The New York Times reports today that Connecticut has decided to drop the Smarter Balanced Assessment for 11th graders and require all students to take the SAT instead.
Although it is not clear in the article, it appears that students in other grades will still take the Smarter Balanced tests.
Since David Coleman was “architect” of the Common Core and is now President of the College Board, the SAT will be aligned with the Common Core.
This is, of course, a tremendous financial coup for the College Board, which charges for every student who takes the SAT.
But it will also benefit Connecticut students, because the cut score (passing mark) on the SBA is set so high that most students are certain to fail and would not be eligible to graduate from high school. Connecticut has now finessed that problem.
The federal government requires that states assess students in both reading and math once during high school. Because so many Connecticut public school students take the SAT anyway, replacing the existing high school test, given in 11th grade, with the SAT would leave young people with one exam fewer on their roster.
State officials said that while scores had not yet been set on what would count as meeting or exceeding “achievement level,” a particular score on the SAT would not be required to graduate from high school or to rise to the 12th grade. Instead, the test will be used as one of several measures, including grades and attendance, to decide if a student has met the requirements necessary to move on.
Dorie Nolt, a spokeswoman for the federal Education Department, said that several states, including Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin, already use the ACT college admissions exam to fulfill their high school testing requirement.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
About 90% of Connecticut’s high school students already take the SAT at least once, so the College Board won’t be cleaning up to the degree you might have thought.
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I don’t know, a 10% increase in participants is probably significant.
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Just providing a little context for the national audience. Many states have a low-single-digit percentage of HS kids taking the SAT.
My back-of-the-envelope calculation is that this rule change means an additional 5000 or so kids will take the SAT every year in CT.
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I find it so incredibly hard to believe that all the reform geniuses didn’t realize they were creating two 11th grade, common core aligned, college-readiness exams. They knew the SAT was changing, they knew the SBAC was aligned. I think it may have been a pressure test to see how much people would take.
The College Board will benefit if this is the trend across the board in all states to replace the current 11th grade test with the SAT. In addition, they they will get a boatload of new data that they never had before delivered to them during the school day to all students.
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The article states 88% of seniors took the SAT.
Diane’s post mentions that juniors will be required to take the SAT.
It would be interesting to know how many juniors currently take the SAT.
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These are the numbers of Connecticut SAT test takers by town in 2013. There is a lot of room for the CB to make money. These kids will likely have to take it twice:(
But this will look great on the financial report.
Participation Rate(estimate): 2013 District
21.% LEARN
34.% New Britain
46.% Windham
47.% Waterbury
48.% Connecticut Technical High School System
48.% Eastern Connecticut Regional Educational Service C
51.% Plainfield
52.% Meriden
53.% Thompson
54.% Naugatuck
55.% New London
57.% Killingly
58.% Torrington
59.% Putnam
60.% Regional 11
60.% Ansonia
60.% Manchester
61.% Plainville
61.% Coventry
62.% Bridgeport
62.% Plymouth
63.% Regional 07
63.% Wallingford
63.% Westbrook
63.% Enfield
64.% East Hartford
64.% Vernon
64.% Windsor Locks
64.% Norwich Free Academy
65.% Danbury
65.% Montville
66.% Bristol
67.% Middletown
67.% Griswold
67.% Derby
67.% West Haven
68.% Stamford
68.% East Haven
68.% Waterford
68.% Milford
69.% Cromwell
69.% Regional 01
69.% Stratford
69.% Groton
71.% Thomaston
71.% The Gilbert School
72.% Regional 19
72.% Regional 06
73.% Lebanon
73.% State
73.% Weston
73.% East Lyme
73.% East Windsor
73.% Colchester
73.% Regional 04
74.% East Haddam
74.% Norwalk
74.% East Granby
74.% Litchfield
74.% Newington
75.% Hamden
75.% Stafford
75.% North Stonington
75.% Ledyard
75.% Canton
76.% West Hartford
76.% Ellington
76.% Seymour
76.% Windsor
77.% Stonington
77.% Clinton
77.% Regional 16
77.% Branford
77.% Somers
77.% Southington
78.% North Haven
78.% Common Ground High
78.% Watertown
78.% East Hampton
78.% Wethersfield
79.% Rocky Hill
79.% Regional 10
79.% Regional 08
80.% Wolcott
80.% Tolland
80.% Shelton
80.% Westport
81.% Fairfield
81.% New Milford
81.% Regional 14
82.% Suffield
82.% Woodstock Academy
82.% Bethel
82.% Berlin
83.% Oxford
83.% Bolton
83.% Trumbull
84.% Portland
84.% North Branford
84.% South Windsor
84.% Regional 18
85.% Regional 13
85.% Regional 17
86.% Newtown
86.% Hartford
86.% Cheshire
86.% Regional 12
88.% Farmington
88.% Greenwich
88.% Monroe
89.% New Fairfield
89.% Regional 05
89.% Avon
89.% Brookfield
90.% New Canaan
91.% Madison
91.% Glastonbury
91.% Ridgefield
91.% Old Saybrook
91.% Simsbury
92.% Wilton
92.% Guilford
94.% Regional 15
94.% Granby
94.% Regional 09
95.% The Bridge Academy District
97.% New Haven
98.% Darien
99.% Bloomfield
100.% Amistad Academy District
100.% Capitol Region Education Council
https://data.ct.gov/Education/SAT-District-Participation-and-Performance-2012-20/9hy9-9eeb
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88% of the state’s seniors took the SAT last year: http://www.courant.com/education/hc-college-board-scores-1007-20141007-story.html#page=1
The most recent data I can find from 2011-2012 shows that there are a little less than 40,000 12th graders in CT public schools. 12% of that is 4800.
