The anti-racist psychometrics of the Olympian's mom

The mother of triple gold medalist sprinter Gabby Thomas is Professor Jennifer Randall, who, during the Racial Reckoning, was handed an endowed chair at the U. of Michigan as a professor of anti-racist psychometrics. And the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative gave her $5 million to found the Center for Measurement Justice to reimagine standardized testing to make it anti-racist.

Interestingly, Dr. Randall’s initiative has gotten almost no publicity in the mainstream news media so far. I wonder why not?

It could be fear of Elon Musk’s Twitter making a fool out of a reporter who repeats what sounds like a bunch of 1970s talking points, while her black daughter dominates a black-dominated sport? But that sounds like I’m overthinking it.

From the Hechinger Report a couple of years ago:

PROOF POINTS: Seven questions for Jennifer Randall

Mother of Olympic medalist Gabby Thomas is a professor of education measurement who champions anti-racist tests

by Jill Barshay

May 9, 2022

Jennifer Randall is a firebrand inside the staid field of psychometrics, a quantitative area of education that uses multiple choice tests to measure IQ and student achievement. One of the few Black scholars in the field, she argues that standardized assessments themselves are racist. She’s developing new types of “anti-racist” tests as she calls for assessment reparations. With testing under attack and colleges dropping the SAT, Randall’s star is on the rise.

Of course, that was two years ago. Since then, colleges are re-requiring admissions tests.

Barshay: How are tests racist?

Randall: I think that most test items are white-centered. Item developers [the test question writers], if they picture a kid, that kid does not look like me. That’s because most item writers are white people. Item writers who are not white grew up in the same colonial schools as their white counterparts. They figured out how to develop items that make it through bias and sensitivity review. And those tend to be white-centered.

So that explains why Asians are so high-scoring these days.

When I talk about the white supremacist hegemony, whiteness is the default; it’s normal. People don’t see it as white-centric; they just see it as neutral.

I’ll give you a multiple-choice example I wrote. It’s a drawing of a family sitting down to dinner, a pretty Eurocentric, regular American meal. There’s a clock at the top. And the question is, what time is dinner? That item on its face seems perfectly neutral: a family sitting down to dinner, we’re asking about the time. But it assumes a lot of things that are white-centric. It assumes that families sit down to dinner all together on any given evening at exactly the same time. And there’s just copious amounts of food laid out on the table. For many children, this is not their experience. Maybe their parents are working into the evening. One works the night shift; one works a day shift. Dinner doesn’t always happen at the same time. These types of items are white-centric without people even recognizing it.

The stock photo companies are working hard to rectify that:

Although they don’t seem to have a lot of clocks on the walls. Is that not a black thing? Or, more plausibly, do stock photographers try to avoid clocks in their pictures because they complicate matters by showing people eat dinner at 10:30?

… Q. You’ve said that you want improve tests and make them “anti-racist.” How can tests actually promote social justice?

A. We need to create items that provide for a full historical context and don’t just elevate and protect whites. I used to teach social studies and every assessment had Thomas Jefferson on it. They all mentioned that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and that he was a brilliant man. The assessments didn’t point out that he owned slaves, raped a 14-year-old girl and had children with this woman.

Tests have to call out injustice. Why can’t we have word problems in math that deal with something other than counting rocks or ice cream flavors? Those are just boring items that no kid – white, Black, Jew, Gentile – wants to take. They’re tedious. I’m working with my students to come up with assessment items that address sociopolitical issues. Why can’t we have an item that is about students preparing meals for Black Lives Matters protests, and they are protesting holding asylum seekers at the border? Or about disparate dress codes for middle schoolers?

My guess is that Asians would still ace the questions.

Representation is a huge piece of it. Students need to see Black and brown leaders from their communities on their assessments.

The notorious “regatta” question was last used on the SAT a half century ago. Even then, blacks did as good as whites, relatively speaking, on it.

Q. Testing has been blamed for narrowing what schools teach and for labeling low-income children as not proficient, inadequate or failing. You’ve been talking about assessment reparations. What are they?

A. Large-scale assessment companies have made a lot of money harming Black, brown and indigenous students whether they want to admit it or not. ETS [Educational Testing Service] should be donating to make up for all the harm that they have done. When I say ETS, I mean every single one of them: ACT, Curriculum Associates, NWEA, Pearson. All of them should be doing the work to undo some of that harm. They’re not going to. But I’m going to keep telling them they should.

After all, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife gave me $5 million. Where’s the rest of my money?

Q. How have your ideas been received by your colleagues in education measurement?

A. When I talk about building an assessment that will be culturally relevant or culturally sustaining for students of color, colleagues say we have to be careful not to compromise rigor.

It’s almost as if academics tested all this stuff in the 1970s and, to their surprise, it turned out to be a complete fizzle.

I say perhaps we need to reconsider what we’re testing. That has been met with a dead silence. You could hear a mouse fart. (I’m from Alabama. I can say that.)

Perhaps they are familiar with the history of social science in the U.S. over the 58 years since the Coleman Report of 1966, while you are not?

People are listening to me right now because of what’s going on in society. I think if we hadn’t watched Eric Garner murdered on TV, fewer people would be listening to me and my work wouldn’t be getting published.

But people who have power are still resistant. I can read between the lines. They’re scared to say, “Absolutely not, Jennifer Randall is insane,” because the optics don’t look good. I know what they’re thinking and saying behind closed doors. But I think we have enough people, a core group, where we will be able to make change.

My Q.: How come your daughter Gabby Thomas is faster at sprinting than any white woman in America?

Interestingly, when Thomas won the silver medal in the 4 x 100 meter relay at the Tokyo Olympics, one of her finals teammates was Jenna Prandini, a white woman. I don’t believe a white American man has made the 4 x 100 m relay team since 1964’s Gerry Ashworth, a Jewish Harvard Business School MBA.

In general, the race gap in sprinting appears to be bigger among men than women.