The U.S. is, of course, far from the only country to use standardized testing as a tool that shapes student success. In the U.K., students must take at least a dozen tests before they graduate from high school, including A-levels that determine whether they are considered college track material. (Interestingly, the lowest performers in the U.K. are White working-class boys, while ethnic minorities tend to do better on average, and have been steadily improving.) In Japan, students must pass a daunting entrance test to get into high school as well as college. And China requires an intensive college entrance exam that lasts more than nine hours.
But what arguably distinguishes the U.S. process is the aura of controversy and mistrust that has surrounded standardized testing since it first rose to prominence in the early 1900s — and later as part of a white-supremacist agenda designed to keep schools segregated even after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which ordered the end of racially separate schools in 1954.
Interest in expansive testing began as the relatively young field of psychology gained increasing traction in the 1910s and 20s, Kendi says. It was a fledgling discipline, seeking to gain a reputation within the scientific community. “At the time, psychologists imagined that the way you gain legitimacy was saying that empiricism was at the heart of the work and that the work was of social use,” Kendi said. “So, these standardized tests are tools we have created, and they are used for social good, so we are relevant, and they are empirical, so we are scientific.”
“It’s hard to know if all of them actually believed in the hierarchy,” Kendi added. “But what I do know is that the standardized tests arrived right on time, in every period, with new theories and measures to justify racial hierarchy.”
At the time, the popular term for the assessments was “intelligence tests.” That description was pushed by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman, who developed the Stanford-Binet IQ test and coined the term “intelligence quotient.” Terman freely admitted that he developed his intelligence scale by testing mostly White, middle-class American students. It wasn’t worth his while testing immigrants, Terman explained, because “these boys are ineducable beyond the merest rudiments of training.” And he didn’t bother with Black, Native American, and Latino children either, as “their dullness appears to be racial.”
The first widely used standardized tests in the U.S. were the Alpha and Beta tests, developed by a colleague of Terman, Yale University psychologist Robert Yerkes. He proposed them as a way to help the Army commanders assess the intelligence of their soldiers. Yerkes designed two versions of the test: Alpha for soldiers who could speak and write English, and Beta — a test series using images — for immigrants who did not know English well, or Americans who had not been educated well enough to achieve literacy.
Yerkes declared that in either case, the tests measured innate intelligence rather than education. “It behooves us to consider their reliability and their meaning, for no one of us as a citizen can afford to ignore the menace of race deterioration,” he wrote.