Testing for Whiteness?How High-Stakes, Standardized Tests Promote Racism, Undercut Diversity, and Undermine Multicultural Education

Abstract

The idea that standardized tests, and later high-stakes standardized tests, serve in the interests of racial, economic, and individual equality is the critical juncture of testing and multicultural education. The presumptive logics of this juncture of high-stakes, standardized testing and equality are extended to argue that such testing not only serves the interests of multicultural education, but also the needs of a multicultural society. In this chapter I argue that, not only are these presumptive logics false, but that they are damaging to the core principles of multicultural education. More sharply, I argue that, in the United States, standardized testing and its progeny, high-stakes testing, have simultaneously served the interests of Whiteness and homogenization while actively working against the interests of diversity and multicultural education. This chapter begins by detailing the ways that standardized testing has been used historically to undermine multiculturalism and diversity in the United States, including its role in supporting white supremacy and the eugenics movement here. I continue with a discussion of modern-day high-stakes, standardized testing and how through test design itself, such assessments work against diversity and multicultural education while promoting race and class inequality. I end this chapter by recounting how high-stakes testing materially supports whiteness through the racial resegregation and the propagation of the schools-to-prisons pipeline. All of which, I argue, serve to undercut multicultural education for our diverse democracy.