“Happy to Comply”: Writing Assessment, Fast-Capitalism, and the Cultural Logic of Control

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Notes

All names of participating subjects, schools, districts, and counties are pseudonyms.

To be clear, the Kentucky system is has been controversial among scholars of writing pedagogy and assessment from its inception. Much scholarship has been published about various aspects of this system. It has been criticized for its tendency to promote teaching to the test, and its linking of portfolios to accountability measures. It has also been lauded for its connection of curricular goals to assessment methods (see Hillocks) and for its fostering of community among teachers and administrators.

Although their validity has been seriously challenged, indirect measures of writing continue to be administered in many school systems, primarily due to their low cost (compared to direct measures) and the pervasive belief that reliability is as, or even more, important than validity. See Huot (1996) for a discussion of reliability and validity in writing assessment.

Portfolio assessment has also had its critics. Most research on portfolio pedagogy has either focused on particular classes where the teacher has implemented the portfolio on her own, or on broad programmatic implementations at universities that have no accountability systems. Little systematic research has been conducted on the impact of large-scale writing assessments that are attached to accountability measures on day-to-day class activities. Moreover, while the potential for portfolio assessments to test the texts that are actually produced in writing classrooms is often noted as a positive, little research examines how this aspect of portfolios can make them a particularly invasive means of assessment. Peter Elbow, an important early proponent of portfolios, has warned that portfolios can be used to create a kind of “dystopia” in which every text students produce becomes “fodder for assessment.” While intended to lend students more agency and creative freedom, writing portfolios can also be used to reduce agency and creativity, as they bring more student work under the umbrella of evaluation than other approaches to writing assessment (50). Terry Underwood has also questioned the degree of agency that is actually exercised by students within large-scale portfolio assessments (59).

To be clear, I am not advocating for these measurement methods. I am arguing that even if portfolios are a more valid means of assessing writing, they don't solve the problem of a diminishment of teacher and student agency in large-scale assessments.