Who cares about education folks! Who cares that the United States has plummeted in the global rankings of education standards! At least that seems to be the attitude of one of the country’s largest states that are set to ditch a test designed to measure the reading and writing skills of potential teachers in the future! According to reports, An outsized percentage of black and Hispanic candidates were failing the test, members of the New York state Board of Regents plans to adopt a task force’s recommendation to eliminate the literacy exam,
Known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test, given to the future prospective teachers. Despite the fact that Education reformers believe that tests like New York’s Academic Literacy Skills Test can weed out potentially bad teachers, the tests have come under intense scrutiny for their alleged racial bias, after just 46 percent of Hispanic test-takers and 41 percent of black test-takers passed it on the first try, compared with 64 percent of white candidates. This story fits in the same glove is a recent report we did out of Washington State where the Writing Center at the University of Washington recently told students that expecting Americans to use proper grammar perpetuates racism and even released a press release that was put out by the University of Washington’s Writing Center arguing that “there is no inherent ‘standard’ of English,” and that pressure to conform to proper American grammar standards perpetuate systems of racism. So what are your thoughts? Is this a smart move on behalf of this school? And will this be the new normal in American education standards for teachers in the future?
