David Coleman, president of the College Board (and architect of Common Core), announced plans to revise the SAT. Read here about the changes. Critics now believe that the SAT accurately measures family income, especially the ability to pay the cost of expensive tutors.
Coleman says that will change. Currently, the ACT has more test takers than the SAT.
FairTest is not satisfied with the changes. It hopes more colleges will join the ranks of “test optional,” since high school grades predict college success better than entry tests.
Bob Schaeffer of FairTest wrote:
National Center for Fair & Open Testing
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
cell (239) 699-0468
for immediate release, Wednesday, March 5, 2014
“NEW” SAT PLAN FAILS TO ADDRESS EXAM’S MAJOR FLAWS —
WEAK PREDICTIVE VALUE, SUSCEPTIBILITY TO COACHING, AND MISUSE;
UPCOMING OVERHAUL LIKELY TO SPUR TEST-OPTIONAL ADMISSION
Changes to the SAT college admissions test announced today fail to address many major concerns of independent researchers, standardized exam critics, and equity advocates. According to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), the revised test is unlikely to be better than the current one. It will not predict college success more accurately, assess low-income students more fairly, or be less susceptible to high-priced commercial coaching courses.
FairTest Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer explained, “The College Board’s failure to tackle the SAT’s historic weaknesses means that more schools will go test-optional. Since the 2005 introduction of a flawed ‘new” SAT, nearly 100 additional colleges and universities dropped admissions exam requirements. A recent research report demonstrating that test-optional admissions policies enhance both diversity and academic quality will further accelerate this movement. The truth is no one needs the SAT, either ‘old’ or ‘new.”
Schaeffer continued, “Rather than simply making the essay optional to compete with the ACT, now the most popular admissions exam, the College Board should stop misuse of SAT results. The company should refuse to transmit scores to schools and scholarship agencies that improperly require minimum scores for admission or financial aid.”
“Providing free SAT prep is laudable, but it already exists through programs such as Number2.com. The partnership with the Khan Academy is unlikely to make a dent in the huge market for high-priced, personalized SAT workshops and tutoring that only well-to-do families can afford. Like most of the other College Board initiatives announced today, this move is less significant than its promoters claim.”
The first administration of the revised SAT is scheduled for 2016. A database of more than 800 institutions that do not require ACT or SAT scores to make admissions decisions for all or many applicants is online at: http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional
– – 3 0 – –
The following charts are available on request
– Chronology of 95 schools de-emphasizing ACT/SAT use since the last revision of the SAT
– List of 150+ test-optional and test-flexible schools ranked in the top tiers of their respective categories
– Comparison of number of high school students taking the ACT and SAT annually over the past 20 years
– Links to other fact sheets on the SAT and related topics at: http://www.fairtest.org
Coming to a school near you, the Scholastic Common Core Aptitude Test, or SCCAT.
Is that the SCCAT that means what animals leave behind, or the SCCAT that means to leave hastily?
It is not for one as lowly as I to presume to plumb the mind of his Majesty, Lord Coleman, by divine right absolute monarch of instruction in English language arts in the United States and now keeper of the gateway to the middle class.
Don’t worry, Bob, got you covered-I’ve applied for Coleman’s court jester position. So maybe this post will help get it.
It’s definitely what animals leave behind, you know feline excrement or for a clear picture and demonstration of bear sccat see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntezkOAYdkE
There’s a little confusion about correlation and variables. SAT and other metrics, like GPA and grades are used to predict freshman college performance. That means that there is,on average, a positive association between these variables and success. On average is important; there are exceptions.
These variables are also correlated among themselves. Higher GPA is on average positively correlated with SAT score. With exceptions..
They are all also, to some extent, positively associated with SES, as is college performance. Again on average.
So finding a measure that predicts college success and has no correlation with SES is going to be tough.
The search has to be for measures that both predict success as well as gauge how well the student can benefit from the experience. None will be perfect; all will have errors. Any should be fair. That’s a huge task.
False. Completely and totally false. They merely measured preparation for college–NOT success. I wish people would understand they have been sold a pack of lies by propagandists.
“They merely measured preparation for college–NOT success”.
NO, they don’t measure anything as the SAT is not “measuring” device. It (SAT) is an “assessment” device (and a completely invalid one at that, see Wilson*) that numerizes the results but that doesn’t mean that that it “measures” anything.
Numerization (the act of assigning a quantity to an uncountable quality) does not make an assessment into a measuring device.
*As shown by Noel Wilson in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
That old test that we’ve been telling you was so great is really a piece of crap and never was as good at predicting college performance as were high-school grades, but just wait until you see the new SCCAT! LOL.
“New and Improved”
Best marketing slogan ever. It works every time. For some reason, we never ask why they were offering old and crappy previously 😉
Now Coleman just needs some babes in skimpy thong bikinis to help him sell the SCCAT!
They were NEVER designed as a predictor of college success. They ONLY measured “preparation” for college. The scores only told admission officers what classes these students took in high school in preparation for college. Nothing more.
The SAT correlated well with g and with high-school grades and, of course, with family income.
But the claim was, originally, that it was a predictor of college success and therefore a useful tool for admissions decisions, and that’s why it was adopted for that purpose. ETS and then the College Board made a small industry of issuing white papers to explain why its nonpredictor of college success actually was a predictor of college success. The was called, for a long while, the Scholastic Aptitude Test because it was supposed to be a test of aptitude. When it became clear to all that they couldn’t continue making that claim, they started calling it the Scholastic Achievement test, but it didn’t measure achievement any better than it measured aptitude, so they started calling it the Scholastic Reasoning Test.
What a record!!!
Now the story is that that great test that we’ve been defending for many decades really was a lot of junk science, unlike the new junk science test we’re going to deliver in 2016.
An essay would at least be an assessment of basic reading and writing literacy. At $25,000 a year and up I am not paying to send my child to a college that does not have at least a minimal standard of literacy. Seriously? You don’t even want your child’s classmate to be able to string together a coherent paragraph?!!
Yes Bob, but fear not we have “new and improved” to the rescue. It is familiar and comfortable, but it is the same old smell you recognize. But trust us, it is new and improved.