At $52.50 per exam, that comes to $252,000. A nice chunk of change for you or me; a rounding error for the College Board.
If they got California or Texas to do this, then you’d be on to something.
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“A nice chunk of change for you or me; a rounding error for the College Board.
Quite correct, Tim.
“If they got California or Texas to do this, then you’d be on to something.”
If one doesn’t believe that that is the end goal of the College Board well, let’s just say I’ve got some great ocean front property over at Lake of the Ozarks in Central Missouri for sale-Cheap!
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I think ALL Connecticut students — including those in private and parochial schools — should have their first set of SAT scores sent to the state so their schools can be properly evaluated. Can you imagine the outcry if private schools knew that their students’ SAT scores (as a group, not individual) would be made public? And no cheating and taking the ACT and SAT and choosing the score that is higher. The first test score is always sent to the state so that each school — including private schools — can be properly evaluated and of course, ranked.
Yes, there would be prepping by rich families. But imagine what would happen if private schools were judged by how well their students performed on the SAT, and ranked so that if they had some low-scoring students, they would look like their teachers are lousy. They would start “teaching to the test” and the parents would be appalled. Maybe then we’d have some sensible legislation.
It is not a coincidence that in many (most?) states, the most exclusive private schools “opt out” of taking the same “state exams” that public school students are taking. And, I suspect, it is not a coincidence that many private colleges who depend on rich private school parents to enroll their kids are making SATs and ACTs “optional” because they want those students but don’t want their ranking to decline because those students have lower SAT scores than many middle class students who can’t afford the $60,000/year price tag.
Take a look at how private schools have moved away from AP courses and exams. When thousands of public schools started making AP exams a focus for advanced students, suddenly private schools decided those AP courses just weren’t good enough for their students. A few of their very top students will take the AP exam, but most don’t and college admissions officers are supposed to buy in to the notion that those classes are just harder instead of seeing for themselves whether the private school students who aren’t at the top of their class can actually do well on the AP exams after their course that is supposedly “better”.
I am not a fan of using SAT scores per se and I think they are a ridiculous way to judge a school. But the only way to stop this madness is force ALL students — including those in private schools — to take the exact same test at the same time and graded outside of the school. (None of those special grading hubs that NYC charter school students have.) I suspect the testing madness would not last very long.
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I think that allowing individuals to choose a school is a substitute for regulation, so it seems reasonable to me that private schools would be subject to less regulation than traditional zoned schools.
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teachingeconomist I don’t understand your reply. There is no regulation of private schools now and that will continue. Unless you are saying that having their students’ take the SAT and the overall scores publicized is “regulation”. Are you saying that private schools would be desperate to prevent that from happening because the results might show something that the “reformers” don’t like? If so, then I completely agree.
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NYC Parent,
My point is that allowing choice can substitute for regulation, so it is reasonable to have less regulation of a school that parents choose than a school that the state chooses for the student.
Think about a non-school example. Suppose your local government assigned you and your neighbors to a plumbing firm. What regulations would you want the government to impose on this plumber? No doubt you would want some requirement that the plumber is competent, and maximum prices that can be charged for plumbing work. But I think it likely that you would also want to regulate standards of service, things like response time for a call, efficiency while on the job, perhaps even some requirements about how the plumber interacts with you. In short, all the things that you might think makes good to excellent plumbing service might well become a government regulation.
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Teachingeconomist, I don’t see how you can compare the democratic institution of public education to hiring a plumber. That is libertarianism run amok. When I was in Indiana a year ago, one of your ilk from the pro-voucher Friedman Foundation compared getting a voucher for private school to being on welfare. The audience hated his metaphor, and the principal of a local public school eviscerated him.
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Dr. Ravitch,
The question of what governments should regulate and what not applies to many things beyond education. Would you prefer I use an example from medicine and talk about regulations on maximum wait time in the office, reading room magazines, and how quickly an appointment will be available? It is not libertarian to think about the boundary between centralized government control and decentralized markets. Libertarians end up with slightly different answers than most folks.
