THE GHOST OF PROGRESSIVES PAST.

A schoolteacher called Steven Singer takes umbrage at Bill Maher mocking him.

Maher disagrees with what I wrote.

In fact, the very idea annoyed him as a prime example of namby-pamby liberals taking their agenda too far.

What did I write in the article?

Only that standardized testing is a tool of white supremacy.

In fact, that was the title of the article, which seems to be about as far as Bill read because he ignored any arguments, facts or historical citations in the piece.

In part, we're still relitigating hoary arguments about the supposed cultural bias of the standardized tests, complete with "runner is to marathon as rower is to regatta," and look who Mr Singer trots out to support his argument.

It’s a real SAT question famously discussed in the infamous 1994 book, The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray – a book that tried to use discrepancies in test scores to prove white people are smarter than black people.

The answer is C, and it relies on a test taker’s knowing the meaning of regatta – something more likely to have come up in the daily lives of affluent white students than in the lives of less affluent minority students. If you don’t live by a body of water and/or don’t have much experience with rowing, you’re probably going to fail this question.

Who knew that the "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" quizzes in Reader's Digest were hidden tools of white supremacy?  Or that high school English classes attempted to create some familiarity with five-dollar words with the understanding that such words might be common currency in college, and those practice analogies quizzes (which younger readers don't encounter as the analogies don't have much predictive power and they've been off the test since 2005) were both test prep and college prep??

The high schools might not be doing much of anything else, either.

In fact, the College Board, the organization that develops and administers the SAT, tacitly admits its test is biased.

It now provides an “adversity score” for poor and minority students to adjust raw SAT scores to account for high schools and neighborhoods “level of disadvantage.”

In other words, they know that poor and minority kids get lower scores so they’re trying to fudge the results to give them a boost.

Which would be entirely unnecessary if the SAT assessed them accurately in the first place.

They are literally trying to make up for how biased their test scores are.

Am I being churlish to point out that those same school districts might not be assessing the role of misbehaving students in creating that adversity in the first place?  Easier to whinge about those unfamiliar words.

You can fix the tests.  You might be able to fix the schools.  You can reduce the production of Distressed Material showing up at college.

You can't change history.  "But if all this isn’t enough to convince you that standardized tests really are a tool of white supremacy, consider their sordid history. They are literally the product of the American eugenics movement."  Put another way, the self-styled progressive intellectuals of an earlier era created the objective conditions that the current cohort of self-styled progressive intellectuals want to change.