AFRICAN AMERICANS currently score lower than European Americans on vocabulary, reading, and mathematics tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence. This gap appears before children enter kindergarten (figure 1-1), and it persists into adulthood. It has narrowed since 1970, but the typical American black still scores below 75 percent of American whites on most standardized tests. On some tests the typical American black scores below more than 85 percent of whites?

The black-white test score gap does not appear to be an inevitable fact of nature. It is true that the gap shrinks only a little when black and white children attend the same schools. It is also true that the gap shrinks only a little when black and white families have the same amount of schooling, the same income, and the same wealth. But despite endless speculation, no one has found genetic evidence indicating that blacks have less innate intellectual ability than whites. Thus while it is clear that eliminating the test score gap would require enormous effort by both blacks and whites and would probably take more than one generation, we believe it can be done.

This conviction rests mainly on three facts:

--When black or mixed-race children are raised in white rather than black homes, their preadolescent test scores rise dramatically. Black adoptees' scores seem to fall in adolescence, but this is what we would expect if, as seems likely, their social and cultural environment comes to resemble that of other black adolescents and becomes less like that of the average white adolescent.

--Even nonverbal IQ scores are sensitive to environmental change. Scores on nonverbal IQ tests have risen dramatically throughout the world since the 1930s. The average white scored higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1978 than 82 percent of whites who took the test in 1932. Such findings reinforce the implications of adoption studies: large environmental changes can have a large impact on test performance.

--Black-white differences in academic achievement have also narrowed throughout the twentieth century. The best trend data come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which has been testing seventeen-year-olds since 1971 and has repeated many of the same items year after year. Figure 1-2 shows that the black-white reading gap narrowed from 1.25 standard deviations in 1971 to 0.69 standard deviations in 1996. The math gap fell from 1.33 to 0.89 standard deviations. When Min-Hsiung Huang and Robert Hauser analyzed vocabulary scores for adults born between 1909 and 1969, the black-white gap also narrowed by half.

In a country as racially polarized as the United States, no single change taken in isolation could possibly eliminate the entire legacy of slavery and Jim Crow or usher in an era of full racial equality. But if racial equality is America's goal, reducing the black-white test score gap would probably do more to promote this goal than any other strategy that commands broad political support. Reducing the test score gap is probably both necessary and sufficient for substantially reducing racial inequality in educational attainment and earnings. Changes in education and earnings would in turn help reduce racial differences in crime, health, and family structure, although we do not know how large these effects would be.

How great is the correlation between poverty and scores on standardized tests?

There is a strong relationship. A 2015 statewide study of school results on the 2012-13 PSSAs and Keystone exams by the Philadelphia-based Research for Action showed this clearly: “Exceptions are rare,” it said. In reading, “of more than 2,200 schools in this sample, 187 post proficiency rates of 90 or above. Of these, just seven schools (3.7%) have economically disadvantaged enrollments of 50 percent or higher; five of the seven are Philadelphia magnet schools.”

Some advocates and researchers point to cultural biases in tests – for example, expecting test-takers to know some aspect of a test question that more affluent students are more likely to have encountered than poorer children.

Testing expert Jay Rosner says that the SAT shows a pattern of discarding possible test questions that Black students get right more often than White students in field tests because they are seeking to maintain the reliability of the test, which means taking into account the relatively higher scores of White test-takers.

The makers of the SAT say that test questions are race-neutral and undergo a statistical “fairness review” before their inclusion.

The core of what makes the tests inequitable, many researchers and advocates say, is not mainly the tests themselves, but the circumstances, from birth onward, of the children taking them.

The biggest challenge that students from marginalized communities face is the tremendous gap in resources afforded them in their schools. The staff, school buildings, access to technology are just a few of the advantage that are lacking in schools in poorer communities. When students of color do not have access to the necessities in education, they will in fact obtain lower test scores. Some student’s motivation for scoring higher on tests is equally affected by the lack of opportunities awaiting them when they leave school.

http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/j/jencks-gap.html

https://thenotebook.org/articles/2015/11/24/how-race-and-class-relate-to-standardized-tests/

http://www.nea.org/home/73288.htm