A New York judge has ruled that the state鈥檚 most recent literacy-skills exam for teachers doesn鈥檛 discriminate against black and Hispanic candidates, even though they tend to score more poorly on it, because it measures skills necessary to the job, and other news outlets are reporting.
The same judge, Kimba Wood, , saying that they discriminated against candidates of color and didn鈥檛 directly relate to job performance.
A seething tension in teacher education right now concerns the push to raise standards for admission into the profession colliding with the need for a more diverse teaching force; as the Times explains, this ruling comes as a bit of a marker in this particular debate.
The test, known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test, measures reading and writing skills. It includes several skills, such as the ability to make text-dependent arguments, that are part of the Common Core State Standards. And, notably, the ALST is widely considered to be more difficult than the tests it replaced.
鈥淣ew York State adopted new federal and state pedagogical and curricular standards that redefined the role of teacher. The ALST was derived from those standards, and thus appropriately designed to ensure that only those applicants who possess the knowledge, skills, and abilities to teach successfully may be hired to do so in New York鈥檚 public schools,鈥� Judge Wood wrote.
Teacher colleges have pushed back on the exam, ultimately getting the state鈥檚 Board of Regents Candidates won鈥檛 have to pass it until June 2016. Until then, they can pass a different test or have their program attest that they鈥檝e met the skills via coursework.
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