Commissioner John King asked business leaders to help push Common Core implementation, despite the fact that teachers say they are not prepared. This is a flat-out rejection of Randi Weingarten’s request for a moratorium on linking test results to consequences. Randi told city and state leaders that curriculum and professional development should precede testing.
This is John King’s answer. If it’s John King’s answer, it is also Merryl Tisch’s answer. She is John King’s boss.
King thoughtfully wrote a pledge for business leaders to sign, agreeing to demand the Common Core, whether teachers are ready or not.
Robert Corcoran, president of the GE Foundation, agreed with King that delay is not an option:
“Some of those at Thursday’s talk downplayed the lack of prep time.
Corcoran, for example, maintained that there’s never enough time to fully prepare for a lot of endeavors, and that can become a trap leading to endless planning but no action.
Businesses, he said, frequently begin new initiatives before they are totally perfect.
“You launch it and you learn,” Corcoran said. “You can’t afford to wait.”
As Merryl Tisch memorably said, “It is time to jump into the deep end,” referring to the Common Core tests. Even the kids who can’t swim should jump into deep end.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Weingarten and Iannuzzi should never have negotiated terms to ENABLE CCSS “vendors” and “reformers” in the first place. Travesty.
Agree with you about Randi. Same thing happened with RTTT agreements.
Regarding CCSS — been thinking that they probably want the data. Period. They don’t care if the scores are low — after a couple of years of innovative personalized learning the scores will go up & CCSS will have been a pretend success.
But why leave it to Randi for a moratorium on CCSS. Any lawmaker can call for a moratorium & that’s what needed. Not just a moratorium on CCSS testing — a moratorium on moving forward with CCSS.
You are so so so right!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sheila, I agree with you about Weingarten. The unions have sold out not only their members, but the future of teachers’ unions. They are representatives of their own individual interests, which has become the new American way. I am baffled by the backlash against common core, however. Although I realize that it is about $$$$, the standards and evaluations are certainly steps above the scripted lessons and ‘one right answer’ which is what we have today. They actually provide teachers with more freedom to teach.
Ianuzzi threw us under the bus. I’m not happy (understatement).
Yes! A moratorium is a concession to the privatizers. It is accepting their right to impose high-stakes tests, the pseudo-science of teacher evaluations, and Common Core, just to wait a little. The demand should be end the high-stakes testing which are destroying our public schools and end Common Core as a failed social experiment on a generation of children!
New York residents need to request a list of businesses so that we can “Opt Out” of their services. Tens of thousands of NY’ers will be happy to comply. I’ve already put in my written request. We ALL need to.
The first time my AP US Govt and Politics students would answer a free response question like those they would see on the AP exam, I told them they would receive full credit in my grade book, but the only mark they would see on their paper is the points on the rubric they would have earned on the test. For many, it was the first zero they had ever seen. It got their attention. But it did not harm them – how could I punish them with a low grade when they were learning how to do something? Again, I am far more comfortable with the notion of only two grades – meets/exceeds standards/expectations, or does not YET meet/exceed standards/expectations.
The entire approach of Common Core and of assessing according to it is based on flawed notions about learning and education. Do teachers want some guidance as to what to teach? Some certainly do. Many of us do not need it – we are knowledgeable not only about the topics we teach and where they fit in the wider world, but also take the time to be knowledgeable about our students and how they learn. Rather than imposing from on high, our students and our society would be far better served were we to do a better job of preparing teachers to properly engage with their students, which means they have to have far fewer for whom they are responsible, especially for those of us who teach at the secondary level. We spend far too much money on the wrong things and not enough on what will matter. Properly recruiting, training, supporting and retaining quality teachers will do far more for our students and the society of which they are a part than will more computers, more “rigorous” standards and assessments.
If and when those imposing these new regimes will submit their own children to them in the schools on which they impose them, then I will at least accept that they really believe they are necessary as a part of education, even as they will still be wrong in that belief.
There is far too much “white man’s burden” and a false “noblesse oblige” in what is happening to education for most Americans.
Our nation is becoming intellectually and morally impoverished as a result.
