This kind of post drives me nuts, @papa-pepper. You heard something on the radio and grabbed a couple sources that have poor credibility just like @gardenlady commented. I went to the links given in those sources. Some links went to junk sites, with no news at all. Other links went to other stories from the same source, the Daily Caller - not a good practice for getting information. The Associated Press article in one link appeared in a lot of papers, as pretty much the same story linked in @gardenlady's second comment. All the links referenced a report by the National Council on Teacher Quality. I read all those links, including the NCTQ report and then different perspectives about that report. Here's my take on it.
Not all tests are good tests. Over several years of evaluation, scores from this test were not correlated with actual student outcomes - the one metric that matters for students. Test biases are real, so are poor tests. Why require poorly written tests that don't correlate with actual student outcomes?
The primary source for the comments in these news reports were people from the National Council on Teacher Quality. Their reviews of teacher education are not valid. They are based on incredibly incomplete online reviews of education programs. For example, one of their 5 key metrics is whether a teacher training program requires incoming students to be in the top half of their high school graduating class or have SAT scores in the top half of test results. But that's a meaningless metric. Stanford gets a failing grade on this score because they don't have any requirement like this. But Stanford doesn't have to -- they get some of the best students in the world without having that requirement at all.
I'm interested in this topic. I care about education of kids and their teachers. I took the time to read your post and follow it through. It took real time and attention to figure out your post was sensationalistic and encourages confirmation bias by folks not willing to dig into the information. You didn't just make a post about something you found interesting -- you presented a point of view with this story. Is there a reason why did you choose this point of view that denigrates minorities and makes fun of teachers?
My point was that this concept is racist, as the article that gardenlady shared showed. When something is done away with partially because of how it affects minorities or decisions made because a white workforce doesn't match the student body, it seems that the only factor taken into consideration is skin tone, which is racism.
That's the point I'm trying to make -- that the articles you are sourcing didn't represent why the tests were being done away with. The tests are being done away with because they are tests that don't measure the ability of teachers to ultimately teach. Once I went past the links you provided, digging deeper to the more primary sources, the tone of the story became quite different. Biased tests do exist. Poorly constructed tests do exist. Tests that fail to measure what they are trying to measure do exist. This test, from the other sources of information, falls into all those categories. So the basis of the claim of racism isn't really supported by the primary sources.
Oh, I see.
I'm sorry if my opinion on the matter offends you, but it's my opinion, and I am free to share it.
I'm not offended at all by your opinion or anyone's opinion. It's the quick post using low credibility sources, presented as the whole story, that frustrates me. There was so much more to this story - about the test itself and about the group quoted at length in the story. I went to a lot of effort to really get a more balanced view of the information behind the story, from multiple sources. That's my issue, not your opinion, for sure.
Ok, I checked multiple sources, all of which agreed with what I heard, and cited a few. I think there is always more to the story and wasn't trying be exhaustive, just to share my thoughts about what I had encountered.