Educational Standards, Assessment, and the Search for Consensus

In this article, we critically examine the nature of the “consensus” reflected in educational standards used to orient high-stakes assessment programs. We analyze two complementary cases of practice in the assessment of teaching. One focuses on the discourse of standards creation and one examines how standards like these are typically used to orient assessment development and judgments about individual performance. We offer two (partially competing) theoretical perspectives that might illuminate and guide our practices in this currently undertheorized and underexamined area of standards development. One is based in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas and one is based in critical elaborations of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. We argue that conventional consensus-seeking approaches to the development and public review of educational standards tend to mask diversity and relinquish authority for consequential decisions to assessment developers who work in far less public circumstances. We draw on hermeneutic philosophy to offer a more pluralist approach that allows dissensus to be represented and taken into account in the assessment process.