When the Blind Meet the Lost

Assessment has landed where it has because the “movement” is driven, far beyond our individual institutions’ halls, by a political agenda and small minds who have seized on an entrepreneurial opportunity and attached themselves to it.   In a democratic society, that politcal agenda deserves a free and open debate.  Unfortunately, many of the individuals who have attached themselves to it, are either unaware of its terms or incapable (or afraid) of engaging in such a debate.  Unfortunately for those who are behind the movement, many of their foot soldiers are an embarrassment and either they themselves are not competent to realize this or they are too ideologically blinded to care.

Perhaps the most telling characteristic of the “assessment movement” is its failure to live up to its own standards: there is no culture of accountability and measurement and assessment in the assessment community. It would not be the first movement (in education or elsewhere) to suffer from this shortcoming.

Author: Dan Ryan

I've been an Academic Program Director at MinervaProject.com, a professor at University of Toronto, University of Southern California, and Mills College teaching things like human centered design, computational thinking, modeling for policy sciences, and social theory. My current mission is to figure out how to reorganize higher education and exploit technology so that we can teach twice as many twice as well twice as easily. View all posts by Dan Ryan