Testing: It's Real Value

Because we don't understand the history of testing, we somehow deceive ourselves into believing that testing adds to the qualitative measures that comprise meritocracy. As Malcolm Gladwell so aptly writes in The Outliers, there is no such thing as meritocracy. Many people in high places get there because of unequal access to opportunity.

SAT tests came out of the post World War II era when elite colleges wanted to limit the number of immigrants and people with the wrong pedigrees. Tests were derived to score the stuff that only the upper classes would know about and lesser classes shouldn't.

Same is true of the notorious LSAT, the test that students take to get into law school, and pay a fortune to take a cram course for. And the state bar exams: since law school allegedly teaches how to think like a lawyer, while most bar exams test obscure rules of law that no one might ever use again, or could easily look up.

Tests for police and firefighters, kept these services white, male, and often securely within one ethnic group for years.

Yesterday in a 5-4 decision that will reverberate throughout the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court condemned New Haven, Connecticut for throwing out a firefighter test because it appeared to have racially biased results. In Ricci v. DeStefano, the conservative majority, a group of men who consistently wish us to be in a colorblind society and therefore are wiping out all of the remedies and judgments that might bring us there someday, held that the decision to throw out the results of a test that no one of color passed was racist.

If you want to get sick, read the decision.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor was one of the judges on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals who ruled that New Haven had done the right thing when it threw out the test results and used another test that appeared to have no racial bias.

Recently, two Berkeley researchers Marjorie Schultz and Sheldon Zedeck, devised an alternative to testing for what makes a good lawyer. Instead of the 3 aspects tested by the LSAT, considered the predictor of success in law school, Schultz and Zedeck found 26 factors. Read the New York Times article by Jonathan Glater. And their test had no racial bias.

Current tests are mostly gender and racially biased, serving as a gateway, a way to eliminate folks, not to really test for competency. I recently heard a commentary that even typing tests given to office workers in the 1950s only surveyed a skill that was used perhaps 10% of the time. Filing, answering the telephone, organizing the day, arranging for meetings, even buying presents for the boss's wife took up more time.

And with access to electronic libraries, and Google, what kinds of skills does this next generation really need? Think about it. We need to have a real conversation, not litigation, over testing, especially as No Child Left Behind comes back up for reevaluation.