Events of 2020 are impacting everyone personally and collectively, and are quickly driving a reexamination and reassessment of the status quo and future expectations regarding our health, education, economics, governance and politics, public safety, systems of justice, social equity, and historic patterns.

See the link below for an op-ed that addresses 2020-21 challenges in education in New Jersey, and argues against standardized assessment. Also find below a response to that op-ed that broadly confronts education's conventional notions and encourages cohesively integrating learning and assessment.

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

A response to this op-ed:

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 also 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 modern and historic 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.

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