Education officials in Massachusetts are tossing out a standardized test question after students say it left them feeling traumatized.
The question, based on an excerpt from the novel, “The Underground Raildroad,” asked students to write an essay from the perspective of the character Ethel – a racist white woman living in North Carolina before the Civil War.
“When we debriefed it in class the next day, a lot of them just said I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to say bad things about a black girl like me,” said Jessie Lortie, an English teacher in Boston.
Students across Boston raised concerns which prompted the state decided to remove the question from make-up exams and eliminate it from student’s English MCAS scores. But the NAACP, state Teacher’s Unions and other groups say the whole test should be thrown away.