Peter Goodman, who writes frequently about education in New York, cites research showing that test scores on the SAT, Pearson, and PARCC tests matter less than overall grade-point-average, which shows the results of four years of study, work, and testing. The test score registered on a single test on a single day matters far less than performance over a long period of time: showing up, doing the work, trying hard, and trying harder. He calls it “academic tenacity.” Is this the same as “grit”? In a recent debate about a post by Paul Thomas, one commenter on the blog said that it was beyond arrogant for an affluent white person to tell an impoverished child of color to “get grit,” but it is also important not to dismiss the idea that non cognitive behaviors can make a huge difference. Goodman cites authorities who say these non cognitive skills and behaviors can be taught. Really smart kids who give up easily are not likely to succeed. How can we help them learn that persistence will help them succeed in meeting their goals?
What I firmly believe is that non cognitive behaviors and skills matter, but what matters most is to reduce poverty. If we raise up families, we raise up the lives of children in those families. Goal-setting becomes more credible when goals are imaginable.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
that is a very inconvenient way of looking at things……grade point averages come from….teachers who, in the overwhelming majority of cases….know what they are doing when they evaluate.
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Yes, and it’s hard to monetize, too.
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Why do some kids give up on school? I think it’s often because kids see the work as impossibly difficult. How can this be? The work seems so simple! Well, yes, to educated adults it does. But simple is not so simple. We are blind to the fact that many “simple” operations, like reading and comprehending this blog post, depend on slowly-accumulated, repeated prior exposures to the words and concepts involved. This is what many failing kids lack, and until teachers starting giving this exposure to word and world knowledge in a systematic way –instead of content-lite skills drills –kids will continue to fail. The problem is not poor kids’ character; it’s the anemic and mental-anemia-inducing curriculum we’re feeding them. See E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit for more details.
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Content-lite?
Sounds like the Common Core, especially in the “close reading” skills that are divorced from context.
Your point is well made, but the educational world is moving away from your point of view and requiring its teachers to do the same.
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If at first you don’t succeed, try rigor.
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To me, we cannot talk about “academic tenacity” without talking about what we teach. I would argue that we don’t want kids who show this type of “grit” when asked to do ridiculous, mundane standards-based BS. That’s obedience and compliance, not the kind of non-cognitive skills I am interested in teaching. We have to talk about a pedagogy of liberation, not obedience. And when we teach high-interest, culturally relevant, student-centered curriculum, motivation will authentically increase.
One more thing I do want to keep highlighting too, is the mental health of our students, especially those living in poverty, but all our students in our increasingly alienating culture and how that relates to ideas of “grit”. When your life sucks, it’s hard to care about the formula on a math test. http://atthechalkface.com/2014/03/22/ignoring-mental-health-in-the-grit-debate/ And maybe it’s OK to not worry about that math test when you’re suicidal. Mental health comes first.
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“We have to talk about a pedagogy of liberation, not obedience.”
TAGO!
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At elite schools kids are not expected to show “grit”. Rather teachers are expected to make lessons engaging and appropriate. If a kid is struggling the teacher needs to figure out the problem.
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Riverdale Country School is far from being alone among the elite $40,000+ private schools in its focus on grit and character education (they are, admittedly, the only one to work with KIPP on it).
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The fact that females do better in school than males, and males score better on SAT proves that the SAT alone is not an accurate predictor of academic achievement. http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112757027/girls-do-better-in-school-than-boys-010313/ In addition to gender differences, there are cultural differences that can account for different scores. As an ESL teacher I fought against the prejudice inherent in IQ scores for my students. I argued that the deflated verbal scores were the result of lack of proficiency in English. Later on the WISC R was available in Spanish, but there were still regional variations that impacted scores. No test is perfect.
Standardized tests are no more than a snapshot of individual performance as seen through the lens of the majority culture. They serve to rank and sort leaving many children of poverty with a less than best option. In a word, they are harmful and DISCRIMATORY! They do not give us a complete pictures of anyone’s potential, especially since there are several different types of intelligence.
