Standardized Means Bias: How Testing Serves Monopoly Capital and Undermines Public Education

In the political economy of U.S. schooling, so-called “standardized” tests are not neutral yardsticks. By design and in practice they embed cultural-linguistic hurdles and reproduce concentrated social advantage. In today’s capitalist, bourgeois school system, these regimes are policy instruments that sort, exclude, and legitimize austerity and privatization, useful to monopoly capital’s project of attacking public education (Hursh, 2013; Saltman, 2014).

Bias is not a slur; it’s in the field’s own rulebook. The profession’s Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing define fairness as identifying and removing construct-irrelevant barriers: language, context, and format that depress scores without measuring the intended construct. If those barriers differentially burden groups, the test is unfair. That is the canonical definition, not ideology (American Educational Research Association [AERA], American Psychological Association [APA], & National Council on Measurement in Education [NCME], 2014; Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, 2023).

Linguistic load does not equate with learning: standardization encodes language privilege. Decades of research show the English complexity of math word problems (syntax, academic vocabulary, idioms) depresses scores, especially for multilingual students, while linguistic modification boosts performance without altering the math being tested. When wording changes who passes, the instrument is measuring language access as much as math proficiency (Young et al., 2014; Sato et al., 2010).

The “neutral yardstick” tracks wealth. National analyses document an extreme income–score gradient: children of the wealthiest 1% are about 13 times more likely to hit 1300+ on SAT/ACT than low-income peers! Scores scale with access to advantaged neighborhoods and resources, not with some detached notion of merit (Mineo, 2023; González Canché et al., 2025).

In the post-affirmative-action era, elite universities are already restoring testing under the claim that scores “help” holistic review. Yet multi-study syntheses find mixed effects of test-optional on actual enrollment diversity. In other words, the testing regime remains a gatekeeping hinge that bends toward existing advantage (Borter, 2024; Kye & Wu, 2025).

High-stakes testing is not merely a flawed measurement practice; it’s a policy technology in a neoliberal script: produce crisis via narrow metrics, declare public schools “failing,” justify closures/charters/outsourcing, expand private markets in curriculum, tutoring, ed-tech, and testing itself (Hursh, 2013; Saltman, 2014). “Standardization” provides the veneer of objectivity required to legitimate upward redistribution in education.

As for the counter-arguments & replies:

• “Fairness reviews catch bias.” Researchers keep finding differential item functioning and language-load effects, proof that culture and language leak into the instrument. The presence of accommodations and linguistic modification is itself evidence of baked-in barriers (AERA, APA, & NCME, 2014; Young et al., 2014).

• “Standardization ensures comparability.” Comparability of what? When wealth and neighborhood context so strongly predict scores, comparability serves to rank-order access to advantage, not to reveal pure ability (Harvard Gazette, 2023; González Canché et al., 2025).

• “Tests help disadvantaged students in holistic review.” Even where that claim is made, system-level evidence on diversity is mixed; without redistributing opportunity and interpreting scores through context, testing re-centers privilege (Borter, 2024; Kye & Wu, 2025).

In a system organized around accumulation and privatization, “standardized” means biased. Not only psychometrically (via language/context) but structurally, as scores operationalize hierarchy to discipline labor, ration credentials, and delegitimate the public. Real equity requires doing away with high-stakes tests, weighting local, multi-evidence judgments, and, where scores remain, mandating context-sensitive interpretation that treats them as signals saturated with social structure, not as neutral truth (AERA, APA, & NCME, 2014; González Canché et al., 2025).

References

American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education. (2014). Standards for educational and psychological testing. AERA.

Borter, G. (2024, February 22). Yale University reinstates standardized test requirement. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/yale-university-reinstates-standardized-test-requirement-2024-02-22/

González Canché, M. S., Zheng, K., Song, Y., & Liang, Y. (2025). Standardized testing for diverse talent identification: A framework to address geographical bias in standardized testing and increase diversity in college admissions in the post-affirmative action/race-neutral admissions era. Research in Higher Education, 66(2). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-024-09824-4

Mineo, L. (2023, November 22). New study finds wide gap in SAT/ACT test scores between wealthy, lower-income kids. Harvard Gazette. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/11/new-study-finds-wide-gap-in-sat-act-test-scores-between-wealthy-lower-income-kids/

Hursh, D. (2013). Raising the stakes: High-stakes testing and the attack on public education in New York. Journal of Education Policy, 28(5), 574–588.

Kye, A., & Wu, M.-J. (2025). Exploring test-optional admissions policies: Patterns in applications, enrollment, and diversity during COVID-19 (EdWorkingPaper 25-1285). Annenberg Institute.

Saltman, K. J. (2014). Neoliberalism and corporate school reform: “Failure” and “creative destruction.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 36(4), 249–259. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2014.938564

Sato, E., Rabinowitz, S. N., Gallagher, C., & Huang, C.-W. (2010). Accommodations for English language learner students: The effect of linguistic modification of math test item sets (NCEE 2009-4079). National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED510556.pdf

Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. (2023). Chapter 3: Test fairness. In 2021–22 Summative technical report. https://technicalreports.smarterbalanced.org/2021-22_summative-report/_book/test-fairness.html

Young, J. W., King, T. C., Hauck, M. C., Ginsburgh, M., Kotloff, L., Cabrera, J., & Cavalie, C. (2014). Improving content assessment for English language learners: Studies of the linguistic modification of test items (ETS Research Report No. RR-14-23). Educational Testing Service. https://doi.org/10.1002/ets2.12023