Our times are marked by change and adaptation that impact everyone personally and collectively, including once-in-a-century pandemic and climate crises.

Street demonstrations, articles, blogs, books, broadcasts and podcasts are surging, driven by a desire to re-examine and re-assess our past, our present, and our future expectations regarding healthcare, education, economics, employment, governance and politics, public safety, systems of justice, and social equity.

Challenges are being issued to repair historic patterns that disrespect human aspirations, disempower the resourceful, distort values and disrupt progress.

Big data intrudes into our lives, our routines, our every actions, placing us in the crosshairs of assessment, sometimes for our benefit, sometimes perhaps not. We deserve to know that every data-driven assessment process is the very best we can achieve for society and ourselves.

Assessment can be a tool by which we evaluate past performance then proactively aim for a better future. Assessment can be embedded in activities or interstitially placed at milestones. Assessment might be formal or informal, estimated or exact, objective or not, and might be encountered at any point during one's lifetime of effort. At its best, assessment is a vital part of lifelong growth and 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 's op-ed that addresses 2020-21's challenges in education in New Jersey, and argues against standardized assessment.

Below is a reflection inspired by the op-ed and based on second-career experience in education administration, teaching, and also developing standardized tests. This reflective essay attempts to quite broadly address 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 often relies on progressively more and more 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.

Predeterminate 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, derived from reliable, well-formulated, carefully vetted, data-generating investigative questions. Such assessments, integrated non-invasively using a robust scientific method or design process, can immediately detect and isolate deficiencies that require further work. Such assessments also quickly reveal successful outcomes that can enable and propel a system or individuals on to next steps, chapters, units, assignments and projects.

Here are a few interesting examples of assessment with their collateral or 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 later by firing;
• An employment practice dismisses axed employees with nearly no warning and no transparency, supposedly prioritizing institutional values (or so the conventional wisdom contends);
• 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;
• Investment in a poorly-thought-out assessment process fails to interleave assessment with instruction and misses the opportunity to empower both teaching and learning.