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rt,
If I may add to your thought (TAGO!)!
“In a word, they are harmful and DISCRIMATORY due to the inherent errors and illogical conceptual premises (ontological and epistemological) that renders the whole process COMPLETELY INVALID!”
And those the two consequences you point out should be shouted out by all involved in education anytime a discussion comes up about the supposed merits of this test or that test or that this group scored better than that group, etc. . . .
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This study of Texas’s admissions system, which automatically admits students in the top ten percent of their high school class to any public university in the state, demonstrates that the predictive value of high school GPA depends a lot on the quality of the high school. They aren’t all interchangeable. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/27/study-finds-impact-attending-poor-high-school-follows-one-college
I’m also reminded of the Michael Winerip column from a couple years back where he interviewed kids who had graduated from New York City high schools with 90+ averages and had passed all of their Regents exams, yet ended up in triple remediation (math, reading, writing) after taking placement tests at open-admission city community colleges. I’m guessing that the “no test” college admissions offices have a pretty good idea of which high schools graduate kids who can do the work.
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But the point of the UT program is to create a pathway for students who otherwise would have little shot at admission. Are we willing to exclude students because they may not have a high GPA at the beginning of their college career due to an under-resourced high school experience?
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The Texas program is fantastic (and very progressive), and I support it wholeheartedly. I brought up that study only to show that a system relying solely or heavily on GPA will have holes in it as long as there are differences in the quality of high schools.
On the flip side of the coin, the SAT is being used to identify high-performing disadvantaged students who attend high schools that infrequently or never send graduates to selective colleges. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-do-you-get-poor-kids-to-apply-to-great-colleges-180947642/
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Tim –
For the last 13 years of my career, I worked with the kids Caroline Hoxby is trying to find. A small group of teachers and guidance counselors would start early on in a kid’s tenure at our 7 – 12 school, kind of monitoring those we could see had the academics and the desire (in Spanish, las ganas) to excel. By the time they were sophomores, we made sure they knew they had a good shot at top schools, as well as seeing that they had a good mix of extra-curriculas and/or work experience. We talked to parents so they understood there was financial aid available and to assure them that their child would be safe on a campus away from home. During first semester senior year, we’d ask regularly about applications, references and essays. Of course, all this was in addition to our regular gigs.
Almost all of our kids were poor, minority students and about 2/3 had English as a second language. Typically, our kids didn’t have great SAT’s or ACT’s, but their GPA’s were outstanding. We began to build a pipeline to elite schools, including Brown, Smith, MIT, Syracuse, Hampshire and Harvard – the places with $$$ enough to bankroll kids with nothing. The universities began to understand that the GPA’s were indeed good indicators of the kids’ performance and that the faculty’s letters of recommendation detailing hardships beyond imaging were real. When the acceptances came in, we helped evaluate what the financial aid offers meant and helped the kids to find last dollar scholarships.
We had a good run, though I remember one of our misses. A student of mine turned down an offer of four fully covered years at Bowdoin. His reason? He thought the offer was bogus, because he had never heard of that school. When he told us this news, we were in the corridor after classes. My colleague turned to face the cinder block wall and began to mockingly bang his head against it. My student turned to me and asked, “Did I do something wrong?”
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“. . . tests matter less than overall grade-point-average, which shows the results of four years of study, work, and testing.”
Both GPA and standardized tests are ILLOGICAL, ERROR FILLED, COMPLETELY INVALID and therefore UNETHICAL to use the results for anything whatsoever. To understand why that sentence is true 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 description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional 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 the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
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. And 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 attempts to measure “’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.
By Duane E. Swacker
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Dwayne,
What I can say with certainty is that a high GPA and a high SAT score does not guarantee success in college. I have seen extremely intelligent students put on academic probation or kicked out of higher institutes.
So good grades in high school do not guarantee good grades in college.
