Blog Post #4 Julia Hyman

"You see kids entering the building through the same door. But the second door they enter is racially stratified". I believe that this quote highlights the problem with both unintentional and intentional racism embedded in our school systems. Although our schools are legally desegregated, students still experience segregation everyday through the policies implemented in the educational systems. I believe one of the main ways schools sub-segregate both by race and socioeconomic class is through high-stakes testing. It is believed that we are allowing the history of racism in education to recreate itself in new ways over and over again. Testing in schools has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities in society. These tests have the ability to determine what one will have access to learn, when one can exit grade levels and schools, and many future opportunities. It has been statistically proven that scores received on these tests reflects access to learning opportunities prior to taking the test and test prep. Since access to these resources often reflects socioeconomic status and race, these tests have added to segregation in school and eventually into the years after. Instead of putting millions of federal and state money to standardized testing, this money should be used to implement ways to level the playing field for all students, rather than widen it.  It is not “standardized” to be comparing a student in a classroom with 10 other students and a highly qualified teacher with access to test-prep to a student with none of those benefits. Rather than worsening these inequalities, the stakes of these tests should be lowered by all educational institutions in order to slowly advance towards a more level playing field.  An even better solution would be to eliminate all these tests from schools and use that money to create higher quality learning opportunities for more students, regardless of race or socioeconomic status. It should be used to hiring more qualified teachers and provide more learning resources and opportunities for all students. Although this is a very big issue to tackle, I think this is a key step to decreasing racism in school systems and adding to diversity both in the classroom and eventually in society as a whole. Without changing the policies that are engrained in our educational systems, it is very hard to eliminate racial inequalities that have been present throughout history.