Our Mission and Pillars
Vision
The Center for Measurement Justice (CMJ) is a research center dedicated to social justice-oriented educational assessments and professionals.
We envision a future in which all learners, especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous students, experience learning assessments that validate their cultural identities and measure what they, their communities, and their families value. In this future, all students, but especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous students, see educational assessments as valuable tools to support their learning and liberation.
Mission
CMJ seeks to inspire, prepare, and support a critical mass of measurement professionals and co-conspirators as they work towards a socially just assessment and measurement system. Through this work, we aim to become the epicenter for engagement on measurement justice, galvanizing communities, school systems, assessment creators, and researchers to advance socially just assessment and measurement approaches.
In our work, we push back against assessment practices that do not value diverse types of knowledge and knowledge creation- especially with respect to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. We recognize that the complex and rich identities of all individuals should be acknowledged, valued, and sustained by/through our assessment practices. Moreover, we acknowledge the white supremacist, racist roots of measurement and seek to disrupt this historical narrative through culturally sustaining assessment practices that are explicitly and unapologetically antiracist. And so, as advocates for justice, we lean into difficult assessment and measurement challenges by building awareness, seeking creative solutions, and generating transformative ideas in an effort to provide and/or create measurement justice for all.
Enabling Systemic Transformation
Three Pillars Leading to Transformation
We engage in three primary strands of work. These activities are the fundamental inputs toward the systemic transformation needed to accomplish our mission.
Supporting Critical Research
Antiracist assessment is a nascent field. Much more work is needed to illuminate its impact and potential if others are to take up antiracist assessment and measurement practices. To this end, CMJ supports research on the impact, methods, or practical implementation of antiracist assessment and measurement. We conduct research with stakeholders, fund critical research of others via research grants, and bring together critical scholars across the field to share their research and connect with like-minded scholars in a bi-annual conference (coming in 2024).
Strategic Engagement
Systemic transformation requires field-wide, continuous effort on the part of a network of scholars as well as the inclusion and increased capacity of stakeholders from outside the research community. We therefore engage stakeholders across the education field to (1) promulgate conversations about anti-racist educational measurement and (2) increase the capacity of willing partners to bring antiracist measurement to their constituents.
Increasing Representation
Fewer than 15% of doctoral graduates in education measurement identified as Black, Hispanic, or Indigenous (BBI) between 1997 and 2016 (Randall, Rios, & Hung, 2021), compared to 33.4% of the general U.S. population in 2021. To grow the field of antiracist assessment and transform assessment and measurement systems, we support the development of more critical scholars, including BBI scholars. CMJ offers fellowships, connects young scholars with opportunities to learn from BBI mentors in the field, and supports young scholars participation with the broader research community at a bi-annual conference (coming in 2024).