Ellen T Klock
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“How can we help them learn that persistence will help them succeed in meeting their goals? ”
The simple solution has been some variant of give ’em a gold star or and M&M for evidence of meeting short-term-goals, conditioning– but this has nothing to do with “their ” goals, only the goals set for them by others. Habits are formed by being rewarded for persistent effort in completing a task, usually one that is unpleasant, at least initially. Thinking of potty training or writing a thank you note for a gift.
“What I firmly believe is that non cognitive behaviors and skills matter, but what matters most is to reduce poverty. If we raise up families, we raise up the lives of children in those families. Goal-setting becomes more credible when goals are imaginable.”
Yes, and in the convoluted effort to sidestep this fundamental issue, Duncan has not yet made up his mind who to use as a scapegoat. He has blamed teachers, principals, schools, parents, and students. and his current campaign is against teacher education programs. Duncan is not alone of course. He is a mouth piece for Obama, Gates, Waltons, Broad and others who have no respect for public institutions.
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Well, John King is on his way to DC (courtesy of NYS). He deserves to be the federal scapegoat after all the harm he did as NYS Commissioner of Regents.
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In Missouri, probably Monday night more than any other this week, I witnessed the convergence of factors people do not readily recognize.
1.I was at the public meeting of the Ferguson Commission, on a night when the emphasis was upon community relationship with law enforcement.
2. At 2 p.m., the initial results of a “search” for a new commissioner of education was announced. The final five consists of four white males from outstate….pretty much removed from areas with the most serious problems, and one female candidate who has worked in the state education department for the last nine years, a decade in which, in my opinion, some seriously abusive treatment of urban school districts occurred, including a forced merger of Normandy’s district with the lowest performing district in the state at the time…..unaccredited Wellston. Normandy had just broken ground on a new elementary school, and was promised to not have their accreditation reconsidered until 2013…..Commissioner Nicastro and the state board lied to them…they voted to take away accreditation in 2012. You would have to study the finances of the special advisory committee to consider whether Nicastro did anything criminal…or just highly questionable. It is a blessing that she resigned before doing any more damage. A transfer law was found constitutional, and it was no surprise that it bankrupted Normandy…incidentally, during the senior year of Michael brown, who was shot in the street a couple months after graduating.
The media concentrated on the clash between citizens and the police chief, but a lot of eloquent people spoke as the night went on. Two members of the elected, although powerless, board spoke briefly, but with an effective level of passion. If any of the appointed members who decide things for the disenfranchised voters of slps were there, I did not see them. The citizens seem much more aware of the connection of schools as a key to being able to deal with some serious problems than the elected, or increasingly, appointed officials seem to have.
3.In Missouri, I believe the third factor is hugely important. That would be an urban media which is part timid, part secretive, and worshipful of people with power. The finalists were announced with little or no background regarding what sort of educators they are, with no followup stories. There was one insipid question asked, and reported by the public radio site, that all had to answer from the president of the state board, Peter Herschend, who was there when the charter schools demanded a state takeover of SLPS in 2007.”Is it a realistic goal for Missouri to be in the top 10 nationally in education by the year 2020?” In other words……are you going to take what little money a stingy legislature allows and make sure we teach these kids how to take these tests?
Factors one and two…..problems all states are having to deal with to one extent or another, are not as serious as factor number three…..our timid, secretive, power worshipping media coverage. It is hard for me to imagine there are many states where this is worse than it is in Missouri.
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A few clarifications….the final five was announced at 2 p.m., and the Ferguson commission met at five. Very few knew anything about the selections….when I mentioned the board members who spoke, I was referring to local st. Louis elected board members…..david Jackson and Bill Monroe…..it takes a special dedication to continue to serve with no power other than to offer advice. I wanted to mention my frustration with the local media blackout of the questions regarding witness forty in the Brown case….I am not as angry at the witness, who seems to have some serious problems, as I am at the media for not reporting about them. Icing on the cake….the owner of the public radio operation gave a sermon about why there has been enough demonstrating….the result is in from the grand jury. I wonder if she wonders, as I do, whether the vote was 12-0, or 4-8.
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