How can we define fairness in education?

By James Clark, Publisher, Education, SAGE Publishing

The summer exam results season in England has seen controversy over assessment unlike any year in living memory. The press, politicians and the education world have pontificated at length over a challenging and complex situation, handled imperfectly, that affects the future aspirations of millions of young people. Such discussions have focused on both the specifics of the A-level results fiasco, the algorithmic grade allocation and inconstant political and policymaker decision-making, and also broader questions about assessment and the role of summative examinations in general. Underneath all of these takes, of various temperatures, lies a basic question: is this fair?  

This is, on the surface, a simple question to ask, but attempts to answer this meaningfully cannot be credible without a wide-ranging exploration of how fairness can be defined, both in an abstract sense and in a deliverable procedural manner when applied to the high-stakes world of educational testing. Such careful analysis is only possible through the application of multiple perspectives drawn from different disciplines and Isabel Nisbet and Stuart Shaw’s September 2020 book Is Assessment Fair? is a timely reminder of the power of the social sciences to underpin a nuanced and rounded appraisal one of the least well understood areas of education. 

The authors examine fairness in a statistical sense, exploring the extent to which forms of assessment can be shown to have robust validity; in a legal sense, noting important international legal cases that have defined a wider discourse around assessment; in a philosophical sense, exploring the moral dimensions of the issue, and in terms of social justice, how and why assessment can contribute to, or undermine, the fight against socio-economic inequalities. 

By Isabel Nisbet and Stuart Shaw

Is Assessment Fair? showcases much of what a finely-balanced academic book can offer at its best: a broad synthesis of perspectives marrying cogent conceptual arguments with the nitty gritty of real-world application, a summation of contemporary debate that both reflects current discourse while also indicating possible future directions where focus could, and should, be applied and a timely contextual commentary that allows readers to apply robust ideas to issues that are fundamental to education. As an academic publisher with a broad output from undergraduate course-supporting textbooks through to large reference handbooks, and many spaces in between, we have a duty to the disciplines we represent to support the articulation and dissemination of critical contemporary analysis that raises challenging questions in accessible form. 

And while this book doesn’t directly cover the particulars of August 2020, being written at a slightly earlier point in time, before COVID-19 radically interrupted our daily existence, Nisbet and Shaw demonstrate the wider value of the academic book as a longer-form piece, built with a far more sustained shelf life than the snap-judgement blog take or broadsheet op/ed. It is a resource for fostering meaningful interpretation and analysis of current events, both this controversy and the next, and a contribution to literature to be built on by others over time that can generate ripples of influence and reach both educators and those who set assessment policy that, in a very real sense, defines how the schools system treats those who pass through it.