. We could give the kids a knife and have a fight to the death but I believe it would disenfranchise the ditch digger underclass not to mention how it would deprive for profit corporations their inmates.

but when the teachers and the schools are held accountable for student scores in a punitive fashion, you have the current emphasis on test training rather than actual learning. My students have mastered the art of test taking. They have also lost desire to learn anything that won't be on the test. They fear taking risks. Scores are all that matter. They don't know what it is to be passionate about learning. They think school is a prison not a place to grow and blossom in a nurturing environment.

It's hard to separate out racial profiling from systems that keep whole economic segments of the population down, when racial groups are part of that economic segment.

Currently, though, BLM is doing just that, so I thought this would be a good time to dig in to this.

Our current capitalist system needs a large pool of cheap labor and cannon fodder. The 1% want to remain the 1%, which means keeping a very large underclass.

It's not coincidence that a large part, (but not all), of that underclass consists of PoC.