The legal case that determined that a standardized test in fact unjustly favored white students. The court found that “because the test was standardized to a white, middle-class group, it was inappropriate to use for tracking decisions.” Despite other, similar, court cases, and despite the growing evidence of inequality, testing became the norm over the next decades and led to streaming, and to a culture of social promotion and retention.
Eventually, these factors led to the separation of children by social class, with many children who lived in poverty receiving placements in the lower classrooms. Because of their normally lower socioeconomic status, black boys were heavily represented in these classes. Studies labeled children from various racial and ethnic groups innately deficient, based on their performance on intelligence tests. People ostensibly committed to managing the veracity of test results ignored social inequities and how they likely contributed to testing bias based on differences in social class and the oppression experienced by racial and ethnic groups.