My kid would be taking the SAT in the first year of the revised test. ACT, here we come!
I believe Coleman also plans on revamping the ACT tests as well.
The GED too!
The Dark Lord Coleman will rule his evil empire as planned.
He can only do one thing at a time, however. I think we’re safe with the ACT for another year.
There should be a run on The Federalist Papers right about now.
The revised GED was supposed to be out starting in January. It is supposed to be much more expensive to take. Also, anyone who had passed some portions of the old test but not yet passed the old test by the end of this past December now has to start completely over. I support Fair Tests suggestion!
More expensive? Drop the test. End the charade. Put Coleman out of business.
From what I can gather, it seems like the test will be common core aligned and filled with Coleman’s greatest hits. (Letter from a Birmingham Jail; vocab words like “empirical” and linear functions). It makes me wonder how sensitive the test will be at the top of the curve. 11th graders should be incredibly practiced at this type of thing by the time they take the SATs. Since Coleman isn’t an assessment expert, I’d love to be a fly on the cubicle walls at the College Board!
You and me both!
The practical issue that you raise there, Emmy, is a fascinating one.
However, bear in mind that all this is about revamping K through college education for the masses to turn it into workforce training. That’s the vision behind the ed deform movement. None of this will apply to the elites. So, it will not be necessary for the entrance test to make fine discriminations at the top. This I actually agree with–that if we are to have these summative tests, then they should be tests of minimal requirements, for that’s what such summative testing can do fairly accurately.
But isn’t that their “value”? Assistance for admissions officers who are faced with evaluating candidates from different high schools?
Clearly Coleman has an assessment “style”. But if children are always tested in this way, they’ll probably get good at taking tests in this style.
I am following this closely because my children will not be instructed with common core aligned materials nor will they take the common core tests throughout their schooling. I have every confidence that a sound education and SAT test prep in high school will work for college admissions but I suspect this might mean even more test prep for students who haven’t been doing such tests since kindergarten. I’ll take it though because test prep is way more developmentally appropriate for adolescents than for 6 year olds.
What we need is some leadership on this issue from our top universities rather than them turning a blind eye. The dean of admissions at Harvard was recently quoted encouraging students to relax a bit over summer vacation or take a summer job. As if. What tiger mom would risk that? Apparently you can rest when you’re old.
We need leadership from our universities on this. Yes, and on much more.
It’s shocking to me, Emmy, that there has been almost TOTAL SILENCE from our academics and intellectuals about the CC$$ in ELA.
Where are the linguists and professors of literature, composition, and rhetoric who should long ago have torn ripped the amateurish CC$$ in ELA to shreds and laughed the authors of this mediocrity off the national stage?
They should all be indicted for criminal solipsism.
I know a professor of linguistics at a well known university who knew nothing about the Common Core and when informed was mostly concerned with defending Bill Gates from what he perceived to be my unfair assertion that he is the driving force and the initial funding that has propelled the CC into almost every classroom in the USA.
Sadly, this is no surprise, Dawn. Almost everything that we’ve learned about language acquisition has been learned in the past 40 years. Our understandings of how language acquisition occurs have been COMPLETELY revolutionized, and what has been learned has profound consequences for curricula and pedagogy, NONE OF WHICH HAVE BEEN REALIZED.
Linguists don’t talk to educators, and educators barely listen to tidbits of what linguists are saying and usually misunderstand or misinterpret what they are hearing, and so our standards and our pedagogical approaches and our curricula remain prescientific, as does our training of English teachers in education programs.
Academics live in their little fiefdoms. The linguist typically thinks that it’s MUCH MORE IMPORTANT to write that rebuttal to someone’s paper on Problems in Prevailing Minimalist Models of Aspect in Latvian than to attend to something as minor as how millions of kids are being consigned to lives of poverty and desperation due to educational witch doctoring being hailed by know-nothing politicians and business people as “new, higher standards.”
Fortunately, there are some scholars and researchers in education who do have a clue, but these had no chance to have any say in the creation of the new “standards,” and no mechanisms have been created for submitting the amateurish “standards” to rigorous scholarly, scientific critique and revision.
I don’t think that insulting linguists adds anything to the conversation. Didn’t the Modern Language Association just invite Dr. Ravitch to give a most excellent speech on Common Core? And Chomsky has spoken up quite a bit lately about the problems in education. Why pick on just this group? I’ve been wondering myself how there can possibly be enough Education faculty in our colleges falling for all this nonsense to keep it going. Or are they the ones that are just not speaking up?
I agree with the Harvard admissions dean. Helicopter parenting, tiger moms, or whatever you want to call it is one of the worst influences on our schools. The changes in the SAT are being made to try to make college more accessible because the colleges know that the SAT scores come down to the amount of tutoring and test prep the student gets. They should just get rid of it altogether.
Emmy, I don’t expect the test to be too rigorous. Everyone gets in. Nobody gets an education. Everyone gets a great, big student loan which collectively could probably offset the national debt.
Jamie, as I said, the silence from linguists about the amateurish language standards in the CC$$ in ELA has been deafening. These “standards” instantiate prescientific notions about language acquisition and ossify those in ways that will preclude introducing curricula that could make a difference in the lives of low-SES kids.
Bob: I can only assume you’re talking about linguists who are working in the field of education. I know many linguists and most of them aren’t in this area. Another commenter said above that the linguist they spoke to about common core didn’t know anything about it. And the response she got was similar to what I got from typical educated (non linguist) parents in suburban Massachusetts who didn’t know anything about common core. They assume that if Bill Gates as philanthropist is pouring money into education, it must be a good thing. I don’t know why a linguist would be assumed to know more about k-12 education than, say, a philosopher if education was not that person’s field.
Jamie, I believe that intellectuals have a responsibility to pay attention to matters of public policy related to their fields of study. Climate scientists have a responsibility to weigh in on energy policy, for example.
