If you want to read a history of writing assessment as it developed during the 20th century within the narrow and specialized confines of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), you can't do better than Norbert Elliot's On a Scale: A Social History of Writing Assessment in America (2005). If your curiosity about ETS is not satisfied by that enormously careful and detailed history, and if you want to gain a close-up, intimate understanding of the person one author called ETS's "first president and abiding institutional deity" (Owen, 1985, p. 1), then you can't do better than Elliot's new biography, Henry Chauncey: An American Life.

Later in this review, I will re-visit those last two "ifs"

I provide thoughts about the current situation regarding concern about wildlife contamination of leafy green crops and other agricultural products, potentially leading to food safety risks, from a grower’s perspective. I discuss development of the Leafy Green Marketing Agreement, as well as how buyers are interpreting and reacting to evidence of animals of any kind in growers’ fields. The high economic cost and added risk to growers are important factors, and scientific data to support developing regulations is often lacking.

Most of us interested in assessment would agree that our field's thinking about what educational evaluation is and does has developed through at least a couple of distinct historical-conceptual phases. Initially, we understood evaluation as a way of gathering information about what people had learned, and we focused on getting the most accurate and reliable information possible. More recently, our conception of evaluation was broadened and enhanced as we came to understand the rich cluster of assessment concepts that point out to us how assessment not only collects data, but also teaches people (produces knowledge) and transforms educational systems and processes. We, therefore, now also attend to validity issues related to consequences, washback, and assessment's "educative" nature (Wiggins, 1998). In this second historical phase, we still seek valid and valuable information about learning and learners, be we also turn our attention to the impact of assessment decisions on the broader educational project.

The other articles in this issue (Elliot, Slomp, Poe & Cogan, and Cushman) gather resources from the disciplines of philosophy, validity theory, law, and cultural studies to forge a new praxis of ethical writing assessment. My contribution takes a different approach to evaluative ethics, an approach we could term political. On the current political scene of writing assessment in the United States,[1] one heavy ethical burden lies neglected: the adverse educational consequences of mass-market standardized testing, especially the testing of writing ability. This article examines failures by two prominent testing corporations to take up their ethical responsibilities to protect the "primary good" (Rawls) of educational quality. One corporation's failure appears at the end of an evidently serious and good-faith effort to engage its responsibilities; the other corporation's failure results from its apparent lack of effort and commitment to that task. I explain both failures by pointing to the phenomenon of "structured ethical blindness", in which truths that stand in the way of someone's pursuit of profit are difficult or impossible for that person to see and to take seriously. My goal is to understand structured ethical blindness in mass-market writing assessment and to suggest how our profession and our society might best respond to this phenomenon. Based on my analyses, I conclude that testing corporations cannot fairly or realistically be expected to run their businesses with careful attention to the educational consequences of their products. Their unavoidable self-interest prevents them from seeing those consequences clearly. I therefore propose federal regulation and oversight as the only apparently functional mechanism by which to counterbalance testing corporations' pursuits of private profit with the U.S. public's right and responsibility to protect the quality of students' educations.