Systemic Test Racism in Chicago

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Systemic Test Racism in Chicago

Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates says black students can’t succeed on tests.

By The Editorial Board

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Aug. 15, 2024 5:47 pm ET

CTU President Stacy Davis Gates speaks in October 2023. Photo: Getty Images

Chicago parents have been wondering when Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates was going to address the disastrous reading and math scores in Chicago public schools. Now she has.

In an interview in early August with Chicago radio news station WVON 1690, Ms. Gates was asked to respond to the union’s critics who are concerned that so many of Chicago’s students aren’t reading or doing math at grade level. Her novel answer: The tests are racist so they should be ignored.

“The way in which we think about learning and think about achievement is really and truly based on testing, which at best is junk science rooted in white supremacy,” Ms. Gates said.

“If you have another hour, I can get into why standardized tests are born out of the eugenics movement,” she continued. “And the eugenics movement has always sought to see black people as inferior to those that are non-black. . . . You can’t test black children with an instrument that was born to prove their inferiority.”

This is certainly convenient for the union because it absolves teachers of any responsibility for failure. If the tests are racist, then black students are doomed to fail, therefore failure is inevitable and it doesn’t matter how or what is taught in school. So give the union a big raise no matter how students perform. Who’s the real systemic racist here?

The good news is that the station’s listeners weren’t buying it. One caller responded that, even if the tests were racist, that was no excuse for allowing black children to fail: “I want to say as a parent, standardized testing, we’re not ready to move beyond that right now . . . How can we say that it’s a racist tool? It might be but let me say this to you, I’ve passed every standardized test and I want my children to be able to do it.”

The Chicago Teachers Union was a top donor to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s campaign and it is counting on his support for its contract demands that include base salary increases of 9% annually as well as initiatives from new housing to environmental initiatives. If the contract is approved, it could add an average of $51,000 in additional pay per teacher by 2028, according to the Illinois Policy Institute.

The data shows that, in 2022, 9% of Chicago’s black eighth graders were proficient in reading and 4% were proficient in math, according to Wirepoints and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. No wonder Ms. Gates sent her son to private school.