Past, Present, and Future of Assessment in Schools: A Thematic Narrative Analysis

As a diverse group of educationalists, we worry about the role of assessment in K-12 schools and current neoliberal education policies. In this paper, we aim to highlight some of the unintended or often overlooked consequences of these policies by taking an arts-based approach to our research. We interviewed various educational stakeholders about their past and present experiences with assessment, as well as their imagined futures. By creating poetic representations to present the results, we aim to shed a new light on the otherwise familiar contexts of assessment in the schools. Many are afraid of a future where neoliberal policies continue to determine the nature and role of assessment in schools, but want to believe that things will get better. Keywords: Assessment, Narrative, Qualitative Research.We are a group of educationalists in Florida who worry about the current role and politics of assessment in the schools. Some of us worry that a focus on assessment narrows the curriculum, producing students who are technically good at schooling, but less adept at thinking outside received wisdom. Others of us worry about the governmentality of assessments and the kinds of student-subjects assessment delineates - the gifted, disabled, and mediocre students. We struggle with the implications of government-mandated testing on the practice of teaching, concerned that the artistic elements of teachers' craft, the aspects of teaching that keep students connected and engaged in classrooms, are being cast aside in favor of mechanistic delivery. Those of us in measurement and research are concerned about our complicity in the production of technically savvy assessment specialists whose statistical skill is used to develop increasingly sophisticated value-added models to evaluate teacher quality. At the same time we recognize that assessment motivates, provides valuable academic information, and aligns with pragmatic material economic and social realities in western society.The purpose of our research was to gather educational stakeholders' stories of assessment, including their worries and hopes for the future of assessment in K-12 education. We analyzed these stories for their commonalities and divergences through an arts-based approach to inform an ongoing dialogue about the role and purpose of assessment in schools. Our research is guided by the following questions:1. What are educational stakeholders' understandings of assessment in schools?2. What are educational stakeholders' experiences with assessment in schools?3. What do educational stakeholders' accounts of assessment in schools suggest about the future of assessment?Literature ReviewAssessment can have as many definitions as people that you ask "what is assessment?" For the purposes of our study, we followed Stobart's (2008) multi-faceted definition of assessment in that it is a "value-laden social activity" that "does not objectively measure what is already there, but rather creates and shapes what is measured" (p. 1). This definition of assessment also states that it has the power to undermine or encourage learning, leading to either constructive or destructive consequence. Although our study simply asked participants about the generic term "assessments," most discourse focused on high-stakes assessments. Johnson, Johnson, Farenga, and Ness (2008) make the distinction between "normal" and "high-stakes" assessments on their utility. They state that assessments qualify as high-stakes when "student performance is used to deny promotion to the next grade, withhold a high school diploma, label schools failures, determine if teachers and administrators keep their jobs, or decide if schools get more funding" (p. 2).High-stakes testing originated in the late 1980s, born out of a neoliberal movement to address the perceived challenge to American corporations by foreign markets (Johnson, Johnson, Farenga, & Ness, 2008). In order to keep up internationally, schools had to "return to the basics, meet higher standards, and be held accountable" (p. …