Excellent! Lowering the student to teacher ratio, helping the teacher to get to know the student – is the simple answer to all the costly unecessariy complexity rolling out in the way of ‘rigor’, ‘curriculum’, and ’21st century learners’ BS…
Thank you Kenneth for this insightful and educated assessment. I am in total agreement (as an educator of public policy and adjunct lecturer both in Graduate School of Education and public agencies on specifics of laws). This is why TFA is so dangerous. And it is also why, as on another Ravitch blog today on rankings of private schools, but only by tuition, we see how teaching at a private school can give far more latitude to do real teaching without all the impediments imposed on public school teachers. Noblesse oblige is part of it, but the free market run rampant factors in large part.
Kenneth Bernstein says that the “entire approach of Common Core and of assessing according to it is based on flawed notions about learning and education.”
A 2002 National Research Council study of AP courses and tests found them to be a “mile wide and an inch deep” and inconsistent with research-based principles of learning.
And that was before they were “aligned” with Common Core!
I just want people to remember it was Joshua Starr who first called for a moratorium on testing before Weingarten. But he called it for a longer period because he knows one year is not enough time for students and teachers to not only fully implement it, but for students, especially in the early grades to get used to it. Weingarten has come to the party a little too late, or, she is once again trying to play the hero knowing quite well when the outcome goes against her, she can say she fought hard. Karen Lewis, on the other hand, puts her words into actions. Karen stood up to the closings of Chicago news while Randi stood silent when it was happening in NYC.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-07/opinions/36973006_1_standardized-tests-teacher-evaluation-systems-school-systems
Amazing. The unions and everyone else empowers the Feds then has to beg their masters for any kind of control back.
You have to trust someone: will it be the unelected bureaucrats or parents/teachers and the local community?
ABOLISH THE US DOE and take back our UNALIENABLE RIGHTS. They are guaranteed in the US Constitution.
Maybe teachers should go back and read the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers and start teaching kids real civics & history again.
Please remember that it is not teachers who are foisting this garbage on everyone. We DO teach civics and history; but the power hungry are trampling over everyone.
You’re just feeding into the deformers’ play-book: blame teachers for everything. Now you are even blaming us for our own demise. Talk about blaming the victim! And how does this blame game help kids, anyway? It DOESN’T!!!!!!
Dear MOMwithAbrain:
Exactly which “unalienable rights” are you talking about as being “guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution?”
And how, exactly, does the Department of Education strip those “unalienable rights” away from citizens?
Please explain.
“BALLS”, said QUEEN Tisch to Randi, if I had them I’d be John KING.
They threw the Chaotic Curriculum in a BIG PILE…Said to the teachers..
“Go find the material you need to go with the standards”….
The DOE…then had the nerve to ask teachers to share the activities and resources they found with the DOE to put on one website for all the lazies to use.
Teachers..Do not share any of your activities with any of these people unless they pay you as they pay themselves..BIG BUCKS..
DO NOT SHARE..
THIS IS A CONTEST TO SEE WHICH POLITICAL FIGURE HAS THE BEST DISTRICT…
DO NOT SHARE
DO NOT SHARE
DO NOT SHARE
THE STUDENTS HAVE SUFFERED..THE TEACHERS THROWN UNDER A BUS…WHILE THE DOE’S AND THEIR $$$$GATES AND $$$$$BOOK CO HAVE FLOURISHED….ONE BEACH HOUSE AFTER ANOTHER!!
This is so uncommunitarian. You’ll be drummed out of the communist teachers’ party where everything is done for the good of the whole. Individualism???? That’s Ayn Rand stuff.
And you know what a kook – and what a deplorable human being – Ayn Rand was, right?
John King’s legacy will be…… (fill in the blank).
He must resign.
They can’t stop CCSS from moving forward because the US economy is dependent on their most valuable commodity’s data. This is a huge scheme. Nothing is coincidental.
King and others like to tout business leaders for support. They also believe that education should run like a business, and that we should make every kindergarten student college and career ready.
Why does he ignore the fact that 50% of every business start-up is failure, that all too often competition forces many out of business, that many businesses take advantage of their employees, and products sold lately are inferior and don’t last too long. Didn’t he ever hear the phrase, “they don’t make them like they used too!”
Why would we want to do this to our nation’s children?
GREED!
They should go into damage control mode. Slow down CCSS until the cloud is protected & vendor agreements are written. There are too many unwritten laws to allow this to move forward at this pace.
