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Jacqueline Hyungmin Kim
Sara Parrott
Going Global
October 30th, 2017
The history of literacy tests for voter registration
In today’s society, most citizens of the united states register to vote without any regard to race of color. However, prior to passage of the federal voting rights act in 1965, southern states disenfranchised nonwhites in many ways.
A literacy test is a tool that measures one’s proficiency in reading and writing. In the 19th century, various forms of literacy tests were used in the voter registration process in the Southern States of United states. It was used in a way to prevent certain groups of people, mostly people of color, and sometimes, poor whites, from exercising their right to vote.
The formal literacy tests were first introduced in 1890s, and was suspended in the 1960s, with the voter rights act in 1965. These tests that worked to disenfranchise racial minorities because people who can’t prove certain level of education had to take this test and people of color were deprived of education due to the segregation in school.
The contents of the literacy test are a mix of trivia questions regarding the civic procedure and citizenship, according to source(cite). Take Alabama literacy test from 1965 for example. 68 questions consist of mostly sentence filling questions and occasional multiple
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For example, Louisiana literacy test’s questions are worded unclearly, with the intention to make it unanswerable. The time limit for this test was 10 minutes and a single wrong answer meant failing the test. On top of this, the ultimate judge was the white registrar, so it was impossible for African Americans to pass the test and register to vote. Even after passing the literacy test, there were other barriers that prevented blacks from voting. A more general use of literacy test refers to poll tax, police intimidation, economic retaliation and
Additionally, the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed blacks the right to vote, but the South found ways to get around this amendment.
The 15th Amendment states that “The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. This gave African Americans the right to vote. The amendment seemed to signify the fulfillment of all promises to African Americans. The 15th Amendment is also categorized as one of the three constitutional amendments. In the beginning thirty-seven states ratified the 15th Amendment. The first of these states to ratify the 15th Amendment was Nevada. To disenfranchise African Americans, devices were written into the constitutions of former confederate states. In 1869, when the New Year began, the republicans were anxious to introduce a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the black man’s right to vote. Congress considered the amendment that was proposed for two months. When congress approved a compromise, the amendment did not specifically mention the black man. The struggle for and against ratification hung on what blacks and other political interests would do. The Republican-dominated Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act. This act divided the South into five military districts and outlining how ...
Despite the 14th and 15th constitutional amendments that guarantee citizenship and voting right regardless of race and religion, southern states, in practice, denied African Americans the right to vote by setting up literacy tests and charging a poll tax that was designed only to disqualify them as voters. In 1955, African Americans still had significantly less political power than their white counterparts. As a result, they were powerless to prevent the white from segregating all aspects of their lives and could not stop racial discrimination in public accommodations, education, and economic opportunities. Following the 1954 Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, it remained a hot issue in 1955. That year, however, it was the murder of the fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till that directed the nation’s attention to the racial discrimination in America.
Standardized testing requires student to answer same or similar questions with given answer choices that are often in multiple choice or true or false form. Dating back from 2200 B.C standardized testing is recorded being used in China ,where people applying for government jobs had to take an examination ,testing their knowledge on confucian philosophy and poetry.During the mid-1800s in Industrial Revolution ,soon after child labor laws were enacted taking children out of farms and factories and putting them into schools the use of standardized test was introduced to America in Boston. Standardized testing was being used to compare schools and teaching quality; Boston’s program was soon adopted nation wide. Types of standardized test including the most common achievement tests and aptitude test. Achievement test measure the progress a student has made academically in a time period. Whereas an aptitude test attempt to predict a student’s ability to succeed academically.Standardized test are used on a large scale because computers can score them quickly, consistently, and inexpensively rather than open ended essay questions which need to be evaluated essay by essay, though essay questions allow for deeper thinking.The purpose for standardized testing is to create a standard on which all students can learn equally,but in “The Real threat to American Schools” by Alfie Kohn, the author claims that idea of standards might not be true. The author makes an interesting point in that if the possibility that all students met the state standards and passed all the tests would those students be considered ‘perfectly educated’ of would the politicians and test takers believe instead that the test was too easy and the standards were too low. B...
After the American Civil War (1861-1865), the United States entered a stage of reconstruction where many southern states passed poll taxes that appeared to be merely another source of revenue, when in actuality, its purpose was to prevent African Americans from voting (Carson & Bonk, 15). In attempts of solving this issue, the fifteenth amendment was passed, which declared the right to vote to male citizens of any color. The fifteenth amendment, however, did not stop southern state legislators to find other ways to prevent African Americans as well as other minorities from voting. In addition to making citizens have to pay in order to vote, southern states also adapted literacy tests (Carson & Bonk, 15). In order to vote, citizens had to take literacy tests and obtain the results that identified them as “literate” enough to vote. Although the literacy tests gravely affected African Americans, it also affected woman and people of other ethnicities with poor education denying them the right to vote (Carson & Bonk, 15). By oppressing minorities and denying them the right to vote, the obvious outcome was that wealthy candidates who ran for
Standardized tests are biased to certain students whether it is race, or even how much money the parent(s) earn. According to Standardized Testing and Its Victims by Alfie Kohn, the tests are a lot easier for children coming from richer communities like Dublin for example, then Cleveland where funding is scarce (Kohn, 2000). It is not just a rich and poor battle it also is a battle with students and regional or language barriers. According to Uyen Zimmerman, my former math instructor from Dublin Coffman, explained English as a second language students interpret asked questions phrased strangely to them differently than a student whose primary language is English. For example, she said there was a question on the ACT that asked a question about folding pizza and an ESL student thought that it meant putting pizza into a folder. Another example is asking students about black ice when students in states such as Hawaii and Louisiana, have never seen or heard of black ice (Zimmerman, 2014). I agree with her completely. All standardized tests are playing with what the creators of the test think is a “standard” and testing all students across America with the exact same questions.
