Race and class are deeply embedded in the way the field and teachers think about linguistic and written performance. Yet, addressing and understanding racial and linguistic prejudice remains important to the fairness of one’s pedagogies, assessment practices, and curricular development. The author argues that social justice approaches to assessment require instructors and program administrators to rethink assessment concepts such as reliability and validity with an eye toward the ways disadvantage is embedded in the very construct task responses and assessment materials used to define quality writing. Because historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) present a unique blend of culturally relevant teaching and traditional (i.e., White) definitions of quality writing, they provide a unique site for inquiry into questions of writing assessment and social justice. Specifically, in engaging with the push-pull legacy toward language use and race that is found at HBCUs, the author indicates ways we might enable teachers, administrators, and students to resist monolingual, racialized consequences embedded in their views of writing assessment and rethink the foundational measurement concepts of reliability, validity, and fairness.

Decisions about writing assessment are rooted in racial and linguistic identity; the consequences for many writing assessment decisions are often reflective of the judgments made about who does and does not deserve opportunities for success, opportunities historically denied to students of color and linguistically diverse writers. Put simply, assessment creates or denies opportunity structures. Because writing assessment is also racially and linguistically affected by the identities of those performing assessment, the role of writing program administrator (WPA) becomes a social justice role that challenges racial and linguistic biases and interrogates institutional structures, so that all students have the same opportunities for success.

This symposium centers on the recently released Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project. In addition to the document itself, the symposium features an introduction to it by some of its drafters, as well as responses to it by veteran composition specialists.

Writing program administrators and other composition specialists need to know the history of writing assessment in order to create a rich and responsible culture of it today. In its first fifty years, the field of writing assessment followed educational measurement in general by focusing on issues of reliability, whereas in its next fifty years, it turned its attention to validity. Overall, the field has exhibited a tension between reliability and validity, with the latter increasingly being conceptualized as involving a whole set of considerations that need to be theorized.

instruction and service-learning over the last few years. Studies in the midto late nineties described courses and institutional arrangements and began to explore the ramifications for composition and English studies (Schutz and Gere; Herzberg; Peck, Flower, and Higgins). Linda Adler-Kassner and her colleagues edited an influential volume in 1997 that signaled the arrival of this new approach as a major pedagogical movement, and in 2000 Tom Deans's Writing Partnerships gave us a basic framework for thinking about the cooperative relationship between students and the organizations they encounter in these courses. More recent work has focused on how community-based learning can be sustained over time through faculty research (Cushman), how to address the gap between community and academic discourses (Chaden, Graves, Jolliffe, and Vandenberg), and what contradictions we must struggle with in intercultural inquiry (Flower), each study highlighting strategies for respecting the needs and abilities of participating community partners. In a crucial step toward establishing the institutional structures necessary for sustained partnership, Jeffrey T. Grabill and Lynde Lewis Gaillet have urged us to focus on the interface between writing programs and community partners. The need for a balanced and nonexploitive relationship in community-based learning asserts itself insistently in our discussions of this approach, and clearly at this stage writing program administrators must become much more active in developing institutional models that promise true mutual benefits for postsecondary schools and their off

Addresses the climate of disappointment that characterizes English studies generally and composition studies--particularly writing program administration (WPA). Considers that the context of disappointment is shaped by a number of overlapping factors including: the widely perceived job market collapse in the humanities; the national abuse of adjunct teachers of first-year writing courses; and the general devaluation of the humanities.

Considers the wide variation of first-year composition programs and if they do indeed vary so widely. Considers what the programs have in common. Asks if it would be possible to articulate a general curricular framework for first-year composition, regardless of institutional home, student demographics, and instructor characteristics. Presents a list of outcomes approved by the Council of Writing Program Administrators.