Yesterday, I noted that the NAACP is opposing the use of the FCAT in Florida, in spite of the fact that FCAT performance gives them the evidence they need to urge schools to better educate their minority youth. John Rosenberg of Discriminations comments, and he's noticed an interesting contradiction between that and NAACP action in California:
In Florida the NAACP does not want the state to collect information that would identify poorly performing schools. By contrast, in California, as one of their primary arguments against Prop. 54, the Racial Privacy Initiative, the NAACP and its allies argue that the state must continue to collect racial information in order to monitor compliance with civil rights laws.
He also provides a link to the NAACP brief, which claims that Florida systematically preserves segregated schools, but their evidence is given only as the policies that are in place for standardized testing, AP course placement, graduation requirements, and the like. Unless I'm completely off here, those policies are completely color-blind in Florida's schools. The standardized tests, in particular, are color-blind, but that's not what the NAACP wants. They want some method that produces equality of outcome, not opportunity, and they, like many test critics, believe that banning tests changes the fact that a score gap exists.
Den Beste's theories that I mentioned earlier today provide an explanation that has everything to do with economics, and nothing to do with a racist educational system. The fact that Florida's public schools are highly segregated are more likely due to "white flight" and suburban retreat than to any systematic policy on the part of the Floridia DOE.
If Florida is in fact segregating and mistreating minority youth, then one would think the NAACP would want the FCAT should remain in place as objective evidence of that. Page 25 of the brief deals with the FCAT. Although the writers of the brief do correctly label the results as differential impact, and not bias, they're still wrong in assuming that evidence of differential impact is a de facto criticism of the test, or that it's evidence the test should be removed.
Posted by kswygert at August 29, 2003 10:54 AM