Savarkar before Hindutva: Sovereignty, Republicanism, and Populism in India, c.1900–1920

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was the theorizer of Hindutva (1923)—the project to radically reconfigure India as a Hindu majoritarian state. Assessments of Savarkar's earlier The Indian War of Independence (1909), a history of the 1857 Indian “Mutiny,” have generally subsumed this tract into the logic of Hindutva. This article offers a reassessment of The Indian War of Independence and situates it within the political and intellectual context of fin de siècle western India. I suggest that this history of Indian rebellion propagated a novel iteration of Indian popular sovereignty predicated on Hindu–Muslim unity. I read Savarkar as adapting the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini and Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to challenge what he regarded as the fissiparous logic of late colonial liberalism. Finally, this article argues that Savarkar's account of the mutual constitution of general will and the personalism of sovereignty must be read as a previously unacknowledged instance of Indian populism.

Aggregate-Level Test-Scale Linking: A New Solution for an Old Problem?

The Reardon, Kalogrides, and Ho article on validation methods for aggregate-level test scale linking is an attempt to validate a district-level scale aligning procedure that appears to be a new solution to an old problem. Their aligning procedure uses the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scale to piece together a patchwork of data structures from different tests of different constructs obtained under different administration conditions and used in different ways by different states. In this article, we critique their linking and validation efforts. Our critique has three components. First, we review the recommendations for linking state assessments to NAEP from several studies and commentaries to provide background from which to interpret Reardon et al.’s validation attempts. Second, we provide a replication of the Reardon et al. empirical validations of its proposed linking procedure to demonstrate that correlations between district means on two test scores can be high even when (1) the constructs being measured by the tests are different and (2) the district-level means estimated using the Reardon et al. linking approach can differ substantially from actual district-level means. Then, we suggest additional checks for construct similarity and subpopulation invariance from other concordance studies that could be used to assess whether the inferences made by Reardon et al. are warranted. Finally, until such checks are made, we urge cautious use of the results of the Reardon et al. results.

Commentary on Reardon, Kalogrides, and Ho’s “Validation Methods for Aggregate-Level Test Scale Linking: A Case Study Mapping School District Test Score Distributions to a Common Scale”

The studies presented by Reardon, Kalogrides, and Ho provide preliminary support for a National Assessment of Educational Progress–based aggregate linking of state assessments when used for research purposes. In this commentary, I suggest future efforts to explore possible sources of district-level bias, evaluation of predictive accuracy at the state level, and a better understanding of the performance of the linking when applied to the inevitable nonrepresentative district samples that will be encountered in research studies.

Student Performance on End of Year State Assessments and Correlation to Teacher’s Worth

This study explored how accountability over the years has shifted with attention mainly focusing how well students are performing on their end of the year assessments and how that determines a teacher’s worth. Through these assessments, the teachers are being told of their worth if a student meets their goal or being told of their ineffectiveness when the teachers and students fail to measure up. Teachers were considered to have value-added as an educator when their students attained their goals. Other educators faced dismissal or reassignment when their students did not meet their goals. The focus is placed upon the educator and the educator’s career is heavily impacted by low test scores and even the high test scores. With teacher value being associated with test scores, other problems came to the surface of the research. High teacher turnover rates, discourse amongst peers when scores were being compared or incentive pay being offered, and educators becoming teachers that teach to the test. The goal was determine how educators and those studying this new shift felt and reacted.

Did a “Traumatic” Test Question Create Racial Bias?

On the second day of a 2019 high-stakes assessment, Massachusetts 10th graders faced a racially insensitive question, which was quickly invalidated. However, a remaining controversy is whether this exposure created a racial bias in performance on the remaining test items. We present results from a pre-registered analysis suggesting the controversial question reduced the comparative performance of Black students by a small amount (approximately 0.006σ). However, we also find a wide dispersion of such effects when examining similarly small sets of test items from prior state assessments that lacked a controversial question which suggests the 2019 assessment was not distinctive.