The Colorado State education department conversation with InBloom, Bates, Winnick, EPIC’s Khaliah Barnes & others is important. I was impressed by someone from CO state technology. He said “We can protect data..I will protect the data.” Not exact words. However that’s accountability.
Khaliah is the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the EPIC v US ED FERPA lawsuit. She’s at 00:40 in a video I’m going to link in different post because all of the conversation should be heard. I mention Khaliah because she talks about policies that could be considered given her knowledge. Some damage control recommendations at this point.
I just found May 16 testimony & will link the meeting video in another video.
Click to access EPIC-Stmnt-CO-Study-5-13.pdf
If Mr. Corcoran’s “launch” is a failure his business loses money and he will suffer the consequences. When the DOE “launches” and fails, children suffer. Why did Merry Tisch and John King choose to implement the Common Core standards quickly and poorly as opposed to carefully and well? To state, as Ms. Tisch did, that “It is time to jump in the deep end” is not an answer. According to Mr. Corcoran, “there’s never enough time to fully prepare for a lot of endeavors”. Really??? How would he feel if a surgeon operating on his heart decided that there wasn’t enough time to fully prepare and opted instead to “launch and learn”? Ms. Weingarten is not suggesting “endless delays”. She put forward a specific timetable of one year. In what language does “one year” mean “endless delays”? Perhaps I’m cynical, but I’m beginning to wonder whether the people charged with the implementation of these standards have agendas other than the betterment of our children’s education and the success of the Common Core.
Of course they do. It was Sheila who pegged it a while back. RTT is not a reform plan. It is a stimulus plan masquerading as reform. This has very little to do with educating citizens. Kids are data and data is for sale. Teachers are dataticians who can easily be replaced every few years creating constant churn with the ultimate goal to replace many with devices. The goal is never ending assessments and test
prep. King, Tisch all the rest have no respect for teachers despite their flowery language. They lie, lie, lie. King doesn’t even have his kids in public schools.
I believe that his children attend a Montessori school, hardly a bastion of test prep. Ms. Tisch has never attended a public school or worked in a public school. Her children did not attend public school. Her brother-in-law sits on the board of directors for K12, on online charter school. Mr. King worked for one year in a public school and proceeded to found a charter school. It seems that both benefit financially from the charter school industry. Unfortunately, neither of them are directly answerable to those that their policies effect. Ms. Tisch was “elected” to the Board of Regents by NY State legislature, but for all intents and purposes, she was appointed. Mr. King was appointed by the Board of Regents. It’s fine to blog, but until the parties affected, namely educators and parents, unify and mobilize politically and begin to hold politicians accountable for this debacle, nothing will change and will, in fact, only get worse.
Here’s Part 1 of CO State education meeting with inBloom & EPIC
[audio src="http://www.cde.state.co.us/media/cdeboard/meetings/20130516/SBEMeeting-20130516-pt1.mp3" /]
Part 2: Interesting how much inBloom Steve Winnick doesn’t want state legislation. Others believe it is essential. Not Steve.
[audio src="http://www.cde.state.co.us/media/cdeboard/meetings/20130516/SBEMeeting-20130516-pt2.mp3" /]
This document defines & connects words we’re hearing related to CCSS. Lots of information in this document. Too much for just me so I hope someone has an interest in breaking it down. What I’m reading is happening requires thoughtful planning from a records management & policy perspective. It appears to me to be a phrase I’m making up — incestuous data development.
Click to access get_file
Here’s the list of the members of the Board of Directors of the Center for Economic Growth: http://www.ceg.org/about-ceg/board-of-directors/
Boycotting their products (when possible, since many of their “products” are financial rather than tangible), and writing to all of them about it and the wrongheadedness of their support of this CCSS campaign might have an impact.
This unholy involvement of this business and millionaire oligarchy in pushing educational “reform” is the nexus that led to NCLB & RTTT, and fuels the Tisch “philanthropic” deprofessionalization of NYSED (Regents Research Fellows that now run the dept.) and of teaching in general. They must be exposed and stopped – now!
Once again, follow the money…
P.S. Wondering how many of these people actually send their children to public schools.
Weingarten asking Tisch and King to implement a moratorium on high stakes testing is like the Joker asking Penguin to leave Batman and Robin alone for a year.
What theater Weingarten tries to put out there. Too bad her acting, sets, props, script, and wardrobe are of the lowest possible quality .. no audience will tolerate it.
