Max Eden writes here about efforts to drench standardized math tests in “anti-racism”:
Standardized test questions can’t accurately assess African-American students unless they implicitly endorse terrorism. That sounds absurd, but that is the essential summary and upshot of the work of University of Michigan Professor Jennifer Randall, a giant in the field of academic assessment, who has received five million dollars from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for her work on “anti-racist” assessments at the Center for Measurement Justice.
Eden quotes an example question, which is both poorly written and unrelenting in pushing woke ideology:
Marcellus is cooking hot meals to hand out to a small group of twelve Black Lives Matters protestors demonstrating against separating families held at the U.S./Mexico border. He is making a meal of rice, cornbread, and red beans. He wants to make enough red beans for each person to have more than ¾ cup. Determine whether each inequality or number lines correctly models c, the number of red bean Marcellus needs to make Select Yes or No for each option.
Clearly, learning math is far less important than absorbing the progressive mindset.
I think he nails the truth when he writes,
Professor Randall is regularly invited to present and serve at conferences and advisory board meetings about the future of assessments. This suggests that her colleagues see great merit in the work and logic represented above. Or, perhaps more charitably, it suggests that her colleagues are too cowardly to insist that it’s stupid to say that you shouldn’t simply ask a student what 2+2 equals. After all, critique an “anti-racist” and you’ll get called a racist.
Anti-racist math testing adds up to a grift.