A federal judge is questioning whether a new exam for aspiring teachers in New York is discriminatory against minorities, a case that could derail the state’s efforts to create a more rigorous set of tests for entry into the profession.
Black and Hispanic applicants have been passing one of the exams, intended to measure reading and writing skills, at lower rates than white candidates, prompting concerns of decreased diversity in the teaching ranks.
Steve Sailer writes: So it’s obviously due to some idiosyncratic failure of the test, since no other test in no other state has ever had the same problem.
The important thing is that no one ever learn from any other examples. Noticing general patterns is evil.
You’re especially not allowed to notice the g factor.
Education Realist points out that a reform made by Congress a number of years ago had the inadvertent impact of making it very hard for ed schools to practice affirmative action.
EDUCATION REALIST WRITES: Ed Schools and Affirmative Action
More on Mumford (a credential test cheating ring in which the press refused to notice that everyone involved was black)
The lurker in the teacher quality debate
The last one is over three years old. It was one of the first posts I ever wrote!
Anyway. As I wrote in the first link, this is going to be a problem. Blacks who have the ability to become math and science teachers have the ability to pass the bar exam in a number of states, at least theoretically. And affirmative action also makes it easier for higher IQ blacks to get into competitive fields that pay much better than teaching. So blacks are going to be more likely to be elementary school teachers or highly motivated and smart (and more likely to go into admin, where affirmative action kicks back in).
This is an area where I like to think I’ve had an impact. Stephen Sawchuk, one of the major people in this beat, used to write about the credential test as if its ease was a union scam. I’m pretty sure I’ve convinced him otherwise; all his work in the past three years in the credential area mentions the impact that higher scores would have on minority teachers. As a result of his work (also Goldhaber’s research, which forced everyone to officially notice that teachers aren’t stupid), reformers are always talking about how it’s possible to both raise standards and retain minority teachers. This is impossible, of course, but they never used to mention it at all, just saying that the credential tests were too easy