I have left the theater by now and am putting my ticket into dispute.
It’s amazing how some people haven’t caught on to her theatrics. Either they refuse to see the writing on the wall or they are really naïve.
Arrogance and agenda revealed. It isn’t about lifting students up, it’s about cutting teachers down.
So are we marching on the 8th? Feeling conflicted
Do you remember the rally against Bloomberg that was suddenly cancelled by Weingarten about 7 years ago?? Makes you wonder if this march is just another pretense to make teachers feel empowered.
As I’ve noted previously, Randi Weingarten has received some serious, well-deserved, blow-back for her Common Core endorsement. Her call for a short-term “moratorium” is nothing more than a ploy to temper the heat. Perhaps Weingarten, in a fit of solidarity, might publicly announce that she is returning to the classroom to weather the Common core implementation with her colleagues. And maybe pigs will fly.
As I’ve also noted before, stopping the Common Core will be very, very difficult. Far too many educators – not to mention students and parents and community members – are badly and sadly misinformed about the College Board and its primary products (PSAT, SAT, Advanced Placement program, and Accuplacer, the placement test used by more than 60 percent of community colleges.).
According to research, most are essentially worthless. But people still buy into them, and promote them (though perhaps not as shamelessly as the College Board). Most importantly, the College Board is all in for the Common Core, and says that is products are “aligned” with it.
Stopping corporate-style “reform” and the Common Core is easier said than done. Parents, students and educators are going to have to remove the wool from over their eyes. And that means abandoning blind belief in the College Board and the products it peddles.
Take, for example, the Board’s AP program, which has expanding tremendously over the past two decades and is now perceived to be a “gateway” to selective college admissions. Kenneth Bernstein – in a comment above – says that the “entire approach of Common Core and of assessing according to it is based on flawed notions about learning and education.” A 2002 National Research Council study of AP courses and tests found them to be a “mile wide and an inch deep” and inconsistent with research-based principles of learning. And that was before they were “aligned” with Common Core!
A 2005 study (Klopfenstein and Thomas) found AP students “…generally no more likely than non-AP students to return to school for a second year or to have higher first semester grades.” Moreover, the authors wrote that “close inspection of the [College Board] studies cited reveals that the existing evidence regarding the benefits of AP experience is questionable,” and “AP courses are not a necessary component of a rigorous curriculum.”
A 2006 MIT faculty report noted ““there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard” (Seebach, 2004). Dartmouth found that high scores on AP psychology tests do NOT translate into college readiness for the next-level course. Indeed, students admit that ““You’re not trying to get educated; you’re trying to look good;” and, “”The focus is on the test and not necessarily on the fundamental knowledge of the material.” Students know that AP is far more about gaming the college acceptance process than it is learning.
In The ToolBox Revisited (2006), Adelman wrote about those who had misstated his original ToolBox (1999) work: “With the exception of Klopfenstein and Thomas (2005), a spate of recent reports and commentaries on the Advanced Placement program claim that the original ToolBox demonstrated the unique power of AP course work in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. To put it gently, this is a misreading.”
Ademan goes on to say that “Advanced Placement has almost no bearing on entering postsecondary education,” and when examining and statistically quantifying the factors that relate to bachelor’s degree completion, Advanced Placement does NOT “reach the threshold level of significance.”
The 2010 book “AP: A Critical Examination” noted that “Students see AP courses on their transcripts as the ticket ensuring entry into the college of their choice,” yet, “there is a shortage of evidence about the efficacy, cost, and value of these programs.” And this: AP has become “the juggernaut of American high school education,” but “ the research evidence on its value is minimal.”
And yet, students are still told by their teachers and guidance counselors (and others) to take AP. SAT prep classes are still big business (the SAT, by they way, predicts very little about college success…enrollment experts say shoe size would work as well).
Stopping Common Core and corporate-style “reform” is not going to be possible without abandoning blind belief in and acquiescence to the College Board.
For many, that pill is just too hard to swallow.