There are a great many linguists in this country who study child language acquisition or who are at least familiar with the research on child language acquisition. The CC$$ deals, in part, with language acquisition. Its prescriptions are based on prescientific notions and will do a lot of harm. Linguists should step forward to explain how crude and backward these “standards” are and to disabuse people of the false assumptions about language acquisition instantiated in these standards. These people are linguists, but they are also citizens and should pay attention. In a few years, their students will be ones who came up through schools using the CC$$. If the new science standards required teachers to describe phlogiston and the ether and how objects in motion come to rest because they use up their motive force and about spontaneous generation of germ cells and inheritance of acquired characteristics and the elan vital, then the physicists and biologists would weigh in.
According to a story in the Huffington Post, today, in the new SCCAT, the essay will be optional, and all essays will be in response to an essay accompanied by this prompt:
“As you read the passage in front of you, consider how the author uses evidence such as facts or examples, reasoning to develop ideas and to connect claims and evidence, and stylistic or persuasive elements to add power to the ideas expressed. Write an essay in which you explain how the author builds an argument to persuade an audience.”
Huh?
Let’s hope that Lord Coleman and company plan to work on the wording of that question and that they plan to give test takers a choice of essays to analyze.
It’s possible, of course, that HP got the wording of the question wong. It’s seems likely, in fact, given how awkward and ungrammatical the question is.
This question–the one essay question on the new SCCAT–could be worse, I suppose. At least it is open-ended, calls upon varied skills, and allows for varied acceptable answers.
Of course, in keeping with the whole thrust of U.S. education for the last thirty years, it’s entirely content free.
That would be easy to prepare for beforehand. Have a stock answer with all the rubrics elements involved. Now we just have to get a copy of the rubric.
Yeah, this is a test prep industry dream come true. It’s an ideal prompt for paint-by-number SAT essay exam prep.
Here’s a little essay test for Lord Coleman. He’s giving every kid in the country only one prompt to choose from, but I’ll be more generous. I’ll give him two.
Dear David:
Explain in 5,000 words or less how the technocratic Philistinism that is education deform has undermined teaching, learning, scholarship, and research in the United States, with particular reference to the insidious consequences for curricula and pedagogy of a) the bullet list of standards and b) Deformish numerology, aka data-driven decision making.
or
Defend convincingly the principle of divine right by which you were chosen by Achieve absolute monarch of the English language arts in the United States and allowed to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, curriculum developer, scholar, and researcher with regard to the outcomes to be measured and the learning progressions to be followed in domains of the English language arts about which you clearly know next to nothing.
You should add those CC$$ buzzwords: with”fidelity” and “efficacy.” One Coleman to rule them all…No one in the MSM has made the connection that one man is influencing p-12 curriculum and the gateway test to college. Until he wrecks the ACT, too, kids should take that test or hope that colleges have had enough of Herr Coleman and ignores his silly tests.
One NON-EDUCATOR as THE major influence on 75 MILLION students. Only in America. We will become a laughing stock nation if we let this stand.
Coleman and Gates and Sir Michael Barber are taking this thing world wide. There will be no one left to laugh except maybe Pasi Sahlberg in Finland.
“One Coleman to rule them all.”
That’s one deep, dark, dank, and scary thought.
I know this is true, but still can’t suspend my disbelief.
We all know that all one has to do is label something “new and improved” and voila… whatever has the label hangs on a bit longer until it once again is labeled “new and improved” again. Coleman’s testing empire hopefully is on the decline and no PR machine making changes and tweaks here and there can save it. We can hope this is the case for the sake of our nation’s students enduring common core and and a “new and improved SAT.
Another infuriating point regarding the change to the test is that it is designed to maximize profit. They are getting rid of the timed essay. Like everything else “ed reform” oriented… it is all about bottom line. It sure is a lot easier to run the bubbled in scoring through a scanner than to have to pay human scorers for the essays. Coleman would probably not dare try to convince the public that a specialized computer program can score essays! Too expensive anyway.
The 1600-point scale is back? Does this mean I can resume bragging about my old SAT scores*?
* scores inflated by memory as necessary.
LOL!
And is that 1600 score “1600 out of 2400” or “1600 out of 1600”?
Here’s a true story from my antediluvian high school years.
I had a friend – who today happens to be a highly successful business owner – who was a poor student and test taker. He took the SAT in the spring of 11th grade and got something like 325 each on the math and verbal sections. He didn’t care, because he knew he was going to a CUNY two year college, and the SAT wasn’t even required for entrance.
During the fall of senior year, he was compelled to take the test again. Having had enough, he went in, waited the requisite minimum amount of time, and two minutes before striding out, penciled in his best approximation of “F&$% You” in the bubble grid. His scores went up.
Now that’s validity!
He did say one thing that was right. The SAT and the ACT both “have become disconnected from the work of our high schools.” He forgot to add, so has David Coleman.
mathcs, you have forgotten that our schools are to be remade according to Lord Coleman’s blueprint; they are to become factories for prepping students for standardized tests of the CC$$.
“factories for prepping students for standardized tests of the CC$$.”
Perfect!
🙂 Well, then I guess our students will be well-prepared for the jobs of the FUTURE GLOBAL ECONOMY, including test taking, bubble-filling-in, demographic question answerers, linear equation solvers, and, uhm, hmmm.
The fee waivers for low-income students announced by the College Board are a good thing. Kudos to them for that.
Don’t know if that is a good thing. It just sucks more into the insidious web to be devoured by the edudeformers’ practices.
Just going off the quote from the article, “Mr. Coleman announced programs to help low-income students, who will now be given fee waivers allowing them to apply to four colleges at no charge”… I’m not sure what about this is a change in policy.
They already (for at least the last 2 years, which is how long I’ve been paying attention to this) offer 2 SAT test fee waivers per year to low income students, and up to 8 free score reports to any college. They also allow you to fill out a request for colleges to waive their application fee if you qualify for a SAT fee waiver, but its up to colleges whether to accept the fee waiver. In my experience, most colleges already grant app fee waivers (or at least deferrals) to any student who qualifies for an SAT fee waiver.
Unless College Board will actually start paying the application fee for up to 4 schools that refuse to grant a fee waiver, I don’t see how this would be a change.
Maybe they just threw that in there for additional PR points and there is no real substantive policy change.
