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CHAPTER 1
Conceptualizing a Historical Narrative of Social Consequences
This history centers language-minoritized bilingual test-takers' experiences with tests and the consequences of that testing for those bilinguals. In this chapter, I outline key conceptual issues that arise in constructing a historical narrative of the social consequences of tests for language-minoritized bilinguals. One of the motivations for this book is the lack of a current narrative on the social consequences of testing for language-minoritized bilinguals. Another is to support change in testing practices (this is taken up in depth in the 'Concluding Thoughts' chapter). According to Shohamy, testing approaches for language-minoritized bilinguals have remained largely unchanged despite innovations in the field of education:
Although dynamic, diverse, and constructive discussions of multilingual teaching and learning are currently taking place within the language education field, the phenomenon is completely overlooked in the assessment field that continues to view language as a monolingual, homogenous, and often still native-like construct. (Shohamy, 2011: 419)
A history is presented here that highlights persistent and often repeated consequences, and specifically negative consequences of testing for language-minoritized bilingual populations. That testing has largely operated using monolingual standards, and the narrative provided here should serve as a motivation for innovations in testing to work actively against these negative social consequences. Such work is needed because, as Otheguy, García and Reid have stated, '[m]any language assessments [...] work to the detriment of bilingual children [and adults] worldwide' (Otheguy et al., 2015: 283).
This historical narrative examines the social consequences of testing faced by language-minoritized bilinguals, and elucidates how negative consequences persist. This book, then, is a direct engagement with a question that has been asked in various forms by many people: do the results of these tests – and the consequences of testing – merely reflect Conceptualizing a Historical Narrative of Social Consequences 15 social inequities, or do they reproduce them? This narrative seeks to illustrate through historical evidence that language-minoritized bilinguals have faced repeated, often severe, consequences which have both exacerbated existing inequities and introduced new ones.
To begin this task, I describe scholarship on intersectionality and historical perspectives of white supremacy, primarily in the United States but also as a global phenomenon. These views inform my approach to describing social consequences and validity, with an emphasis on how previous approaches to validity have treated language-minoritized bilingual test-takers; the discussion ends with the proposal that a use-oriented testing perspective be adopted in constructing a historical narrative of the consequences of testing. These different lenses highlight myriad separate factors at play in relation to the social consequences of testing, and importantly when looking at these experiences collectively. Thus, in this chapter I put forth a framework that is used throughout the book to provide evidence that can be used to inform new, shifting approaches to testing, with the explicit purpose of confronting and mitigating the reproduction of negative social consequences of testing for language-minoritized bilinguals through the construction of a cohesive, though not exhaustive, historical narrative.
Conceptualizing Histories of Discrimination
For an investigation of histories of discrimination, the scholarship on intersectionality and white supremacy provides an overarching framework to locate cohesion across the array of experiences related to themes of oppression and privilege. Intersectionality is particularly well situated because it would be challenging to conceive of a historical narrative of language-minoritized bilinguals in the United States that ignored the role of racism, ableism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+, xenophobia, classism and ageism. Combined with the literature on white supremacy, these views of history also serve as a lens for critiquing validity and how validity has been produced within a history of white supremacy.
Intersectionality
Including identities based on race, age, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, class and religion is essential to understanding the social consequences of testing because many language-minoritized bilinguals have faced negative social consequences not only because of their language background, but also because they inhabit one or more of these other identities as well. Intersectionality frameworks help to make sense of the interactions of these multiple minoritized identities, and the various forms of oppression entailed. In her seminal work on intersectionality, Crenshaw (1989, 1991) examined how Black women were uniquely impacted by 16 Social Consequences of Testing for Language-minoritized Bilinguals violence with respect to structural, political and representational intersectionality around race, class and gender. Crenshaw's work has been expanded to understand the experiences unique to individuals who inhabit two (or more) historically marginalized identities. Intersectionality frameworks facilitate the documentation of historical accounts of the forces that perpetuate oppression with respect to language-minoritized bilinguals.