As a parent, I’m not a fan of the College Board. My children who have completed high school have taken the ACT and fortunately, our school district offers IB (International Baccalaureate) as well as AP. While IB is not perfect, in my view the skills that my children acquired while taking IB were more useful to them in college than those that they got by taking AP. That being said, having had two children apply to college and one about to begin the college application process next year, without AP or IB courses, my children would not be competitive with others in our area for college acceptance. Far from “gaming the system” it is, in fact the reality, that the so called “college level courses” are, along with GPA, the primary factors that most colleges consider when making acceptance decisions. As a result, our school district heavily weights AP and IB courses, as do most schools in our area. Frankly, I believe that they should be weighted because, by and large, they are far more rigorous than the New York State Regents alternatives. Also, the reality is that AP and IB courses are chosen by students who are more academically motivated than those who take Regents courses and the quality of instruction and level of classroom discussion is more sophisticated. Taken altogether these factors will better prepare my children for college than a Regents course. While it may be true that those students who take AP are not fully prepared to skip courses in college, most colleges do accept credit for scores of 4 or 5 and sometimes even 3s on AP tests. I agree with you that the college application system is a racket. But this is the system that the colleges have created. It’s not that people have a blind belief in College Board products or that they are gaming the system. This IS the system. If they and their schools don’t play the game, they simply will not be competitive for college acceptance.
@ hrh88:
Systems can change, and be changed…and the college admissions “racket” is in dire need of being changed.
Moreover, this “competitive” stuff – starting with the jargon – needs to end. The corporate-style “reformers” cite economic competitiveness as the main reason for their brand of “reform.” (which includes more “rigor”). But it’s all provable nonsense. For example, each year the World Economic Forum (WEF) uses a sophisticated set of metrics to rank nations on their international competitiveness what causes it.
When the U.S. dropped from 2nd to 4th in 2010-11, four factors were cited by the WEF for the decline: (1) weak corporate auditing and reporting standards, (2) suspect corporate ethics, (3) big deficits (brought on by Wall Street’s financial implosion) and (4) unsustainable levels of debt.
Last year (2011-12), major factors cited by the WEF are a “business community” and business leaders who are “critical toward public and private institutions,” a lack of trust in politicians and the political process with a lack of transparency in policy-making, and “a lack of macroeconomic stability” caused by decades of fiscal deficits, especially deficits and debt accrued over the last decade that “are likely to weigh heavily on the country’s future growth.” [Note: The WEF did NOT cite public schools as being problematic to innovation and competitiveness. ]
And this year (2012-13) the WEF dropped the U.S. to 7th place, citing problems like “increasing inequality and youth unemployment” and “the United States is among the countries that have ratified the fewest environmental treaties.“ The WEF noted that in the U.S.,”the business community continues to be critical toward public and private institutions” and “trust in politicians is not strong.” Political dysfunction has led to “a lack of macroeconomic stability” that “continues to be the country’s greatest area of weakness.”
So, the “competitiveness” rationale for school “reform” is more than just a little bogus.
So too with the “competitiveness” rankings of colleges put out by US News & World Report. If, for example, Harvard and Yale and Dartmouth (to pick three) are so doggone good, then why did so many Harvard and Yale and Dartmouth grads fail so miserably –– in terms of economic knowledge and also in terms of ethics and morality – (like, for example, George W. Bush, and Jamie Dimon, and Larry Summers and Hank Paulson, to name only a few) in the prelude to the Great Recession?
Students (and parents) can choose to play the game, or not. [Note: there are plenty of good colleges out there, and not just the “select.”]
As to the weighting of AP classes, the main finding of a 2004 Geiser and Santelices study (looking at more than 80,000 students who entered the University of California system over three years) was that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average, and a high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.” The best predictor is UNweighted GPA.
But high schools award bonus points, and that’s why many students take AP, to pad their transcripts. Even more perversely, the College Board, which produces the SAT, now recommends that schools “implement grade-weighting policies…starting as early as the sixth grade.”
Yes, you read that correctly. The SIXTH grade! If that sounds stupid, and conniving, perhaps even fraudulent, that’s because it is.
As long as we continue to buy into the goofiness, as long as we willingly keep playing the shell game, the shell game will continue.
@democracy- you present the best evidence and arguments I’ve read yet. Thank you.
Thanks, tuppercooks.
Just trying to do my part.
@ democracy:
Thanks for the response and I agree with you up to the point where you state:
“Students (and parents) can choose to play the game, or not. [Note: there are plenty of good colleges out there, and not just the “select.”]