The TOEFL exam is the one that really irks me with its fee structure. $170, or $85 if you qualify for their “fee reduction service”. They don’t offer any fee waivers. The TOEFL is required by many colleges if English is not your first language.
At my district, many students dream of attending college, but 100% of them are low income (very low income) and 100% of them are ESL students, and there isn’t a single institution of higher education in the world that offers instruction in their first language. There are scholarships out there so that the kids here can attend college without any monetary parental support, but scholarships don’t disburse the funds until you start college, so they can’t help with the test fees. Very, very few families here (maybe 3 or 4 families) could manage to save up $85 for the TOEFL fee, so it can be a difference-maker for whether a child can or cannot attend college.
That’s really awful, CTee. Sounds like something that an NGO could take on in order really to make a difference in a lot of lives.
You’re kind to offer kudos! Call me a skeptic… College Board probably hired an expensive PR firm to tell them how to move forward. I don’t give them as much credit for offering “fee waivers”… and their “accountants” probably figured out how to make this profitable in some non transparent way.
High schools in cities already have fee waivers for low income students. So Coleman was deceptive again.
“It is time for the College Board to say in a clearer voice that the culture and practice of costly test preparation that has arisen around admissions exams drives the perception of inequality and injustice in our country,” he said in a speech Wednesday in which he announced the changes. “It may not be our fault, but it is our problem.”
I guess that means he will be reducing the cost of the AP tests also, and providing free test preparation for them, and paying for people to proctor them (as opposed to having high school educators freely proctor them).
Not.
I very much liked this statement from Mr. Coleman. I humbly suggest, however, the following slight edit:
“It is time for the College Board to say in a clear voice that the culture of summative standardized testing and the trivialization, narrowing, and distortion of curricula and pedagogy resulting from that culture are major contributors to the inequality and injustice in our country. This is partially our fault, but only partially, for the entire education deform movement, from the plutocrats funding it to the educrats and carpetbagger consultants profiteering from it, is to blame.”
“I guess that means he will be reducing the cost of the AP tests also, and providing free test preparation for them, and paying for people to proctor them (as opposed to having high school educators freely proctor them).
Not.”
Double not!
If I may correct that statement a bit:
““It is time for the College Board to say in a clearer voice that all the standards and tests that they have foisted upon an unsuspecting public over the past decades were completely misguided and that any results are completely repudiated and invalid. To understand why see: “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 ”
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.
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” is, to paraphrase Pauli, not only not right, its not even wrong.
Got me baffled with that one CTee!
“to paraphrase Pauli”–Please explain. (I have a good friend whom we call Paulie however I don’t think you’re referring to PA)
If Wilson is “not only not right” (perhaps you mean in the sense of not being ‘right in the head’) and “it’s not even wrong” then his logic must be impeccable, eh!!
CTee, obviously, there are claims made by Wilson that are just silly. To deny that any quality can be quantified is to deny all possibility of quantification. However, what we must recognize, and this is an important takeaway from Wilson’s argument, is that quantification is subject to a variety of kinds of error that in turn involve varying degrees of error and commonly involves fiat and power relations that should be taken into account. If we are to avoid numerology and fallacious appeal to authority, we must therefore subject proposed measurements to intense scrutiny when these are put forward as policy that will have significant consequences. A measurement procedure for a complex attribute like reading ability or intelligence or achievement in school or aptitude for further study becomes a delimiting operational definition of that attribute, so we should be very cautious about that procedure if the consequences of employing it are significant. If one is taking a tiny sunfish for a sale around a pond, determining direction by sight is acceptable. If one is sailing in an area of coastal ocean with submerged rocks, one had better attend to one’s chart, one’s compass, and one’s depth finder.
So, critiques such as those put forward by Wilson should not be dismissed so blithely. In the case of the standardized tests that are now being created, these become our operational definitions of successful completion of K-12 studies, and so people change how and what they teach to accord with those operational definitions. They start, for example, turning the activities and exercises that they have students doing into ones that measure the same standards in the same ways. And those operational definitions preclude other operational definitions that would be appropriate for some students or better for students generally.
Duane, CTee is quoting the chemist Wolfgang Pauli. The idea is the old Logical Positivist/Verificationist one, championed most famously by A.J. Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic, that there are
a. statements that are true
b. statements that are false
c. statements that aren’t clear enough to be either and so are, in effect, meaningless
CTee is saying that Wilson’s ideas fall into category C.
Will have to read Ayers. Sounds interesting.
Thanks!
Ayer and the other Verificationists were, I think, confused. Their claim was that only only statements that were representations of independently verifiable facts (The cat is on the mat) and well-formed propositions within axiomatic systems (1 + 1 = 2) had meaning because only those had truth value. They consigned all of ethics, politics, aesthetics, and metaphysics to the status of nonsense–neither true nor false but meaningless.
What an idiotic notion. Meaning is mattering to persons–not representation alone. Representation is one type of mattering. Your subjective judgments are no less facts about the world than are the design of the shirt you are wearing. We generalize from such judgments (we make inductive inferences), and then we check those judgments against the judgments of others and modify or qualify them as necessary, following the same sort of process of reasoning that we follow in making scientific inferences. So, I find that I don’t like having a sharp object poked into my eye. I generalize from that: Having a sharp object poked into one’s eye is a bad thing. I check that in the world and find that others agree, with a few exceptions (e.g., eye surgery).
So-called verificationism appealed to narrow reductionists who didn’t grok that subjective experiences are facts about the world too.
Thanks, Bob, for the clarification of “Paulie”. CTee and I would disagree then as to where Wilson’s work falls in Paulie’s classification schema.
CTee,
Please rebut/refute what you perceive to be Wilson’s “errors” in thinking. Not a generalized “there’s nothing there” but concrete examples from his work that you see as not being logical/rational.
Thanks in advance,
Duane
I am NOT a David Coleman fan, but there is actually a reduction in the cost of the AP test for those who qualify for free or reduced lunch ($63 instead of $89) and schools are encouraged to help students pay for tests as needed.
Public schools should not be paying for the costs of the AP test unless their willing to pay for any and all costs associated with schooling, FFA fees, sports fees, field trip fees, etc. . . first.