Looking at these different perspectives of structural, political and representational intersectionality provides interpretive lenses that aid in framing how language-minoritized bilinguals have experienced the consequences of testing in relation to other social, political and historical phenomena. Structural intersectionality presents how different aspects of societies are linked to, make possible or sustain oppressive acts (Crenshaw, 1991, 2014). Political intersectionality emphasizes the laws or policies that are put in place to address one aspect of inequities, but that introduce a bevy of other complications when they do not take the impact of other intersectional identities into consideration. Representational intersectionality is understood as 'when one discourse fails to acknowledge the significance of the other' and 'the power relations that each attempts to challenge are strengthened' (Crenshaw, 1991: 1282).
For language-minoritized bilinguals, intersectionality has been applied in research on raciolinguistic ideologies and on language-minoritized bilinguals in K-12 schools who have also been diagnosed with disabilities. Rosa and Flores integrate intersectionality as one of five components of a raciolinguistic perspective. They argue that this bringing together of language and race 'is not intended to displace, avoid, or distract from important analyses of categories such as gender, socioeconomic class, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion' and that they instead align their argument with scholarship in intersectionality that 'refuse[s] dichotomies between categories such as race, class, gender, and sexuality' (Rosa & Flores, 2017: 15). They review research that has looked at how these intersections of language, race and additional identities have coalesced to impact individuals. Kangas (2017, 2018) and Schissel and Kangas (2018) have applied intersectionality to understand the unique concerns that arise for language-minoritized bilinguals who are also diagnosed with disabilities in US public schools. These works illuminate a lack of examination of what separate practices and policies – on the part of teachers, schools and tests – for language-minoritized bilinguals or students with disabilities mean for students who are both.
Intersectionality is itself not beyond critique, however. In general these critiques are essential to move intersectionality forward as a reflective, contextually attuned theory or framework. Cho (2013), for example, has called into question how dominance and oppression are often prescriptively ascribed to particular racial groups or sexes. She points to somewhat reductive portrayals of race as Blackness and sex as women, to the exclusion of more fluid frames for identifying race, sex and other Conceptualizing a Historical Narrative of Social Consequences 17 identities. Others have questioned the application of intersectionality in research centered on identity (Anthias, 2012; Cho et al., 2013; Guidroz & Berger, 2009; Núñez, 2014). Yet the prevalence of particular emphases in critiques has been problematized as well. May (2015) has claimed that many critiques are more indicative of how intersectional research has been misunderstood or poorly executed. She calls for researchers engaging in work with intersectionality to reflect on how power operates in scholarship as well. Moreover:
[what researchers] may not have accounted for adequately is how [they] are regularly invited to adhere to and think within the confines of existing and established frameworks. [... These frameworks] consistently seem more logical or plausible and those who use them, or adhere to their norms, are more likely to be perceived as rational or as making reasoned claims. This is what intersectionality, in great part, has to teach us: and this is also, in great part, how it gets dropped or distorted. (May, 2015: 67–68)
The point that May has made is that intersectionality is not a straightforward interpretive frame. Rather, it is 'about "both/and" thinking, relational power and privilege, ontological multiplicity, and intermeshed oppressions' (May, 2015: 98). Thus, many of the critiques of intersectionality are reflective of degrees of incompatibility between intersectionality and some paradigms within research and how central tenets are 'dropped or distorted'.
For this historical narrative, intersectionality highlights how the multiple minoritized categories that language-minoritized bilinguals occupy can impact the social consequences of testing. More specifically, it looks how these bilinguals are more susceptible to different testing consequences because they inhabit multiple minoritized identities. These identities are often foregrounded and even isolated in ways that make a test or testing consequence more readily applied.
