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Helen A. Moore
Abstracted Helen A. Moore, Testing Whiteness: No
Child or No School Left Behind?, 18 Washington University Journal of
Law and Policy 173-201, 173-174 (2005) (192 footnotes omitted)
I began my study of schooling and critical pedagogy as a research
assistant for a program called PRIME: Program Research in
Multicultural Education. One of our challenges in the mid-1970s was
to assist the Principal Investigator, Dr. Jane Mercer, in
constructing educational materials for her role as an expert witness
in Larry P. v. Riles. Through that project, I learned a great deal
about testing issues as they relate to the whiteness of educational,
political, legal and policy perspectives. Today, as a sociologist, I
commit my research to an understanding of the processes and
consequences of testing policy and the whiteness of evaluation
paradigms as they play out in education on issues of social
inequality.
Omi and Winant argue that racial formation is a "fundamental
organizing principle" for all macro-social relationships, including
schooling in the United States. At micro-levels, we interact with
others in a variety of social and educational settings, including
the conditions under which we, or our students or children, take
tests, and how we use those tests to shape individual educational
opportunities. At the macro-level of collectivity, Omi and Winant
encourage us to understand the complex relationships of whiteness to
economic, cultural and ideological structures. Today, the category
of "whiteness" itself is an unstable and "decentered" complex set of
social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.
These and other sociologists encourage us to examine that struggle
because today, as in the past, racial minorities "bear the heavy
burden in human suffering as a result of their categorization as
'other' in dominant practices and ideologies." They argue that we
are at a new stage of socially based politics of racial formation. I
draw on their assessment of race to consider testing and whiteness
as efforts to center and cement racial categories of privilege
through testing policies.
In this paper, I examine the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB)
as a manifest social policy that imbeds racial formation practices
centered around whiteness into a national movement of standardized
testing. The first section of this article provides background
information on the NCLB, the construction of school testing, and
potential policies that advantage whiteness. The second section
describes key elements of "testing whiteness" that invalidate the
assumptions of NCLB and raise legal, social, and policy questions
for the courts and our communities. I draw on Larry P. and the
critiques of racialized testing patterns as instructive of potential
judicial frameworks for these ongoing educational issues. Our legal
and educational responses to NCLB may become the frame for
educational policy challenges that confront public education and
race dynamics over the coming decades. |
