Beyond deficit assessment in bilingual primary schools

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we analyze the harm that high-stakes standardized tests in the U.S. render to maintenance-oriented dual-language bilingual primary schools and, in particular, to minoritized bilingual learners. We argue that these schools must resist the negative incentives and prevailing logic that passing standardized tests is crucial for students’ future success and act to mitigate the potential harm to their school missions and pedagogy that this form of assessment presents. The alternative anti-deficit qualitative approaches to assessment we describe here rely on assessments of student learning and knowledge that are strengths-based, culturally aware and mindful, and seek to motivate students to accomplish ambitious, albeit differentiated, goals. These assessments carry a tone of empowerment and cultural affirmation and foster positive academic identity development of emergent bilingual children. We hope here to persuade that these assessments will assist dual-language bilingual primary schools to resist the neoliberal pressure to tie high-stakes decisions to standardized testing, which impair the cultural, educational, and personal development of their most vulnerable students.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment
• dual-language
• bilingual education
• primary schools
• critical race theory
• antiracism
• multiculturalism

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Knoester

Matthew Knoester is an associate professor of Educational Studies at Ripon College. His research interests are critical democratic education, bilingual education, literacy, social contexts of education, and authentic assessments. He is co-author most recently of Beyond Testing: Seven Assessments of Students and Schools More Effective than Standardized Tests, a recipient of the Critics’ Choice Book Award from AESA.

Assaf Meshulam

Assaf Meshulam is a lecturer in the Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University. His current research interests are critical education theory, bilingual education, education for democracy and social justice, and civic education.