Reimagining American education: Possible futures for equitable educational assessment

For too long, we have accepted many aspects of educational assessment as givens: Letter grades. Tests scored on a scale from 0 to 100. Using a single test on a day each spring to judge whether schools are serving our children. So many of these practices serve as gatekeepers — sorting and selecting students for supposedly scarce opportunities. It’s hard to imagine any other way of thinking about assessments.

COVID-19 provides us an opportunity to “break with the past and imagine our world anew,” as Arundhati Roy (2020) writes. In the first year of the pandemic, we eased up on grades, put standardized testing on pause, and accommodated the variety of ways students needed to engage with schoolwork. It was often uncomfortable to do so, and many of us have been eager to return to things as they were. But many of us have been just as eager to let go of old educational practices, and we’ve asked ourselves whether it might be possible to move forward “lightly, with little luggage,” as Roy puts it, “ready to imagine another world.”

Which of the familiar kinds of school and classroom assessment should we take with us, and which should we leave behind? Looking forward, how can we ensure that our assessment practices are more valid, useful, and just? And what has the pandemic taught us that we should keep in mind as we build new assessment systems?