From my perspective, what we need is a change in the public's conception of the mission of the schools. Of course, bringing about such a change is no small task. Yet a shift needs to be made from a conception of schooling as a horse race or a kind of educational Olympics to a conception of schools as places that foster students' distinctive talents. It raises the mean and increases the variance. Bringing about such a change in the conception of schooling cannot be achieved, in my view, without changes in the structure of schooling in America and in the criteria that institutions of higher education employ in making admissions decisions.
Universities affect secondary, middle, and even elementary schools in the most conservative of ways.
We need to have admissions criteria that are considerably more flexible and open-ended and that do not continue to privilege a narrow range of competencies that are fundamentally reflective of social class advantages. Parents, always concerned about their children's social and educational mobility, will continue to adapt to the existing criteria if they are not changed. Test scores are widely regarded as proxies for the quality of education. My aim in introducing this special section is to put performance assessment into a broad educational and social context. Performance assessment affords us, in principle, an opportunity to develop ways of revealing the distinctive features of individual students.