And
“But high schools award bonus points, and that’s why many students take AP, to pad their transcripts.”
Regarding the choice to play the game or not, my son’s experience is illustrative. My oldest child got a rather high score on the ACT. He had decent, though not stellar, grades and took one AP and three higher level IB courses in high school. I accompanied him as he visited colleges and I saw the reaction of the admissions officers to his ACT score. Ultimately he was awarded a merit scholarship of $20,000 per year to one of the “good colleges” that you mention. In addition, he earned 26 college credits from AP and IB courses that he took in high school. This saved me almost a year’s tuition. So between the $80,000 that he received over four years for the merit scholarship and the $34,762 that he earned for his credits from AP and IB classes, the total is $114,762.
The cost of college is, next to the purchase of a home, the most costly investment that many families will make. In fact, for many, the cost is crippling. For three children, it is difficult to afford, but our income is such that we do not qualify for need-based scholarships. Nonetheless, my family is not wealthy enough for me to “choose” to forgo $114,762. When it comes to playing the game, many of us do not have much choice.
Regarding the second statement, high school students do not take AP courses in some nefarious attempt to “pad their transcripts”. They take them because this is what colleges require for admission whether they are Ivy League or the “good colleges” that you mention and because they could potentially save thousands of dollars in college credits. In fact, most Ivy League colleges give little or no credit for AP classes. “Good colleges”, though this varies from college to college, mostly do give credit for a four or a five on an AP exam. As college becomes more and more costly, many students cannot afford not to take AP courses at their “free” public high school.
As far as the weighting is concerned, despite what Geiser and Santelices may have found in 2004, in 2013, while most colleges claim that they un-weight grades, many, in fact, do not. With the arrival of the Common Application, colleges that at one time got a few thousand applications are now receiving tens of thousands of applications each year. They do not have sufficient staff in their admissions departments to un-weight the grades on every transcript. Thus, this too is part of the game that high schools and students must play if they are to gain acceptance to not only the “select” but also the “good” colleges.
In short, while studies may dispute the value of the so called college level courses such as AP, the reality is that studies or no studies, this along with GPA and, to a lesser extent, standardized test scores, are the primary factors that colleges consider when making admissions and scholarship decisions. It is for this reason that high schools offer them and students take them. When colleges stop “buying into them” so will prospective students.
@ hrh88:
I appreciate your response, but you are arguing from personal experience (anecdote) rather from a larger, research perspective.
Let me explain.
First, you cite your oldest child’s ACT score. The ACT is only marginally better than the SAT at predicting college success. What both measure best is family income, and colleges know it, and that’s why they doled out the grant money to get your son to come to their campus…they knew you could and would pay the rest of the freight.
That illustrates a major flaw in college admissions; they willfully give grant money to students who need it least.
Matthew Quirk reported on this in “The Best Class Money Can Buy:”
“The ACT and the College Board don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions; enrollment managers say the practice is far more prevalent than most schools let on.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/the-best-class-money-can-buy/4307/2/
And the net result is this: “More and more, schools are chasing the small number of students who have the money or the test scores that help an institution get ahead. As those students command higher and higher tuition discounts, they leave a smaller and smaller proportion of the financial-aid budget for poor students, who are increasingly at risk of being left out of higher education.”
As to the ACT, like the SAT, it too is far more hype than a genuine educational tool with merit.
The authors of a study in Ohio found the ACT has minimal predictive power. For example, the ACT composite score predicts about 5 percent of the variance in freshman-year Grade Point Average at Akron University, 10 percent at Bowling Green, 13 percent at Cincinnati, 8 percent at Kent State, 12 percent at Miami of Ohio, 9 percent at Ohio University, 15 percent at Ohio State, 13 percent at Toledo, and 17 percent for all others. Hardly anything to get all excited about.
Here is what the authors say about the ACT in their concluding remarks:
“…why, in the competitive college admissions market, admission officers have not already discovered the shortcomings of the ACT composite score and reduced the weight they put on the Reading and Science components. The answer is not clear. Personal conversations suggest that most admission officers are simply unaware of the difference in predictive validity across the tests. They have trusted ACT Inc. to design a valid exam and never took the time (or had the resources) to analyze the predictive power of its various components. An alternative explanation is that schools have a strong incentive – perhaps due to highly publicized external rankings such as those compiled by U.S. News & World Report, which incorporate students’ entrance exam scores – to admit students with a high ACT composite score, even if this score turns out to be unhelpful.”