"After 1815 Americans transformed the republic of the Founding Fathers into a democracy. State after state revoked property qualifications for voting and holding officethus transforming Jefferson's republic of property holders into Andrew Jackson's mass democracy. Democracy, however, was not for everyone. While states extended political rights to all white men, they often withdrew or limited such rights for blacks. As part of the same trend, the state of New Jersey took the vote away from propertied women, who formerly had possessed that right. Thus the democratization of citizenship applied exclusively to white men. In the mid19th century, these men went to the polls in record numbers. The election of 1828 attracted 1.2 million voters; that number jumped to 1.5 million in 1836 and to 2.4 million in 1840. Turnout of eligible voters by 1840 was well over 60 percenthigher than it had ever been, and much higher than it is now." (Remini, 1998)
In the latter half of the 18th century, freed slaves possessed the right to vote in all but three states. It was not until the 19th century that states began to pass laws to disenfranchise the black population. In 1850, only 6 out of the 31 states allowed blacks to vote. 1Following the civil war, three reconstruction amendments were passed. The first and second sought to end slavery and guarantee equal rights. The third, the 15th amendment, granted suffrage regardless of color, race, or previous position of servitude.2 The 15th Amendment monumentally changed the structure of American politics as it was no longer the privileged whites who could vote. For some it was as though hell had arrived on earth, but for others, it was freedom singing. However, the song was short lived. While many political cartoons from the period show the freedom that ex-slaves have for voting because of the 15th Amendment, they often neglect to include the fact that many African Americans were coerced into voting a certain way or simply had their rights stripped from them.
Standardized testing is an unfair and inaccurate form of judging a person’s intellect. In many cases, people are either over- or underrepresented by their test scores, partly because America does not currently have the capabilities of fairly scoring the increasing number of tests. Additionally, many students today are not native English speakers, and their capabilities could be grossly underestimated by these types of exams. Although President Bush is a supporter, many influential people are against this bill, including the largest teacher’s union in the United States, which has formed a commission in opposition to the President’s proposal.
All four of these major flaws in the system combine to create an incredibly unfair atmosphere for English language learners in public schools. Data suggests that English learning students produce scores “20-40 percentage points below other students on statewide assessments,” (Menken). It is clear that the design of standardized tests are biased toward English speakers. Thus, as a result of the No Child Left Behind act, ELL’s are left behind significantly more than English speaking students strictly as a result of English comprehension. From these flaws and biases, Kate Menken argues that standardized tests are in fact a language policy issue. Menken claims that English literacy has become an important gate-keeper in immigration. She refers to Leibowitz’s words to support her argument: “English literacy tests and other statutory sanctions in favor of English were originally formulated as an indirect but effective means of
African-Americans may sometimes wonder at the contradictory facts about their history presented in many standard history texts. These texts state that blacks were given the right to vote in 1870, yet the same texts will acknowledge that this right did not really exist for African-Americans until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Ashby, Cornelia M. No Child Left Behind Act. [Electronic Resource] : Education Assistance Could Help States Better Measure Progress Of Students With Limited English Proficiency : Testimony Before The Subcommittee On Early Childhood, Elementary And Secondary Education, Committee On Education And Labor, House Of Representatives. n.p.: [Washington, D.C.] : U.S. Govt. Accountability Office, [2007], 2007. University of Alabama Libraries’ Classic Catalog. Web. 22 Feb. 2016.
According to the America’s Black Holocaust Museum, African-Americans were restricted from voting with violence, literacy tests, property tests, and poll taxes (Voting Rights for Blacks and Poor Whites in the Jim Crow South 1). “Blacks who tried to vote were threatened, beaten, and killed. Their families were also harmed. Sometimes their homes were burned down. Often, they lost their jobs or were thrown off their farms” (Voting Rights for Blacks and Poor Whites in the Jim Crow South 1). This clearly affected their right to vote because it scared them away from the poles. In addition to this, they were given literacy tests and property tests. If they were deemed illiterate, they were unable to vote (Voting Rights for Blacks and Poor Whites in the Jim Crow South 1). This was especially unfair because even if the black citizen could understand what was being said to them, the administrator of the test would say that they couldn 't in order to prevent them from voting (Voting Rights for Blacks and Poor Whites in the Jim Crow South 1). For the property tests, only citizens that owned property could vote, and many black citizens did not own property (Voting Rights for Blacks and Poor Whites in the Jim Crow South 1). This was also unfair because African-Americans could not afford to own property because of their extremely poor economic situation. Finally, there were poll
Literacy is defined as “the ability to use available symbol systems that are fundamental to learning and teaching for the purposes of comprehending and composing, for the purposes of making and communicating meaning and knowledge” (Stock, 2012), and it is one of the most essential skills that an early year student will learn. Literacy serves to provide the building blocks for the continued knowledge acquisition and general education of individuals of all ages; by working to understand and identify how and why literacy is taught using the structured literacy block format in Australian schools, and in identifying the benefits of utilizing this type of tool for teaching literacy in student’s early years, it will be possible to gain a better understanding of the organization, planning, and teaching approaches that are used in a literacy block approach. A sample standard literacy block will be provided, offering the means of understanding the applications of the tool, which will serve to further stress the necessity of this tool’s usage.
Literacy embraces reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Integrating all of these into a literacy program is key. Teachers must provide endless and ongoing opportunities for their student to read, write, listen, and speak.