146 | chapter 5 | Fairness
But What Does This Have
to Do with Teaching?
Decades ago I was asked to serve as an expert witness in a federal court case tak-
ing place in Florida. It was known as the Debra P. versus Turlington case, because
Ralph Turlington was the Florida Commissioner of Education and Debra P. was
one of nine African American children who were about to be denied high school
diplomas because they had not passed a state-administered basic skills test. A class-
action lawsuit had been brought against Florida to stop this test-based denial of
diplomas.
When I was invited to serve as a witness for the state, I was initially pleased.
After all, to be an “expert” witness in a federal court case sounded like a form of
instant tenure. So, my first inclination was to agree to serve as a witness. But then I
learned that Florida’s high school graduation test was having a substantial dispa-
rate impact on the state’s African American children, far more of whom were going
to be denied diplomas than their White counterparts. I pondered whether I wanted
to support an assessment program that would surely penalize more minority than
majority children.
So, before making up my mind about becoming a witness in the Debra P.
case, I consulted a number of my African American friends at UCLA and in the Los
Angeles Unified School District. “Should I,” I asked, “take part in the support of a
test that denies diplomas to so many African American youngsters?”
Well, without exception, my African American friends urged me to accept the
Florida assignment. The essence of their argument was simple. What was going on
in Florida, they claimed, was the awarding of “counterfeit” diplomas to African
American children. If so many African American youngsters were actually failing
the state’s basic skills test, then it was quite likely that those children did not pos-
sess the necessary basic skills. Yet, even without those basic skills, many of Florida’s
African American children had previously been given high school diplomas that
allowed them to graduate without the skills they needed. My friends made it clear.
As one put it, “Get your tail down to Tallahassee and support any test that shows
many African American children are being instructionally shortchanged. You can’t
fix something if you don’t know it’s broken.”
And that’s where bias detection comes in. If teachers can eliminate bias from
their own assessments, then any gaps in performance levels of minority and majority
students can be attributed to instruction, not shortcomings in a test. Achievement
gaps, properly identified, can then be ameliorated instructionally. If there’s no recog-
nition of a bona fide gap, then there’s little reason for instructional alterations.
(As a postscript, the Debra P. case turned out to be an important precedent-
setter. It was ruled that a state can deny a high school diploma on the basis of a
basic skills test, but if the test covers content that students have not had an opportu-
nity to learn, then this violates a student’s—that is, a U.S. citizen’s—constitutionally
guaranteed property rights. I liked the ruling a lot.)
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Chapter Summary | 147
Most importantly, if you personally realize how repugnant all forms of
assessment unfairness are, and how assessment bias can distort certain students’
performances even if the bias was inadvertently introduced by the test’s developer,
you’ll be far more likely to eliminate assessment bias in your own tests. In educa-
tion, as in any other field, assessment bias should definitely be absent.
The presence of assessment-related federal laws obliges today’s teachers to
rethink the ways they should test students with disabilities and ELL students. With
few exceptions, children with disabilities are to be assessed (and instructed) in rela-
tion to the same curricular goals as all other children. This can often be accom-
plished through the use of accommodations—that is, alterations in presentations,
responses, settings, and timing/scheduling. Assessment accommodations, however,
must never alter the fundamental nature of the skill or knowledge being assessed.
Assessment accommodations can also be used to reduce potential bias associated
with the testing of ELL students. Given the enormous number of first languages
other than English now found in the nation’s schools, financial limitations tend
to prevent the development of suitable assessments for many language-minority
students.
Chapter Summary
This chapter on fairness in testing was, quite naturally, focused on how educa-
tors make their tests fair. Assessment bias was described as any element in an
assessment procedure that offends or unfairly penalizes students because of per-
sonal characteristics, such as their gender and ethnicity. Assessment bias, when
present, was seen to distort certain students’ performances on educational tests,
hence reduce the validity of score-based interpretations about those students.
The two chief contributors to assessment unfairness were identified as offensive-
ness and unfair penalization. The essential features of both of these factors were
considered. It was contended that an examination having a disparate impact on
a particular subgroup was not necessarily biased, although such a differential
impact certainly would warrant further scrutiny of the examination’s content
to discern if assessment bias was actually present. In many instances, disparate
impact from an examination simply indicates that certain groups of students
have previously received inadequate instruction or an insufficient opportunity
to learn.
Two procedures for identifying unfair—that is, biased—segments of educa-
tional assessment devices were described. A judgmental approach relies on the con-
sidered opinions of properly oriented bias reviewers. Judgmental approaches to
bias detection can be formally employed with high-stakes tests or less formally used
by classroom teachers. An empirical approach that relies chiefly on differential item
functioning can also be used, although its application requires large numbers of
students. It was recommended that classroom teachers be vigilant in the identifica-
tion of bias, whether in their own tests or in the tests of others. For detecting bias in
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