That’s OK, but, yeah, like the kids in my school who get free lunch would have $63 available all at once to fork over to take a test.
We do advertise the reduced fees here at my school, but is the school (system?) really paying for the tests? If so, that means taxpayer funds are going into David Coleman’s company.
FairTest has little understanding of the logic components of The SAT. Plus, its listing of test optional schools is, at its root, dishonest.
WHY??????
I wouldn’t imagine someone from selectprep.com (test preparation company) would like colleges making the SAT optional, eh?
Well, Select Prep’s business is secure. Coleman’s changes will do nothing to end the test prep industry.
These tests only measure preparation–they don’t measure “intelligence” or college success. It has ALWAYS been that way, but these tests have been perverted into something they were NEVER intended to be.
SAT scores are highly correlated with “g” as measured by IQ tests. Prep courses raise scores, on average, by about 30 points, but in a competitive college entrance environment, those 30 points can make a difference.
On another note, Lord Coleman has decided that the SCCAT should be closely aligned with, and a test of, what is done in high school, but aren’t the new national assessments from the Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.)–PARCC and SBAC–supposed to be doing that already?
So, doesn’t that make the SCCAT redundant? Or are we going with a “you can’t test the same stuff often enough” approach, doubling down to ensure that K-12 be turned into all test prep all the time?
Is that the idea? Inquiring minds want to know.
Yes, Ang, the SAT is a SUPERB measure of the square footage of students’ parents’ homes. That it measures extraordinarily well.
Highly correlated with the square footage … I love that! and also with parents’ and grandparents’ educational attainment, don’t forget.
Harold, I was simply repeating Ang’s funny (and true) statement.
They don’t “measure” anything as they are not measuring devices. See above response to you, susannunes.
By continually repeating the false concept that these tests “measure” something we reinforce the edudeformers meme and cede one of many linguistic skirmishes before they have even been engaged.
Oh silly boy!
These tests do measure…
The square are footage of your parents home!
😉
TAGO!
Nice point Ang. I don’t know if the ample square footage is causing them to score higher, but there definitely seems to be a correlation.
Put Coleman out of business. Ignore the SAT.
I’d say if a student can pass the PARCC or SMB test they don’t need to take the SAT. And if New York keeps seeing only 30% passing rates on the CCS test as I’m sure other states will follow, what’s the use for the SCCAT?
Hum. There is something here I just cannot put my finger on. 😉
2013 COLLEGE-BOUND SENIORS SAT SCORES BY FAMILY INCOME
2013 COLLEGE-BOUND SENIORS SAT SCORES BY FAMILY INCOME
READING MATH WRITING TOTAL
$ 0 – $20,000 435 462 429 1326
$20,000 – $40,000 465 482 455 1402
$40,000 – $60,000 487 500 474 1461
$60,000 – $80,000 500 511 486 1497
$80,000 – $100,000 512 524 499 1535
$100,000 – $120,000 522 536 511 1569
$120,000 – $140,000 526 540 515 1581
$140,000 – $160,000 533 548 523 1604
$160,000 – $200,000 539 555 531 1625
More than $200,000 565 586 563 1714
From FairTest
For those of us who have worked with various populations over the years, it rings true that this test, like the other standardized tests, do a great job of measuring how well off and dominate culture you are.
What’s next? David Coleman producing Sesame Street?
A close reading of the letter J, spanning one hour.
J is for Jackass.
Digging deeper into the text, yes. 🙂
One of the smartest presentations ever made on the subject of education deform:
http://sxswedu.com/news/2014/sxswedu-2014-video-highlights-keeping-promise-educational-technology
This presentation reflects what I have been saying for a long time about doing Failure Modes and Effects Analysis on the Education Deforms being implemented.
Bob, regarding your comment:
“It’s shocking to me, Emmy, that there has been almost TOTAL SILENCE from our academics and intellectuals about the CC$$ in ELA.”
Same is true for math, except the standards were written by academics with little to no input from cognitive and developmental psychologists, or anyone else with any understanding of how children learn (including teachers, of course.) The chairman and co-chair of the committee who wrote the math standards are both on the board of Coleman’s Student Achievement Partners. According to a former supervisor, soon after the common core (math) standards were adopted she was talking to a friend of hers who was a math professor at Rutgers. He asked her, “How could you allow this to happen?”
One can understand why, when there were separate state standards, these might have flown beneath the radar of the intellectuals in our universities. But national standards represent a totally unprecedented situation in which the IDEAS to be thought and acted upon by the entire population are being mandated by an unelected, self-appointed body, and one would have thought that that shocking aspect of the situation would have been enough to capture the intellectuals’ attention.
Here’s something else really shocking about the CC$$ in ELA: It’s a simple matter for experienced teachers of English at all levels to come up with superb outlines for learning progressions in any domain covered by the “standards” that are PRECLUDED BY them, and the fact that these are precluded–that one isn’t allowed even to think those–should outrage EVERYONE in the field. Imagine a comparable situation in which some amateurs had written “standards” for medicine that precluded introducing any new treatments based on ongoing research and development. Physicians wouldn’t stand for that, so why do ELA professionals? How can someone who is a professor of English methods in a university, for example, not be horrified by this? How can some of them actually collude/collaborate with the foisting of these amateurish “standards” on the entire country?
And suppose that those “standards” for medicine outlined the same treatment for every patient, despite his or her condition. Again, physicians wouldn’t stand for that, so why do ELA professionals?
It’s really quite shocking that these “standards” haven’t been met with derision and anger from ELA professionals–teachers, curriculum coordinators, curriculum developers, and education professors in particular–horrified that amateurs like Coleman would presume to do their thinking for them.
I read that Achieve is very focused on the transition from 12th grade to college. This is where we may finally get some push back from the universities. (Well, that is if there are any tenured faculty left.) Are they going to write freshman level courses now? As someone said below, Mr. Gates certainly has a high opinion of himself (especially since he failed to complete 4 years of college). Obviously he was smart enough to complete college, but why did he not have enough “grit” to get through something he found to be so odious?
Are these people really going to tell us that MIT sucks and we need to hold the professors more accountable?