So, the explanation has two general possibilities, neither one very good. The first is that college admissions staff (and top college administrators) are ignorant of the severe “shortcomings” of the ACT and SAT. If that is the case, why in the world do these people have jobs in academia? They may as well be doctors who still practice bloodletting.
The second possibility – the real answer – is that they engage in this nonsense (and it really is nonsense) willfully. Because it’s all about “image”…and money. For example, Matthew Quirk noted that former VCU president Eugene Trani used to carry “a laminated card in his pocket to remind him of the school’s strategic goal of making it to the next tier. For every year the school stays in the higher tier he will receive a $25,000 bonus…” He was – and is – surely NOT the exception. In a very real (and nefarious) sense, this is a continuation of who gets voted “best dressed” in high school. It’s the real-world equivalent of giving tax cuts to the already wealthy to “stimulate” the economy. Maybe the fictional Forrest Gump described it best: “Stupid is as stupid does.”
You say that colleges do not un-weight transcripts. Of course they do. They have to. There are so many methods of weighting that they have no way to compare grades if they don’t. That’s why they use the ACT and SAT scores; to cut some deserving (though low-income) students out of the mix. And then they un-weight the core classes for other applicants.
You also state that your oldest child “earned” 26 credits for AP and IB courses. First, many schools do NOT award credit for IB courses (AP is their preference). Second, most colleges do NOT award that many credits for high school classes. Research shows that the vast majority of students who take AP (or IB) do NOT graduate any sonner than non-AP takers, and thus do NOT save any money. Your oldest child is the exception (though I’m sure you’re happy about that). And I’d wager that he or she could have obtained a quality education a less expensive state university (you didn’t say where the oldest child went).
Finally, you say that AP courses are the “primary factors” that colleges use in offering admissions and doling out cash, and “When colleges stop ‘buying into them’ so will prospective students.” In other words, this is a top-down process. There’s nothing that can be done. That’s sort of like saying “The tobacco companies say there’s no evidence that smoking is harmful, and until they buy into the medical research, they’ll keep producing their ads enticing prospective smokers to smoke.”
I disagree. Strongly. Education can, and often does, work. So does enlightened government policy. Right now, we seem to have very little of either with regard to the College Board and its products. The College Board sells its products, and – in essence – claims they are harmless, Not true. And as I’ve noted, the College Board is “all in” on the Common Core.
Stopping the Common Core (and all it entails) and corporate-style “reform” is not going to be possible without abandoning blind belief in and acquiescence to the College Board.
For many, that pill is just too hard to swallow.
@ hrh88: There have been a number of these articles in the news of late. Here’s one:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-08/colleges-soak-poor-u-s-students-while-funneling-aid-to-rich.html
An excerpt:
“Colleges are always saying how committed they are to admitting low-income students — that they are all about equality,” Burd said in a phone interview. “This data shows there’s been a dramatic shift. The pursuit of prestige and revenue has led them to focus more on high-income students.”
I have been involved in admissions work for my alma mater, Haverford College, for almost two decades. While we still require SAT or ACT scores, they are not that heavily weighted, and in fact a good high school record with challenging courses and lower SATS is looked upon more favorably than sky-high test scores and an inconsistent record.
What we are looking for is whether the student has challenged herself in high school – did he take the challenging courses available, be they Honor, AP or IB? If not, why should we believe s/he will challenge self at the college?
I taught for 13 years at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt MD. We have a science and tech program admission to which is competitive, but was also a geographic high school, so we have a mix of kids. We are nationally known, so a transcript from us carries meaning at just about every admissions office in the country. Some of our most challenging courses have never carried college credit, and until recently did not get a weighted grade. Having taught AP myself for 7 years, I can say directly that I did not need AP in order to challenge my students. Even when I taught government in 9th grade, some of my students would take papers from that class on to college interviews, the way I had with my AP US History papers when I applied to Haverford in the fall of ’62.
I agree that there are problems with AP, and they are likely to get worse with David Coleman, a principal architect of the Common Core, at the head of the College Board. But since the College Board now requires approval of a curriculum in order to use the AP designation (and is slowly moving to standardized curricula for AP courses), at least that enables a college that is unfamiliar with a particular high school some additional information on which to base its evaluation of the high school transcript.
