Once-in-a-century pandemic experiences of 2020 are impacting everyone personally and collectively.

Street demonstrations and incisive articles, books, blogs, broadcasts and podcasts are driving reexamination and reassessment of our past, our present, and our expectations regarding healthcare, education, economics, employment, governance and politics, public safety, systems of justice, and social equity.

Challenges are being flung at traditional patterns that disrespect human aspirations, disable passion, disempower the resourceful, distort values and disrupt progress. In our lives and our routines we continually are targets of assessment, and deserve to trust that every assessment process and outcome is the very best we can achieve.

Assessment is the tool by which we evaluate past performance then proactively estimate for the future. Assessments can be embedded in activities or interstitially placed at milestones. Assessments might be formal or informal, objective or not, and could be encountered at any point during one's lifetime of efforts. At their best, assessments are part of lifelong learning.

Assessment...

• offers an opportunity for someone to demonstrate knowledge and skills.
• provides personal empowerment backed by evidence regarding what an individual might achieve.
• provides universally-recognized credentials that may be required for particular social tasks.
• can force someone to reflect, appraise, and perhaps re-prioritize.
• encourages reconnoitering of one's current bearings, possibly motivating change in direction or even complete remapping to a new route to get to where one wants to be.
• may suggest seeking additional resources (family, friends, mentors, time, money, education) for help with tasks to reach one's goals.
• provides objective insight into what is worth holding on to, e.g. particular beliefs, goals, values, knowledge, or skills. Also offers clues about what can be put aside, e.g. inessentials or distractions.

Click here for New Jersey education activist Julie Larrea Borst op-ed that addresses 2020-21's challenges in education in New Jersey, and argues against standardized assessment. Also find below a response to the op-ed that further addresses education's notions of learning and assessment:

Storytelling and apprenticeship are ages-old uniquely human strategies to convey knowledge, experience, and wisdom. How did education devolve to sage-on-the-stage lecturing that is one-way, and that uses increasingly obsolete canned lessons accumulated by a teacher over years? Such widespread practice may seem to make a teacher's job easier. But coupled with a classroom's one-size-fits-all testing, and grading that makes teaching a 24 x 7 job, this anachronistic strategy to motivate lifelong learners may be wasteful of teacher creativity and most students' time and emotional energy.

Canned education is fundamentally inequitable and neglectful, since it fails to differentiate among learners, and does not fulfill education's responsibility to thoroughly and efficiently satisfy each individual's actual learning needs.

21st century education should seamlessly integrate learning with just-in-time assessment that informs all stakeholders, and adds NO extra burden for students and for teachers. Both historic and modern assessments in a wide range of industries and applications have been devised from reliable, well-formulated, carefully vetted, data-generating questions. Such assessments, integrated into a robust scientific method or design process often non-invasively, can immediately detect specific deficiencies that require further work. Such assessments also quickly detect successful outcomes that will enable and propel a system or individuals on to next steps, chapters, units, assignments and projects.

Here are a few interesting examples of assessment and collateral and coincidental consequences:

• An employment policy periodically cuts 7% of the workforce under the assumption that hiring is generally faulty and it is easier to fix this by firing;
• An employment practice dismisses cut employees with nearly no warning and no transparency, exclusively prioritizing the institution (or so the conventional wisdom);
• An employment practice psychologically tests potential hires for uniformity with a select group of current employees, with no clear relationship to overall goals;
• An educational practice administers standardized tests that are not timely enough to impact teaching and learning, and are often inconsistent with overall educational goals;
• A mediocre investment in assessment does NOT interleave assessment with instruction and misses the opportunity to empower both teaching and learning.