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Language in education

Refugee children left behind as eagle lands on the moon

By July 21, 2010May 30th, 20193 Comments3 min read7,997 views

Yesterday, the New York Times carried a heart-breaking story about an exceptional school principal forced from her position under No-Child-Left-Behind legislation in order for the school district to obtain federal funding. It’s an instructive tale about the standardized-assessment tail wagging the educational dog in the name of so-called quality assurance. I won’t repeat the story here other than to say it’s an article well-worth reading, and I hope it makes a dent in the ascendancy of the standardized assessment cult.

In the article, the principal shares a sad story about the cultural bias of the 5th-grade reading test, which will from now on become a stock of my intercultural communication teaching. Oscar, a recent arrival to the Vermont school from a refugee camp in Africa, took the same test as all the other kids around the country who have grown up in the USA and spoken English all their lives:

Oscar needed 20 minutes to read a passage on Neil Armstrong landing his Eagle spacecraft on the moon; it should have taken 5 minutes […] but Oscar was determined, reading out loud to himself.

The first question asked whether the passage was fact or fiction. “He said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Irvine, man don’t go on the moon, man don’t go on the back of eagles, this is not true.’”

Oscar had understood the text and he understood the difference between factual and fictional writing. However, his lack of exposure to (American) media, meant he got the first question and, subsequently, all the other five questions, which were based on the first one, wrong.

Oscar got penalized for the fact that his knowledge of the world was quite different from that of the middle-class native-born “standard” (?) child the test designers had in mind. In the policy context of No Child Left Behind the school and the principal were penalized, too.

Cultural bias has been a concern for assessment researchers and practitioners since the emergence of IQ tests in the first half of the 20th century. The evidence is there that standardized assessment disadvantages even among native-born students those from non-middle class backgrounds (Mac Ruairc, 2009, is a recent study in the Irish context well-worth reading). Students from migrant backgrounds and from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds are further disadvantaged. Despite all the evidence and all the research, standardized assessment and the idea that it means quality spreads like a cancer from one educational system to the next.

Dear readers, share Oscar’s story widely! Many adults in the developed world believe the moon-landing is not fact but fiction, and it’s plain to see that the fact that Oscar thought it was a story tells us nothing about his reading ability nor about the quality of the instruction he received in his school. There are thousands of such testing stories out there. How can so many wrongs add up to a right – the imagined standardized high-quality education system?

ResearchBlogging.org Ruairc, G. (2009). ‘Dip, dip, sky blue, who’s it? NOT YOU’: children’s experiences of standardised testing: a socio-cultural analysis Irish Educational Studies, 28 (1), 47-66 DOI: 10.1080/03323310802597325

Ingrid Piller

Author Ingrid Piller

Dr Ingrid Piller, FAHA, is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research expertise is in bilingual education, intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization.

More posts by Ingrid Piller

Join the discussion 3 Comments

  • Sense of alienation resulting from a lack of exposure to Western media (particularly popular culture such as movies, tv dramas and celebrities) is something I can easily relate to and also have seen in many international students here in Australia. It’s a different context from the serious issue of the testing system and cultural biases in it as in Ingrid’s post, but when I just arrived as an undergraduate student, I had no idea what and who Mr. Beans or the Simpsons or Monty Python were. No one really seemed to care about the fact that I wasn’t following what they were talking about and I used to get a “Don’t you know??” look. That was the reason I was often silent because my English was already pretty good back then;-) Luckily I had great flatmates – international students from Singapore. They rented videos for me, put me in front of the TV set with drinks and snacks and lectured me over so many nights what these programs were, why they were popular and funny to whom and which phrases were cool to use. I still often don’t get pop culture, but it doesn’t worry me any more (I’ve given up). What bugs me is when I see people such as international students from non-Western backgrounds being treated as ignorant or backwards because they haven’t heard or seen what’s popular here or in the US or the UK. I don’t expect non-Japanese to have an intimte knowledge of Mitokomon, G-Men, or Odoru Daisosasen. But you are expected to know Western pop culture which many unwittingly think are consumed everywhere (they are not), and if you fail to do so, you have failed the test of global citizenship. Particularly for new arrivals, continuing to talk in their newly acquaried second language while feeling ashamed of their lack of ‘global’ cultural knowledge with people who presumably ‘own’ the culture and language….requires superhuman power.

  • vahid says:

    Hi Ingrid,

    Thank you for sharing the story with everyone.
    The boundary between fact and fiction is blurred in the modern word.
    As Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) argues, the excess of signs and of meanings in late 20th century caused an effacement of reality, which is quite paradoxical.

  • Vera Williams Tetteh says:

    Thanks for sharing this story, Ingrid. It is timely food for thought for me as I prepare to front up for my boy’s parent teacher interview on Monday, which he is quite anxious about me attending. If only minority immigrant parents could see the culprit for what it is – cultural bias in education system!

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