Haverford is small enough that every application is read – usually multiple times, and there are no numerical weights to different portions of the application, as state universities with tens of thousands have to do to winnow the pool to something that humans can feasibly handle.
It is not, however, just the existence of the Common Application that has led to the explosions in applications. Remember that US News rates colleges/universities in part on how selective they are – the lower percentage of applicants admitted the better the college is ranked. That provides yet another example of Campbell’s Law, because the institutions encourage ever more people to apply so that their admissions rate will be lower.
@Kenneth:
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
As you point out, a high school course does not need to be AP (or IB) to be one that is challenging, and perhaps more importantly, one that causes students to think, and to engage not only with content but with each other and with important social issues.
To be clear, there are significant problems with the College Board’s Advanced Placement program, the biggest of which is that AP is grossly overhyped and marginally effective (like the SAT). And the AP course audit – demanded by colleges because of the problems with AP – is little more than window dressing, or lipstick on the pig, if you prefer.
One long-time AP teacher referred to the course audit as an “exercise in paperwork. Another long-time AP teacher called it a “bureaucratic mess,” perhaps because AP teachers with established performance records had syllabi rejected while brand-new Ap teachers had them approved. Indeed, multiple teachers at some schools sent in the exact same syllabus, with some gaining approval and some getting rejected.
On a homeschooling website, one person wrote this: “i then did a series of cut/paste, original content and stuff that directly applied to my little homeschool.” That person got a rapid approval. Another homeschooler wrote this: “We have had many courses approved — French, German, Calculus, Computer Science, French Lit when it existed, etc. We looked at the course requirements and sample syllabi online and planned out the year. Our courses were always approved within a couple of days without any trouble.”
As for Haverford, it seems to be a very nice, small school. Students like the “community” it provides and the sense of trust that pervades it (exams are unproctored). But Haverford touts its place in the “rankings,” just as it does student SAT scores on its website, detailing that the median SAT score (on all three SAT components) is 700 or above. And Haverford touts the fact that 99 percent of its students are in the top twenty percent of their classes in GPA, with 92 percent in the top ten percent. [And as I’ve noted, many students take AP because it “looks good” and because they get bonus grade points for taking AP.]
And Haverford is very selective, admitting only 23 percent of students (830 of the 3625 who applied) in the class of 2016. The enrollment rate (not yield) of those who applied is only 9 percent. 3625 applications are more manageable to read and evaluate than 20 or 30 thousand. But I’d still guess that Haverford uses the ACT and SAT (which measure family income, and are quite high at Haverford) to help determine who gets in – and pays the rest of the tuition. Because Haverford is EXPENSIVE.
Tuition and fees for 2013-14 are $59,446. So, even if a student gets $20,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 in grant funds, that still leaves, $25,000, or $30,000 or $35,000 in tuition and fees to pay. Guess who will get most of the grant money?
The website FinAid put it this way: “As the elite colleges become more selective in their admissions policies, they are crowding out lower income students who did not have the same advantages as their wealthier peers. Extending no loans policies to all students and reducing costs for middle income families in addition to low income families increases competition for admission and can potentially reduce the number of low income students being admitted.”
And Haverford students recognize this on campus. One alum said “Haverford [is] a tiny town resting amidst the highly wealthy residential suburbs of Philly, known as the ‘Main Line’.” A senior students says that “a majority [of students] are pretty well off.” A junior notes that on campus “the dominant culture seems to be fairly wealthy,” and a sophomore says ” lots of people have plenty of money.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not hating on Haverford. It’s an intimate campus with an 8:1 faculty-student ratio. The vast majority of classes (75 percent, US News says nearly 80 percent) have 20 or fewer students in them, with more than a third of classes having 10 or fewer students.
But $60,000 a year for school is $60,000 a year. And a small school can only do but so much.
Haverford does needs-blind admissions, guarantees all admitted a financial aid package that enables them to attend WITHOUT TAKING OUT LOANS and more than half the students receive financial aid.
We have become more selective simply because more students are applying and we are unable to increase the size of the freshman class without coming up with more housing, since it is very important for us that students live in / be part of the community.
Too bad the teachers pension can’t dump its GE stock.
why not?