The Standards Will Never Be Enough: A Racial Justice Extension

ABSTRACT

Since 1952, the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing has provided criteria for developing and evaluating educational and psychological tests and testing practice. Yet, we argue that the foundations, operations, and applications in the Standards are no longer sufficient to meet the current U.S. testing demands for fairness for all test takers. We propose racial justice extensions as principled ways to extend the Standards, through intentional actions focused on race and targeted at educational policies, processes, and outcomes in specific settings. To inform these extensions, we focus on four social-justice concepts: intersectionality derived from Black Feminist Theory; responsibility derived from moral philosophy; disparate impact derived from legal reasoning; and situatedness derived from social learning theories. We demonstrate these extensions and concepts in action by applying them to case studies of nursing licensure and placement testing.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank our reviewers for their careful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript and Susan M. Brookhart for her final review. We also would like to thank Emi Iwatani, Kyndra Middleton, and Jennifer Randall, the editors of this special issue, for their generosity, leadership, and commitment to justice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.