The technology of writing assessment and racial validity

This chapter articulates writing assessment as a technology, theorized with three aspects (power, parts, and purpose), accounting for the ways in which assessment dialectically constructs and is constructed by its historical environment. Seeing writing assessment as a technology provides a full account of assessment as an environment of conflict and social (re)production, but most importantly, it accounts for racial formations existing around it and because of it. This articulation of writing assessment reveals problems with the concept of validity (and traditional validation research), particularly consequential validity. The chapter concludes by offering racial validity, which investigates how our writing assessments reproduce and are produced by the racial formations in and around our schools, classrooms, and writing assessments.