Emmy, Gates says that he saw a window of opportunity and seized it. I suspect that he’s right. He could always have gone back. His parents had the resources, if he had failed, to make that possible.
Gates has big plans for US colleges. He’s talking a lot about how expensive they are and how unproductive and how many students drop out of them. So, he wants to make them cheaper by doing a lot of online education, and he wants them to become more vocationally oriented, and he wants them to have, like the K-12 schools, standards, value-added measurement, and standardized assessments of learning. He has written and spoken about all of these of late.
70 percent of classes in US colleges and universities are now taught by adjuncts, and these schools are almost all now administered by business people rather than by faculty who have taken off a couple years to serve in an administrative capacity (as was done long ago). So, the conditions may exist for him to get what he wants there in the public post-secondary schools. The private schools attended by wealthy kids, of course, will be immune from all this crap.
It’s interesting that US education has now become Bill Gates’s tinkertoy set.
Tinkertoy set, indeed. BTW: my recollection of the Gates/Harvard story was that he “dropped out” with some level of disgust or frustration but you’re right in that it was more a case of seizing an opportunity. Or at least that is how he tells it. Since he was there and not me, why not believe him? 🙂
I do think you are correct regarding what is coming down the pike for publicly funded colleges and universities (especially because an adjunct workforce will not be able to resist it). On a certain level, I agree that we should do more to align post-secondary education with the requirements of today’s economy. Everyone doesn’t need to go to “college” in order to have a productive and fulfilling life. But if we do this then we need to re-imagine what 21st century Voc-Ed should look like for the six years between high school and “some college”. I strongly feel it should be the polar opposite of what we are getting through common core. It should be radically “hands-on” and collaborative. Students should work across disciplines rather than in sequences like Algebra, Geometry and Algebra II.
We’re pursuing education as if it is the “filling of a pail” rather than the “lighting of a fire” (Yeats) and expecting that this approach will build versatile capacities. It will not.
I agree, Emmy, as I so often do with you. We are currently turning out lots and lots of kids, after 12 or 16 years of education, with no notion what they might do for a living. The psychological and economic cost of that is enormous.
The filling a pail/lighting a fire line, BTW, is from Plutarch’s “On Listening to Lectures,” from the Moralia, and is falsely attributed to Yeats (I think; I have never been able to find it in a work by Yeats, and I’ve read just about everything the man produced).
Here’s the Plutarch:
“For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.”
That’s from the Loeb Classical Edition.
I can’t wait to watch the showdowns between the profs and the deformers. The ed deformers found it easy to push K-12 teachers around because their unions were a eunuch’s shadow of what unions should be and because many of those teachers were already inured, by long experience, to being docile and following orders. It will be interesting to see what stealth mechanisms the deformers create at the post-secondary level to avoid direct confrontation with a lot of angry academics.
Don’t PO a heterophenomenologist (or anyone who has a clue what that means). It’s not pretty.
LOL.
Right not, though, the profs are sadly silent, most of them, as the deforms hit their brothers and sisters in K-12.
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out. . . .”
Regarding that “collaborative and hands on” notion–I have long maintained that we could teach the entire Grade 7-12 math curriculum to some students through the lens of graphic arts and for other students through the lens of computer science and for other students through the lens of machine shop.
It gives me great pleasure, Emmy, to see that you understand how the CC$$ PRECLUDES pedagogical approaches and curricular designs. It’s really tragic how many people don’t get that, how many do not understand what a loss that is, a loss of important possibilities.
Thanks for the heads-up on Plutarch! I vaguely remembered that the pail/fire quote was falsely attributed but I forgot the details. I like this quote so much that I will remember not to make this mistake again! It is harder when the quote is good but the person who actually said it is less known than the person to whom it is falsely attributed. This one doesn’t have that problem so I assure you I will spread the word!
“I can’t wait to watch the showdowns between the profs and the deformers.”
Honestly, I don’t think it will be much of a match. With an adjunct workforce and manufactured budget problems, second/third tier colleges will crumble easily under the pressure and be unable to fight against state legislatures or the federal government requiring exit exams for continued funding.
I’ve noted this point multiple times on this blog but it bears repeating.
College enrollment specialists say that their research finds the SAT predicts between 3 and 15 percent of freshman-year college grades, and after than that nothing. Shoe size would work as well, or better. The ACT, the SAT’s big competitor, is only marginally better. The “new, improved” SAT will be no different. (though in a perverse twist, the SAT changes suggest that it will now make an attempt to enhance citizenship…don’t believe it).
The real story is that both the ACT and the College Board (purveyor of the PSAT, SAT, and the AP program) were major players in the development of the Common Core standards – and its massive testing regimen – which are about to be unleashed on public schools across the nation.
The Common Core was funded by Bill Gates, and it was largely the work of three main groups: Achieve, ACT, and College Board. Toss in the Education Trust. All of these groups are tied tightly to corporate-style “reform.”
Achieve, Inc.’s board includes Louis Gertner, who’s bad-mouthed public education for decades. It also includes Tennessee Republican governor Bill Haslam, a pro-life, anti-gay, corporate friendly politician. The board also includes Prudential executive (and former big banker) Mark Grier (Prudential has been fined multiple times for deceptive sales practices and improper trading), and Intel CEO Craig Barrett (who keeps repeating the STEM “crisis” myth). Intel has laid off thousands of workers and is masterful and aggressive at avoiding tax payments and seeking subsidization, much like Boeing, and Microsoft, and GE, and IBM, and Chevron, and AT & T. These are some of the biggest tax cheaters in the country. There’s a reason that Achieve’s main publications never mention democratic citizenship as a mission of public education.
Achieve’s funders include – not surprisingly – Boeing, Intel, GE, IBM, Chevron, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, Prudential (and State Farm, MetLife and other insurance companies), and the Gates Foundation. The Education Trust is funded by MetLife, State Farm, IBM, and by the Broad, Gates and Walton Foundations, among others.
