Issues of evaluation may be thought of in terms of opposing virtues and dangers. Evaluation can encourage coherence in programming strategy, and can allow students to move from program to program, by establishing standards recognized between programs and institutions.¹⁶³ Avoiding evaluation may mean a dissipating lack of focus and direction. But evaluation may also mean deadening centralization. The practical question is how evaluation can be organized to honour community specificity and learner-centredness.

A danger in the present situation is that, as government funding increases, so will demands for restrictive systematic evaluation. The systematic evaluation instruments ready to hand are the standardized tests that do not, and can not, reflect the wisdom of learner centredness and community embeddedness in literacy work. Practitioners are often critical of standardized tests. Tests are often culturally biased and inappropriate to people who have endured negative schooling experiences. Testing may dictate instruction (in "teaching to the test"), rather than learning determining evaluation. Testing may even dictate recruitment; some prison programs define their objective as getting a given number of students to score at a grade 8 level on a mandated standardized test; this leads to recruiting people who are nearly able to pass it already. Failure of literacy students to show substantial gain on standardized tests can also be dispiriting to those who work in the field.¹⁶⁴ Nevertheless, standardized achievement testing is widespread, especially within institutional settings. This reflects, in part, the pressure that adult educators face, or feel, to report student's progress according to widely recognizable measures. One Ontario report even recommended (the recommendation was not adopted) "materials and methods to assess and measure literacy and numeracy levels at entry and at periodic intervals in all programs."¹⁶⁵