That's roughly the ideal behind criterion-referenced assessment.
Now, in fact, with standards-based assessment, we do have standardized tests,
we do put people across normal distribution curves, and
we often forget this underlying principle.
Principles also expressed historically in a movement, which is old now,
called Mastery Learning, which is anybody can master a particular skill.
And the classic model of the normal distribution curve, what it does,
it assumes an inevitable inequality.
And whether you assume that inevitable inequality is based on what you've learned
or whether you assume it's based on underlying natural capacities,
there is this underlying assumption of a natural inequality, and
we're going to measure you against others.
So in order for some people to do spectacularly well at that
end of the bell curve, we need quite a lot to be mediocre,
we need something to be not so good, and we put a lot of statistical effort into
differentiating people in these kinds of ways.
So unfortunately, with standardize assessment,
we still do a lot of that even though the underlying principle behind criteria and
reference didn't stand as based assessment.
May have always designed being designed to be something quite different.
Here's an example now from the Australian curriculum,
in fact, of a piece of student writing measured
against the standards in a criterion-referenced assessment regime.
In other words, what we can do is we can describe in quite specific ways
the nature of this text and therefore say that the student,
on the basis of our analysis that takes, has reached the standard or not.
Now, let me tell you that a little bit of the history of
standard-based assessment and where we are today.
In the United States, one of the big initiatives in terms of
standardized assessment was No Child Left Behind of 2001.
So that was something that was introduced by George W Bush.
And he, in fact, the political history of it was he came to the presidency in 2000,
he had a hostile Democratic congress.
So I thought, what can I do?
I want to be the education President.
And in fact, No Child Left Behind was something that was created jointly with
Senator Edward Kennedy, and it's as much a Kennedy creation as a Bush creation.
So it's a complicated history, and I want to talk about it for
a second as illustrating a lot of the dilemmas about assessment.
Because subsequently, No Child Left Behind was reviled and hated,
because it imposed this testing regime on schools and
upped the ante in terms of the number of assessments that were around.
So, it became pretty unpopular.