The “leaders” at the College Board include president David Coleman, who was instrumental in writing the Common Core standards, and who was a former McKinsey consultant and treasurer of disgraced former DC chancellor Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst. It includes policy chief Stefanie Sanford, former policy director for Texas Governor Rick Perry and “director of advocacy” for the Gates Foundation. It includes assessment chief Cyndie Schmeiser, who is now in charge of the PSAT, SAT, and AccuPlacer (worthless academic measures), and who was previously the chief operating officer at ACT. And it includes Amy Wilkins, formerly of the Education Trust.
Slide on over to charlatan Wendy Kopp’s Teach for America, and one finds that the big contributors are the right-wing Arnold Foundation (which wants to privatize public pensions), the arch-conservative Kern Foundation (which even wants to inculcate ministers into the belief that unregulated “free enterprise” is a “moral system”), the Broad and Gates and Walton Foundations, Cisco, State Farm, and big banks –– Bank of America, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Wells Fargo –– that have paid billions and billions in penalties and fines (with a very hefty dose yet to come) for ripping off consumers and rigging “markets.”
The very same groups who seek to “reform” American public schooling so that no child is left behind, are selling snake oil that will –– and already does –– deny millions of kids a decent education. They perpetuate a corrupted system that marginalizes workers and citizens, that off-shores millions of jobs, that creates enormous inequities in income and wealth through transfers of money from public treasuries to private coffers, and they tell us that the solution lies in better teachers, more “rigorous” standards, and “accountability.”
These people and groups tout the importance of “transformative reform.” They all recite the same jargon, and they all seem to believe that teachers (especially those deemed the “best and brightest”) hold the key to restoring American “economic competitiveness,” which is the foundational rationale for the Common Core.
It’s all unmitigated foolishness. Nonsense. But you won’t read about any of that in mainstream press accounts of the SAT changes. And that’s a dire shame.
Thanks for that info, democ!!
Will be interesting to see what happens when private schools that so proudly have rejected common core start to realize what this means for their students. Maybe they will lead the revolt against the SATs. In the meantime, maybe we need to start lobbying colleges and universities to refuse SAT scores.
I am guessing that if the schools continued to prepare their students for the old SAT the students would probably ace the replacement.
To some extent, Coleman is a one-trick pony. His BIG IDEA, his DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION, is a hackneyed truism: Students should attend to texts closely and use evidence from those texts when responding to them. There are a great many educrats in the country who seem to be under the impression that that’s ALL the CC$$ in ELA mean, and the idea is so received, so hackneyed, as to be unobjectionable. But the “standards” are also a grade-by-grade list, by domain, of outcomes to be measured, and these specific items on the bullet lists delimit possible learning progressions in the various domains in ways that are unacceptable. They constitute a prior restraint on thought about learning progressions in these domains.
These new SATs will be more closely aligned with the CCSS. This is the stepping stone of CCSS in the colleges.
I can’t believe the power that this man has been allowed to possess.
I’ve noted here repeatedly that until and unless educators (and parents and students) divorce themselves from the College Board nonsense –– the PSAT, SAT, and yes, Advanced Placement…and the ACT –– that the Common Core would and could not be stopped.
ACT says it is “aligned” with the Common Core. The College Board says the same about is mostly worthless products.
What we are seeing is a public double-down on Common Core by the College Board.
“its” mostly worthless products…
Yes, but how do you do it? I can send my children to an alternative school to be educated but in the end they must jump through the admissions hoops like everyone else and no one (besides me) cares if they have a strong ethical core. There is no way to measure that but you sure can see it when it is missing!
The Ivies have 2-3x more qualified applicants than they can accept. I recall one dean saying that they could admit a class, toss them out, and come up with an equally impressive class from the same candidate pool! As much as tiger moms are maligned, they are only reacting to the system and trying to play the game. They don’t make the rules. We really need some bold leadership on this issue for the sake of our so-called “meritocracy” and the health of our citizenry.
Emmy, as a teacher and college “advisor”, we worked to get kids away from the narrow range of schools they put on their lists. Good schools for exceptional kids. The problem is that kids and parents are pretty parochial once they go beyond the “name” schools.
At whatever tier, there are schools out there that go unnoticed unless you look in a different way. Schools looking for kids with other things than just SATs.
In thinking about admission to highly selective schools, I think it is important to remember that admissions is creating a community of students, so every applicant is not in competition with every other applicant. Football players compete with football players, rowers compete with rowers, even likely math majors compete with likely math majors for the approximate number of seats the school has assigned to students with those characteristics.
I hear ya Peter, I really do. However, the name schools open up incredible doors. I’ve got a prestigious liberal arts college and an elite university on my resume and people simply assume the best about me from the get-go. This is a very powerful thing. Parents who have experienced this fear their children not having it, even though they know that the quality of the education at lesser known schools can be just as good or better than the “name” school.
Bill Gates has been very clear that he and Melinda were “shocked” to find that there was so little accountability in schools and that he intends to have the reforms he’s financing to correct that extended to colleges. He has called for standardized college exit exams and VAM for professors. So, he sees this as a K-college set of reforms, and yets, Coleman is one of the tools for effecting those reforms.
Coleman is a “tool” alright. In more ways than one.
“rectalfication”????
Well, if Bill and Melinda think so that’s good enough for me!
Excellent. Then it will not be necessary to subject you to rectification. 🙂
Bill Gates thinks quite highly of himself.
I’m quite shocked to see the complete lack of accountability that he, himself, enjoys. Seriously: who put this guy in charge?
Boycott Microsoft. Boycott Walmart.
… as I sit here communicating via my Windows computer software and my Windows cellphone…. The sad and harsh reality is that if we boycott Microsoft (or Apple, Google, etc.), we will lose our “virtual voices,” Diane’s blog and all the many others will dry up, etc. The task at hand is to make sure we use (exploit?) these people as much as (or more than) they use/exploit us, and to ensure that all of these people and their companies comply with the law. And, if they don’t, we do what we need to do to bring the wrath of the Department of Justice, or the Securities Exchange Commission (I don’t care, pick the appropriate one) upon them.
It is curious why the handmaidens…er…academics… who are doing the VAM “research” cannot see that they might be next. I have listened to presentations in which they literally refer to “good teachers” and “bad teachers” based on the standard deviation of student test scores. And no on in the audience says a word about it.
