School assessments tend to be designed to measure learning of the dominant majority

School assessments tend to be designed to measure learning of the dominant majority.

• The concept of habitus, particularly white habitus
  • Apoliticality is a feature of the white habitus.
  • Punctuality is another white habit of mind often imposed on students (of color) in ESL classrooms
• White habitus and its role in schools
  • Education is never ideological neutral.
  • Ideological neutrality in education only serves to support the current dominant ideologies.
  • Dominant academic discourses are white habits of language
  • Schools reproduce the culture of the dominant class
  • It is dangerous to ignore the ideologies inherent in TESOL
  • Many rhetorical prohibitions in the standard academic English curriculum are effective rhetorical tools
  • Several features of academic culture in the US are believed to come from a dominant WASP culture
• Assessment tends to measure habitus, thus enforcing it
  • Conventional assessment ecologies value habitus more than learning
  • Success in conventional classrooms is synonymous with adopting a white racial habitus
  • Ideological neutrality in education only serves to support the current dominant ideologies.
  • The dominant narrative of multilingual students is deficit-based.
• attempts to remove habitus from grading
  • Inter-rater reliability increases when the raters share habitus, but this also has consequences for students with different habitus.
  • Hybrid-grading contracts, as used by Danielewicz and Elbow, fail to avoid the bias and judgement of white racial habitus
  • Hybrid-grading contracts, as used by Danielewicz and Elbow, unintentionally reserve the highest grades for students who adopt a white racial habitus
  • Anonymous grading cannot prevent reference to the norm within the class which may introduce a bias towards a white racial habitus
  • Community-based assessments are centered on the racialized habitus of the community.
  • Criticisms of community-based assessment include failing to equalize power dynamics, as well as gender and racial biases
  • In a negotiated assessment ecology, male and white students are more likely to defend their work which therefore introduces a gender and racial bias in the grading system
  • Efforts to support one group of students can further marginalize others.
• what’s next? what is working?
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  • Some pre-college outreach programs support students developing identities that blend their own cultural values with the more valued dominant culture. This would have to be supported in assessment methods, though.

Sources

• ^2ac738 cites Ruecker, 2013; Ruecker, Chamcharatsri, & Saengngoen, 2015
• ^e8f588 cites Donehower, Hogg, and Schell, 2007
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Further reading

• Ruecker, 2013; High-stakes testing and Latina/o students
• Ruecker, Chamcharatsri, & Saengngoen, 2015; Teacher perceptions of the impact of the common core assessments on linguistically diverse high school students.
• Donehower, Hogg, and Schell, 2007; Rural literacies