Assessments

I am a retired professor of Art Education from Denver, having 
recently relocated to Santa Monica, and have been working 
with LAUSD on developing written assessments in the arts, 
grades four and eight.  Assessement is a powerful tool; it 
spotlights items in the curriculum that become focal points, 
often to the detriment of other activities.  It is worthwhile, 
however, because it alerts teachers that indeed there will be 
that moment, in students' learning careers, when a 
"snapshot" captures something that is possibly meaningful.  
But we must insist, in the Master Plan, that assessment  
take many appropriate forms, and that not all learning is 
measurable through written testing, and that other means 
are often as useful.  In Arts Education, we use a wide variety 
of assessment techniques, and consider them valid as 
indicators of  growth in disciplines that value novelty, 
ingenuity, imaginative planning, excellence in technique, 
courage in the execution of new ideas, and personal choice.  
Those attributes should be included in explicating  
assessment goals for the Master Plan; one that will be 
inclusive of  disciplines not relying only on codified rules.