Test meant to screen teachers instead weeded out minorities
By KAREN MATTHEWS, ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK — Mar 11, 2017, 11:51 PM ET
New York education officials are poised to scrap a test designed to measure the reading and writing skills of people trying to become teachers, in part because an outsized percentage of black and Hispanic candidates were failing it.
The state Board of Regents on Monday is expected Monday to adopt a task force’s recommendation of eliminating the literacy exam, known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test.
Backers of the test say eliminating it could put weak teachers in classrooms. …
But the literacy test raised alarms from the beginning because just 46 percent of Hispanic test takers and 41 percent of black test takers passed it on the first try, compared with 64 percent of white candidates.
That’s a pretty run-of-the-mill racial gap: about 0.58 standard deviations between whites and blacks.
A federal judge ruled in 2015 that the test was not discriminatory, but faculty members at education schools say a test that screens out so many minorities is problematic.
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See also http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/test-meant-screen-teachers-weeded-minorities-46065836
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