For many years, young children applying to enter elite private schools in New York City had to take the ERB, which was supposed to be like an SAT for toddlers.
Now these schools have decided to drop the ERB as an admission test because of the pervasiveness of test prep. According to a story in today’s New York Times:
Next year, the test, commonly known as the E.R.B., is likely to be dropped as an entry requirement by most of the schools. A group representing the schools announced this week that, because of concerns that the popularity of test-preparation programs and coaching had rendered its results meaningless, it would no longer recommend that its members use the test.
“It creates a lot of anxiety in families and kids that is unnecessary,” said Patricia Hayot, the head of Chapin School, who leads the group, the Independent School Admissions Association of Greater New York. “We’re being brave. We’re trying to explore a new way.”
The decision quickly upended the frenzied arena of private school admissions. The association represents 130 private and independent schools, including some of the city’s most respected institutions: The Dalton School, Riverdale Country School and Packer Collegiate Institute, among others.
Now it is time for colleges and universities to drop the SAT as an entry requirements. Tutoring for the SAT is pervasive and very expensive. In New York City, the “best” tutors earn as much as $700 an hour. Getting prepped for the SAT is a very expensive proposition.
Consequently, SAT scores reflect family income even more than they had in the past. All standardized tests are reflections of socioeconomic status. Now the effects of family income are exaggerated by the families’ ability to pay for private tutoring.
When I took the SAT many years ago, the College Board insisted that coaching had no effect on the scores. Then they changed their story and admitted that coaching can raise scores. Then the money race was on. And the SAT scores heavily favor the rich.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The elite prep schools with all the resources they have at their disposal should take kids by lottery. And if they can’t produce extraordinary results, close them and transfer their resources to charter management companies that can 😉
LOL. That would be quite a feat, Dr. Maldonado, given that no “charter management company” in history has EVER produced “extraordinary results”.
So, unless you believe in magic, or are just “wishing and hoping” for some fantasy that has no basis in reality, on what basis would you make such a ludicrous suggestion?
I was just in my local Barnes&Noble yesterday, and to my surprise there were dozens of materials for parents on the Common Core….books, workbooks, CD’s, kits…you name it. This will also fall into the category of test prep like the SATs or the ERB. Parents who can afford it will be working with their children to prep them for the Common Core state tests. How valid can those results be??? Oh, the money behind this whole movement !!!
We pay $110 an hour in Dallas per hour for a private SAT coach. And our child already has an excellent SAT score; our child is the one who wants a higher score.
While $110 isn’t $700 an hour, it’s not the norm in Dallas to do something like this when you have no interest in sending your child to an East Coast school. It’s seen as over-the-top for anything but an East Coast school (degrees from which are more suspicious than impressive here in Texas) so we keep it to ourselves that we are paying a tutor since our child has only expressed interest in colleges located in the south and west.
So, yes, standardized tests benefit those with means. Although I am an urban public school teacher, my husband is not and our children will benefit from their SES status which is based on his earnings. That’s not fair.
ALL standardized tests benefit the affluent. Lots of kids with merit will get overlooked if we continue to only favor the advantaged and that’s what standardized tests are best at.
Didn’t you love the quote:
“Any uncertainty that you place in the process creates an absolute boom in test prep,” said Suzanne Rheault, chief executive of Aristotle Circle, one of the city’s more popular coaching programs. “People prep. They try to get information. They don’t want their kids to be guinea pigs.”
I wrote the following comment in response to Rheault’s quote:
Interesting to read that the test prep coach believes those parents who are applying to private schools don’t want their children to be guinea pigs… but everyone seems to be OK with the public school students in the entire State of NY being guinea pigs… I only hope that this is a signal that the absurdity of placement tests will disappear.
Bravo, yes, let’s advocate an end to SATs, no usage of SAT’s for college entry. Already, about 700 or more colleges are SAT-optional. SATs add nothing to predicting success in first-year of college which HS transcripts don’t already tell us. But, SATs have always given a leg up thigh-income students. My University, City University of NY, shamelessly abandoned its own long heritage of open access and free tuition, and in recent years uses the SAT for admission and placement. This is how far things have gone–the premier urban open-door university, CUNY, is now an SAT-admissions place which proudly showcases its small selective elite units like the Macaulay Honors College. Ending SATs will start the rollback to democracy.
As the daughter of immigrants who dropped out of school after the eighth grade, my SAT scores were extremely low. But I got into a non-selective state university, studied hard, became a teacher and married another college graduate. The two of us worked hard to provide a solidly middle class upbringing for our two sons who got near perfect scores on their SATs and graduated from the best universities in the country.
Now how did such a “dumb” mother produce such gifted children?
Sheer luck of the biological draw.
Well, undoubtedly you’re leaving out the part where your two sons, who were inevitably headed for a life of failure and prison, were SAVED by winning the lottery for admission to “an extraordinary, life-altering charter ‘school'”!
I MUST be right about this because everyone knows that ONLY charters can “save” our children.
Even though not one charter anywhere has outperformed your average public school in the same district; unless, of course, they cooked the books, or the numbers, or…something.
Isn’t that right, Ms. Rhee? If you’re reading this, in icognito mode, we’d like to hear your REAL story.
This is very good news, to add to the schools that are using more holistic measures to select students. It’s always been bizarre that some parents believed their three- and four-year-olds needed a test coaching so that they’d get into the pre-K that was absolutely necessary to get them into Harvard.
Thanks, Diane, for the reminder about the SAT. I took it (and several of the sub-tests, since I liked them) back in high school. Remember that back then not only did they claim you couldn’t be coached, but that the test was a “Scholastic Aptitude Test.” When that “aptitude” part proved to be junk science, SAT became “ability” test. Finally, they gave up and just left it as the plain old SAT.
The terrible impact of test prep for the SAT and ACT hits hard on everyone. The families that can afford the thousands of dollars are putting their kids, many of whom are average and modest, through test prep hell. But the poor families sometimes are suckered into paying those same dollars because they want only the “best” for their kids.
And it hits at every “level” for both the SAT and ACT.
When my eldest son was in high school, three of his classmates scored a 36 on the ACT and got written up in the newspapers. All of them had taken the test multiple times and had also done test prep. My kid only got a 35 and felt somehow cheated and bad. Without test prep and multiple takes. It was really sick having to go over that. Kids like to be in “the papers” and this ranking and sorting, as we’ve been reporting and analyzing, screws up kids from age three on, and all the way from the “bottom” in scores to the “top.”
“All standardized tests are reflections of socioeconomic status.”
All standardized tests are bogus. We’ve known that for years but few acknowledge it.
All standardized tests contain all the errors identified by N. Wilson and then some that render the whole scheme and any resulting conclusion invalid. See Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Come join the most urgent Quixotic Quest of our times and help rid the world of the malicious educational malpractices that are educational standards, standardized testing and the “grading” of students. Start by reading and understanding what Wilson has to say.
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.