New York to Scrap Literacy Test for Teachers. Guess Why.

Efforts to introduce standardized testing and the monitoring of performance metrics for teachers in New York have been opposed by the teachers unions ever since they were first introduced decades ago. It’s an ongoing battle which has been mirrored across the nation. Still, some measures have been put in place which were intended to at least ascertain basic levels of proficiency for people seeking teaching positions. One of these is known as the Academic Skills Literacy Test (ASLT). It’s basically a reading comprehension test administered to those who would eventually be giving similar tests to students.

Sounds almost like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? You might think so, but this month it looks like the Empire State will be scrapping the examination because not enough people were passing it and the failure rates were deemed to be too heavily skewed along racial lines:

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. Critics of the examination said it is redundant and a poor predictor of who will succeed as a teacher.

This is not something which just cropped up. A group representing many of these aspiring teachers brought lawsuits in 2015 claiming that both the ASLT and a second exam focusing on liberal arts and sciences were somehow racist in nature. The group was seeking more than $300 million in damages but a federal court eventually dismissed the case. Despite the fact that the courts gave the testing program a thumbs up, it seems that the testing regimen will be scrapped anyway.

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