Reviewed by Jen Daly, University of New Hampshire
Herman, J.L., Bailey, A. L., & Martinez, J. F. (Eds.) (2023). Fairness in educational assessment and the next edition of the Standards. [Special issue]. Educational Assessment, 28(2)
Educational Assessment’s special issue “Fairness in educational assessment and the next edition of the Standards,” organized as a dialogue among three authors, Jennifer Randall, Randy Bennett, and Guillermo Solano-Flores, tackles themes of equity, fairness, and justice-oriented approaches to large-scale standardized testing in U.S. K-12 schools. The issue begins with Randall’s piece “It Ain’t Near ‘Bout Fair: Re-Envisioning the Bias and Sensitivity Review Process from a Justice-Oriented Antiracist Perspective.” Bennett authors the next piece titled “Toward a Theory of Socioculturally Responsive Assessment.” Solano-Flores then responds to both Randall and Bennett in “How Serious Are We about Fairness in Testing and How Far Are We Willing To Go? A Response to Randall and Bennett with Reflections about the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing.” The issue closes with a summative “Fairness in educational assessment and the next edition of Standards: Concluding Commentary.”
Beginning with “It ain’t near ‘bout fair,” Randall calls for an explicitly anti-racist re-envisioning of the item review stage (also known as Bias/Fairness and Sensitivity Review) of standardized test development. This process is meant to challenge white supremacist logics that have long provided the foundation for large scale educational assessments, and Randall argues that using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Theory (CWT) as frameworks will generate a shift “for learning and, if necessary, unlearning” (p. 70). Randall’s recommendations focus on three actionable revisions: “(1) shift from a fear-oriented to a justice-oriented perspective in the development of guidelines; (2) a re-envisioning of what is meant by barriers and construct irrelevant variance; (3) the need to facilitate the development of the collective critical consciousness of assessment developers and reviewers” (p. 72). According to Randall, current bias and sensitivity review processes are driven by fear and constructed with stakeholders in mind, not students. While these policies claim to avoid traumatizing minority students, they are actually “racism disingenuously cloaked as a concern for the emotional well-being of students” (p. 75). Randall also recommends an antiracist approach to language, which will undercut the dominant assumption that standard edited American English is the formal language. The third recommendation focuses on the education of assessment professionals to decenter whiteness and become intentionally antiracist. These three recommendations are active ways that tests can become sites of resistance to white supremacy and spaces of learning while actively engaging all students in antiracist practices.
Engaging in the current long-standing dialogue surrounding the abolishment of standardized tests, Randy Bennett next navigates a way to continue utilizing standardized tests with a major overhaul centered on equity and justice. Using existing frameworks of culturally responsive education and culturally relevant pedagogy, Bennett comes to understand tests as cultural artifacts that not only reflect ideologies but also work to perpetuate them. At present, testing models are widely based on antiquated and eugenicist perspectives that have affected vulnerable populations in material and emotional ways (Bennett, 2023). For Bennett, it’s about changing the perspective to accommodate and acknowledge multiple ways of knowing and communicating. Bennett outlines a working definition of socioculturally responsive assessment from five principles outlined in the article:
- includes problems that connect to the cultural identity, background, and lived experiences of all individuals, especially from traditionally underserved groups;
- allows forms of expression and representation in problem presentation and solution that help individuals show what they know and can do;
- promotes deeper learning by design;
- adapts to personal characteristics including cultural identity; and
- characterizes performance as an interaction among extrinsic and intrinsic factors. (p. 96)
Bennett notes that more research is necessary, but there is no need to wait: there are already successful models of equitable and empowering assessment and a wide variety of current technologies that can offer more individual approaches to testing.
Taking a historical perspective, Guillermo Solano-Flores examines the use of the term “fairness” and its connection to oppression, power differentials, and inequality, arguing that Randall and Bennett offer two perspectives on two different aspects of testing that should be implemented together rather than thought of as separate recommendations. For Solano-Flores, talk is not enough: “I would like to see a deep and honest recognition of the limitations of assessment systems, not an update of terms and appearances” (p. 105), and Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing is a place to enact actionable change in defining fairness with more “‘must’s’ and fewer ‘should’s’” (p. 114). For Solano-Flores, testing is a component of a much larger societal issue: “there is a price that we…need to pay if we are serious about fair testing. That price has the form of a new system of social and institutional priorities, a change of mentality, and willingness to do things differently” (p. 114).
While this special issue considered large-scale testing, many of the justice-oriented recommendations could be applied on a smaller scale through use of their theoretical foundations. In the last ten years, the discipline of Writing Studies has focused on writing assessment through a justice-oriented lens engaging with equity driven assessment, such as Asao Inoue and Mya Poe (Inoue, 2015; Poe & Inoue, 2016; Poe, Inoue, &Elliot, 2018; Randall, Slomp, Poe & Oliveri, 2022), Stacy Perryman-Clark (2016), Ann Ruggles Gere (2023), William Banks, Nicole Caswell, and Stephanie West-Puckett (2023), Mary Stewart (2023) and Annie Del Principe (2023). The listed scholars are only a few that have been working to uncover biases built into assessment processes and theorizing more justice driven approaches to assessment in writing programs—many more scholars are entering the conversation daily. Assessment practices are central to creating an equitable writing program, and there is still much work to be done.
Jen Daly (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English: Composition and Rhetoric at the University of New Hampshire. She has presented on writing assessment at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and received a grant through the Boston Rhetoric and Writing Network for archival work on WPA histories at UNH. Jen is currently working on her dissertation, which examines early 19th century American women’s writing and the creation of metaphorical spaces through worldbuilding in their personal writing.
References
Banks, W. P., Caswell, N. I., & West-Puckett, S. (2023). Failing Sideways: Queer Possibilities for Writing Assessment. Utah State University Press.
Bennett, R. E. (2023). Toward a Theory of Socioculturally Responsive Assessment. Educational Assessment, 28(2), 83–104.
Del Principe, A. (2023). Time as a “Built-In Headwind”: The Disparate Impact of Portfolio Cross-assessment on Black TYC students. Journal of Writing Assessment, 16(1).
Gere, A. R., Curzan, A., Hammond, J. W., Hughes, S., Li, R., Moos, A., Smith, K., Van Zanen, K., Wheeler, K. L., & Zanders, C. J. (2021). Communal Justicing: Writing Assessment, Disciplinary Infrastructure, and the Case for Critical Language Awareness. College Composition and Communication, 72(3), 384–412.
Inoue, A. B. (2015). Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. The WAC Clearinghouse; Parlor Press.
Perryman-Clark, S. M. (2016). Who We Are(n’t) Assessing: Racializing Language and Writing Assessment in Writing Program Administration. College English, 79(2), 206–211.
Poe, M., & Inoue, A. B. (2016). Toward Writing as Social Justice: An Idea Whose Time Has Come. College English, 79(2), 119–126.
Poe, M., Inoue A. B., & Elliot, N. (2018). Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado.
Randall, J. (2023). It Ain’t Near ‘Bout Fair: Re-Envisioning the Bias and Sensitivity Review Process from a Justice-Oriented Antiracist Perspective. Educational Assessment, 28(2), 68–82.
Solano-Flores, G. (2023). How Serious are We About Fairness in Testing and How Far are We Willing to Go? A Response to Randall and Bennett with Reflections About the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Educational Assessment, 28(2), 105–117.
Stewart, M. (2022). Confronting the Ideologies of Assimilation and Neutrality in Writing Program Assessment through Antiracist Dynamic Criteria Mapping. Journal of Writing Assessment, 15(1).