Validity and Racial Justice in Educational Assessment

• In Event: Racial Justice in Educational Assessment

Abstract

This presentation seeks to confront ongoing racial injustice and white supremacy in educational assessment by providing a framework for addressing and disrupting racial injustice in the assessment/measurement field. Specifically, I describe how certain conceptualizations of assessment validity itself play a central role in assessment’s inability to meaningfully dismantle racial injustices. But I will show that other conceptualizations of this central concept do have the potential to disrupt much of the racial injustice that educational assessment at large has served to uphold for so many years. First, I reframe an historical and ongoing debate over the concept of validity, in order to emphasize just where the possibilities (as well as the stumbling blocks) for confronting racial injustice lay; then, I explicate a specific validation process – based directly on Michael T. Kane’s argument-based approach, specifically after his significant revision in 2013 – which I argue could serve as foundational to the goal of assessment as an agent for racial justice.

Author

• Josh Lederman, Brandeis University
  Presenting Author