This paper is a review of a journal article written by Dale D. Johnson and Bonnie Johnson titled,The Unfairness of Uniformity, published in the August-September 2002 issue of Reading Today. This article examines the effects of race, culture, and economic deprivation on the ability of students to perform on high-stakes tests.
Increasingly, public education is being forced to provide objective means for determining its effectiveness. High-stakes testing is one of these measures, maximum performance tests that a student must pass in order to graduate to the next grade. Dale D. Johnson and Bonnie Johnson, two university professors, took an unpaid leave of absence to teach for a year in a rural elementary school in Louisiana in order to evaluate the impact of cultural circumstance and racial background on children faced with these kinds of tests.
The situation in which most of these students live is bleak; Johnson and Johnson (2002, August-September) describe it as ôhigh stakes, high stressö (p. 18). They observe that their students were, in many respects, typical of elementary school students everywhere. They exhibited the same range of intelligence, curiosity, and emotional development of others their own age. Yet, their home lives were focused much more dramatically on simple survival. Most were undernourished, poorly clothed, and prone to ill health. Many dealt with violence at home on a regular basis, and high-stakes tests, designed to be blind to individual circumstances, did not take any of these factors into account.
Nor do tests take into account the cultural background of the students, who often have limited experience outside their extended families and their rural communities. Students whose culture does not share a common vocabulary with that used on a test will not be able to understand the questions being asked. A student in these circumstances may be able to sound out the word ôopera,ö for exa...