Resolved: On balance, standardized testing is beneficial to K-12 education in the United States

Contention 1. Standardised testing is racist.Doctor Harold Berlak, an independent researcher and professor at Washington University finds Standardized testing perpetuates institutionalized racism and contributes to the achievement gap between whites and minorities. For instance, the deeply embedded stereotype that African Americans perform poorly on standardized tests hinders many African Americans’ testing ability. Also, research has shown that minorities statistically have lower standardized test scores than whites because of existing, hidden biases in the development and administration of standardized tests and interpretation of their scores. Therefore, the achievement gap will not begin to close until current standards and assessment tests are significantly reformed ... Even when parents’ income and wealth is comparable, African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and immigrants for whom English is not a first language lag behind English speaking, native-born, white students. Nowile M. Rooks of Time Magazine in October 2012 finds Today, as an acknowledgment of the inherent racial and economic inequity of standardized achievement tests, hundreds of colleges have already stopped requiring the SAT for college admission decisions. However, the same cannot be said for k-12, where scores on achievement tests are in part used for everything from admitting students to prestigious public schools to placing students in gifted or remedial programs, allocating federal funding, and even evaluating teachers. Nowile continues The recently filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education pointing out that black and Latino students in New York score below whites and Asians on standardized tests so consistently that although they are almost 70% of the overall student body, they are only 11% of students enrolled at elite public schools. As a result, the complaint argues that New York City is in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act because schools rely on a test that advantages one racial group over another. The system in which we are debating is inherently racist and biased against 1 people of color and 2 those that are non-english speaking. We can’t say that the system in which we are operating benefits education no matter what, unless we are trying to defend a racist system that attacks people for being themselves and not being what color of skin the test-makers want them to be. C2. Standardised testing is opening the door for eugenics. Joshua Cook in 2013 of the Freedom Outpost writes that standardised tests as of now are perhaps the scariest way to mine for data of the American future. He writes that having this data collected and mined, perhaps sold to companies for school profits when schools can barely balance their own budget due to systemic racism and redlining, is a way of measuring intelligence (and we think that our opponents will agree with us to this point). However, as John Loflin of the Education Community-Action Team in April 2013 writes , if history has taught us anything, having a massive database of the intelligence of the American future is beyond harmful or just ‘bad’ - it is outright amoral. US history has taught us that when the draft goes into place, the US government will first pick those that have low test scores or low intelligences to serve in the war so that they die - and an American ‘utopia’ is restored with only complete European descendents being alive and running the country. This is the very definition of eugenics - which is trying to keep those that are undesirable from reproducing (they can’t have children if they die in foreign combat). And if we look to the way that we looked onto Hitler’s actions of eugenics in Germany in world war two, we see that we can’t set up a system that allows for this to happen. Further, Loflin explains, there are people that are in charge of the US military drafting service that are in favor of eugenics and ‘weeding out undesirables’ from the mainstream - though they do not say it in this same language, the intentions are the same as what we are saying they think to be true. We cannot stand here and defend a system that is by its very core racist - so far racist as to have eugenics a full possibility due to the way that standardised testing is set up as of now. We can only see a negative ballot with all things considered, thank you.