Focus on race and white supremacy
In constructing a historical narrative of testing and its consequences, it is important to understand that colonialism, slavery and imperialism are global phenomena with clear histories in testing and in the United States. Viewing testing and its consequences with respect to white supremacy makes visible the systemic oppressive forces (Allen, 2001; Ansley, 1989; Doane & Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Flores & Rosa, 2015; Gillborn, 2006; Omi & Winant, 1993; Sledd, 1969; Smith, 2012, 2016) that circulate around, through and with testing. In reviewing the literature on white supremacy, conceptualizations comprehensively encompass historical, political, social and economic influences and events. The linguistic elements generally link 18 Social Consequences of Testing for Language-minoritized Bilinguals whiteness with monolingual or native speaker ideologies about English proficiency that align with standard language varieties (Sledd, 1969). That is not to say that whiteness could not include speaking other languages, but the assumption is steeped in perceived fluency in English. One example is the practice of hiring 'native English speakers' in different regions of the world, which has favored white individuals. In looking to definitions of white supremacy, there is an emphasis on these factors, and the ways in which supremacist acts represent power relationships that marginalize. Ansley explained how white supremacy represents
a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institution and social settings. (Ansley, 1989: 1024n)
The inclusion of unconscious ideas is particularly relevant for the understanding of white supremacy in relation to testing. The United States has a history of policies and laws explicitly formed on the basis of white supremacy, around, for example, immigration and naturalization. Such practices and their impact have not disappeared; rather, white supremacy has shifted from de jure to de facto practices (Mills, 2003).
Smith (2016) has explored how white supremacy is sustained through three primary logics which are anchored in systems which often do little to question their practice: slavery anchored in capitalism; genocide anchored in colonialism; and orientalism anchored in war. These logics are literal in their description of historical events, yet bear relevance to modern, de facto versions of white supremacy. From slavery to the current for-profit prison and immigration detainment systems, economic growth through capitalism has been achieved. Genocide speaks to the disappearance of Indigenous peoples, and in particular to their removal in order to gain their lands. The forcible removal of Native Americans throughout the history of the United States is not far removed from the government actions at Standing Rock Reservation, where from April 2016 there were protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (which had raised serious concerns about endangering water supplies and destroying ancient burial grounds). The third logic of white supremacy argued by Smith is orientalism anchored in war. Based on the work of Edward Said, orientalism describes the process whereby Western countries (inclusive of the United States) are deemed to have a superior or exceptional civilization, while other regions of the world are less advanced or exotic. The exoticism or 'foreignness' is often seen as a threat, which is then used to justify war or other forms of military action. The 'war on terror' and the differential treatment of domestic terrorist events based on the race or ethnicity of the person committing the act exemplify this logic of white supremacy.
In seeking a way to understand how language-minoritized bilinguals have been treated historically, this book looks to Omi and Winant's (1993) concept of racial projects. 'Racial projects connect an interpretation of race in a given historical moment or context to the organization of social structures and everyday practices' (Carbado & Harris, 2012: 183). Understanding the interpretation of language-minoritized bilinguals in a given historical context in connection with the organization of social structures and everyday practices foregrounds the relevance of the social consequences of testing. While racial projects seek in a similar way to understand the interpretation, representation or organization of racial dynamics, this historical narrative seeks to understand the dynamics of being perceived as 'not yet proficient in English' in relation to a multitude of other characteristics that serve to perpetuate the use of tests to delegitimize the participation of language-minoritized bilinguals in various facets of US society.
Exploring the contexts of white supremacy outside the United States also factors into this understanding of white supremacy. Allen (2001) examines how conceptualizations of globalization and the influence of capitalism in driving global connections are indicative of global applications of white supremacy. Twine (1998) has explored the dynamics of white supremacy in Brazil in the views of Afro-Brazilians. Hage (2012) has detailed racialization and discourses of superiority in Australia. In connecting white supremacy to testing, Gillborn (2006) showed how white norms are applied in the national assessment system in schools in the United Kingdom, questioning – like this book – whether tests record or produce inequalities. He outlined the shifts in tests and accountability frameworks, most of which obscure the heterogeneity of achievement of students from different racial backgrounds, and the enactment of policies with almost no regard to how they could affect non-white students. To draw attention to the ubiquity of subjugation of language-minoritized bilinguals in testing, Gillborn remarked, 'It is difficult to imagine a contrary situation where no action would be taken were a new assessment system to result in white children being out-performed by their peers in every minority group' (Gillborn, 2006: 334). This then leads into a discussion of the purpose of testing, which connects with test validity. These understandings of white supremacy serve as a backdrop for constructing a historical narrative of the consequences of testing faced by language-minoritized bilinguals.
Validity and Language-minoritized Bilinguals
Modern definitions of validity stem from a view that the interpretations of or actions based on a test score are used for intended purposes.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Social Consequences of Testing for Language-minoritized Bilinguals in the United States"
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Copyright © 2019 Jamie L. Schissel.
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