Couldn’t they require a test prep report so that admissions officers could weigh SAT scores appropriately. Many kids take their SATs with NO tests prep and have to compete against many who gain from it. A simple electronic attachment to the score.
Or would that create an undreground test prep market? Welcome to the deep end.
OOOH. Interesting. Require test prep entities to report who takes their courses, or require an affidavit or some other sworn statement from the student regarding test prep. Now… how to implement that idea??? I’m already thinking about my 9-year-old and how I can shield her from these issues. She’s a great “test taker,” so that is not the issue. The issue is about the abusive, divisive, and unfair nature of the tests, and the $$$$$ these dogs are generating for no one but themselves. How to stop it, oh how to stop it?
Yes, such a thing would be entirely unworkable and would, of course, create an underground market.
All the years that this test destroyed or marginalized so many students to find out that whoops, it wasn’t such a great test after all. All testing, whether standardized or teacher made are crude instruments for measuring distributions of students–that’s it—they do not measure something inside the student that test makers term “ability” or “grade-level,” or whatever term is used to equate a statistical concept with a human quality. The only value a test can serve is in some form of formative assessment that provides the teacher with continual feedback on the acquisition of a skill—that’s it. Otherwise the grades we write in grades books and those numbers on all those data sheets are merely counts of how many wrong and how many right on some construct that tells us nothing about what a student knows and understands and absolutely nothing about those ephemeral human qualities that no test will ever evaluate.
Agree with the addition that “grades” also usually have some kind of component of “completion”, that it, has the student done the work, and the grade doesn’t alway include only “graded/evaluated by the teacher work”
From a high school guidance counselor in a city school:
“The college board has given fee waivers to students to request that the college waive the application fee for many years. This is not new. It does not cost the college board anything. Most colleges grant the waiver; a few do not. Why lie? Why mention it if it does not cost the college board anything more than printing the requests? This man is devious.”
“The math questions, now scattered across many topics, will focus more narrowly on linear equations, functions and proportional thinking.”
So was “scattered across many topics” a bad thing? So now is it a good thing to have high schools and middle schools narrowing their math curriculum to only include linear equations, functions, and proportional thinking? Is that all the math that’s going to be important and needed in college?
It sounds to me that the math is going to be embedded in writing samples and the students will be asked questions about different kinds of evidence. On the face of it, this is good. This is what students will be doing in college classrooms. However, I am concerned that focus on this in grades 10-11 and earlier (which is what will happen in order to get students ready for the SAT) will calcify this as a skill long before the students reach a college classroom. Doing close reading is a revelation when done in the context of a particular discipline and with a subject matter expert. The SAT and the prep that will precede it can only mimic this experience. Because acing the SAT is so important for college admissions, students will learn to close read not for knowledge but for racking up points. They will be inclined to believe that there are “right” answers when it is more the case that you have to look at a body of work in order to identify evidence gone astray.
arguments gone astray
Any thoughts on how dropping standardized tests will impact the gender gap in college enrollment? Male students as a group do better on standardized test scores than their grades would predict, female students worse on standardized scores.
This is an important point, TE, but not because it’s an argument for keeping the SAT. It’s important because it raises a significant issue. We are failing boys in this country. They are, in record numbers, seeing no future for themselves and rejecting the constrained paths open to them. More standardization is going to make this problem worse.
The practical impact of dropping standardized tests (by the way, more students take the ACT than take the SAT, so I wonder at the focus on the SAT exam) will be even fewer boys going to college.
Here’s how the SAT change was reported at The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/this-is-what-the-new-sat-will-be-like/284245/
Scroll through the comments and you can see an exchange between me and Grant Wiggins, the consultant assessment “guru,” on the SAT and Common Core. He has previously called the Common Core “common sense,” and in our exchange he says the motives of Bill Gates and David Coleman (of the College Board) are “pure.”
I don’t think their motives are to sow evil, but I’d be very hard-pressed to call them “pure.”
Grant Wiggins used to run around the country preaching the gospel of assessment disappearing into instruction and taking the form of formative feedback. And then he turned on a dime and started preaching the value of the same all-important summative testing that he had been arguing against for decades.
I guess he figured out who was writing the big checks these days.
Wiggns implies strongly that the Common Core will yield public schooling that is more “consistent” and that is “more engaging, more personalized, more responsive to student interests.”
I pointed out that the stated purpose of the Common Core is to promote “economic competitiveness.” Both the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable echo this nonsense.
I suppose we’ll find out.
That comment was unfair, and I apologize for it. Reviewing Mr. Wiggins’s comments on that thread, I saw nothing in them to suggest that he is in favor of more standardized testing, and a quick review of his website shows that he has reservations about these summative tests.
So, he has continued to preach the gospel of formative assessment. Good for him.
And yet the Common Core is going to come with a very healthy dose of testing (even if it is delayed briefly), including testing related directly to the standards and ACT and SAT testing.
So, how can one favor the Common Core, but simultaneously be opposed to standardized testing?
“So, how can one favor the Common Core, but simultaneously be opposed to standardized testing?”
Logically, you can’t. If the person in question is well versed and knowledgable about the subject, it would seem that they’re trying to fulfill an agenda by confusing the issue. I don’t trust people who speak this way.
Democracy, I think that very few people get up in the morning and say to themselves, “I want to work to make the world a worse place today.” I’m sure that Gates and Coleman think that their prescriptions are a win-win, but they are sorely mistaken. Gates is a fascinating character. I think that he really wants to improve things AND that he expects to make a lot more money doing that. But his prescriptions for US education are really, really damaging. Centralization and standardization are not the means by which we shall bring about positive improvement. If Gates really wanted to “unleash powerful market forces,” then he would be supporting local autonomy and opening up K-12 educational materials markets to competition from small vendors.
Common sense is that layer of prejudices we lay down before the age of eighteen.
Lots of talk to drop the SAT which I agree to.
But let’s revamp college general requirements and degree courses to attract more students and cut cost. The first 2 years of required courses can be stream-lined. Many students spend too much of that time partying anyway–not to mention how sports seems to be the big attraction and money maker for an institution. Their philosophy is no better than corporate takeover.