Cultural Bias

Perhaps you have heard of the term "cultural bias," particularly if you have done any reading about urban education and the achievement gap.

The idea is that part of the gap in test scores between low- and high-income students come from a lack of common cultural knowledge-- for example, a test question may ask about compound interest on a bank account, a concept with which most middle and upper class middle school students would at least be vaguely aware of... they know their parents have bank accounts, many of them may have savings accounts, and they have at least some idea of what interest is and how it works. For a student in poverty whose family lives paycheck to paycheck, the word "interest" may be completely foreign. This student has to not only learn HOW to calculate interest, they must first learn WHAT interest even is. If they did not explicitly learn about interest in math class, they will miss that question on the test-- even if they know how to use percentages in other circumstances.

To be honest, I was always a LITTLE bit skeptical of cultural bias. It just seems like for the most part, my kids are quite worldly and know about a lot of things I wouldn't expect them to.

Until today. We took a practice writing test today (it is scored, but it's a lead-up to the final test at the end of the year)... the test that affects our school's AYP Language Arts score that determines whether or not we are a "failing" school or whether we are "meeting standards."

Without getting too specific, the writing prompt REQUIRED knowledge of what the Nobel Peace Prize is and what an Academy Award is for. If students don't know these two things, they literally have no chance of writing a coherent essay.

Is this fair? I am of the opinion that it is not. I would say both of those things fall under the category of "cultural background knowledge" that most students growing up in a middle class home and school environment would know about-- their families read the newspaper, watch the news, and they have much more school experience with the arts and humanities. My students stared at me in disbelief when I read the prompt, and hung their heads when I told them I couldn't answer any questions about the topic.

And yet our school's future could be determined based on such cultural bias. In this example, even the best writers in our school could be foiled by lack of background knowledge. Is it fair to say a student is stupid because they don't know what the Academy Awards are? I don't really think so.