I think that building level autonomy is incompatible with traditional school systems that use street address as admission criteria. School boards can not defend sending the children of the 500 block of Maple street to school A and children on the 600 block of Maple street to school B if school A and B have significantly different approaches to education. The schools must be largely the same. Teacher autonomy requires student autonomy.
I also think that democratic control of schools and teacher autonomy are also in tension. Posters on this blog often advocate for democratic control of schools and equally lament what the democratically elected representatives do with their control of schools. Democratic control of schools is control.
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Teachingeconomist, are you really an economist at all? Did you ever hear of the lemon law? Let me enlighten you from my basic econ 101 class — if you have no regulations at all, the good actors suffer along with the bad, because no one trusts anything at all. Once you allow any used call salesman to say anything and do anything without regulation to get a sale, every used car salesman suffers. If you think what the US has is unfettered capitalism without regulation, then you are just plain wrong. Without regulation, you can’t have a capitalism that works because the false notion that every person knows everything about the product he is buying is considered to be nonsense by REAL economists. But if you want that kind of unfettered capitalism, you should read The Jungle and go back in time and purchase meat and food. Better yet, vote for Republicans who will get rid of all food inspectors! I am sure you won’t mind food being contaminated because if enough children die of e coli, eventually parents will stop buying that food and hopefully another food vendor under another name won’t start selling the same tainted food. And remember, no suing, because everything a corporation does is “buyer beware”, and if your child dies from a tainted vaccine, well you should know not to go to that doctor for child number two, right?
And of course, you are free to use any of your non-licensed plumbers anytime and we don’t want to waste money on housing department inspections, so if your family dies of carbon monoxide poisoning because you believe so strongly that we should also allow non-licensed plumbers to do whatever they want, then just be honest about it. When your child is sent to the ER, and gets the unlicensed and cheap doctor, you will be thrilled to know that while he is getting substandard care that will cripple him for life, at least there is no regulation and you “chose” that type of country for your child to live in.
I can’t figure out if you think it is fine to have unregulated schools. I guess looking at how many students were fooled by the for-profit Corinthian College advertisements taught you nothing. I’m sure you find it appalling that we aren’t letting their CEO take his billions and happily keep them. I could go on — I’d love to see your reaction when your parents or child lose their health insurance the week after they get cancer because we no longer have regulations, just like you seem to want.
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NYC,
I am not sure why you jumped to the idea of no regulation from my comment. Less regulation is less, not no regulation.
It seems to me that regulation of consumer products is a good idea when 1) comsumers have difficulty in assessing the a quality of a good or service, 2) there is a serious consequence if a particular quality of the good or service is lacking, and 3) there is general agreement on what constitutes the desired quality of the good or service that is subject to regulation. Under these requirements, for example, regulating sanitary conditions in a restaurant is a good Idea, but a regulation that requires restaurant food to taste good is a poor idea.
The licensing of a plumber tells you nothing about how quickly a plumber will return your call, how quickly she will come to your house, how expeditiously she will repair your proble, or what she will charge. If you were required to use one plumber and prohibited by law from using any other plumber, wouldn’t you want to require the plumber to return your calls within a specified time period? Wouldn’t you want the plumber to attend to your problem within a reasonable amount of time? In a world where you choose a plumber, the plumber has a reason to do those things because she might lose your custom. In the world where you are required to use her services, what reason does she have to inconvenience herself to satisfy your notions of good service u less the regulations say she should?
As for secondary education, it has evolved with out government regulation. Private colleges and universities would appear to be doing a reasonable job.
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teachingeconomist, there is a very important difference between a public and a private good. There is a reason that rural communities in the US got electricity and telephone service and yes, schools, and it wasn’t because the people who lived there “chose” which company would bring electricity to their homes for hundreds of thousands of dollars because it just wasn’t cost-effective to do it for less.
Education, no matter how you slice it, is a public good. There are students who are very inexpensive to teach and the lowest paid 22 year old taught one way to give a lesson can do it fine and they can get rid of the students who can’t “get it”. And there are students who, because they come from poverty or have a gamut of special needs, are more expensive. The notion that we should privatize the education of the easy children so that the government overpays private entities so they can “profit” from that job, while the expensive children are left to rot in underfunded schools, is something that is contrary to every democratic ideal that made this country strong.
If people want to pay to have their kids attend schools that are “free of regulation” so they can profit from the easiest kids to teach, let them pay for it. But to have such schools profiting from taxpayer money to weed out any expensive student because they are exempt from proper oversight? Wow, just wow. It’s the kind of “crony capitalism” you find in corrupt countries. “Free of regulations” has proven to lead to unethical people profiting from taxpayer dollars. I can’t help wondering why you are so determined to see unregulated schools paid for by taxpayer money because you want some fake “choice” (which is only for the easy students and not the ones who those non-public schools make “miserable” until they leave).
That’s exactly what the segregationists in the South wanted. Hey, I’m sure those schools are “open” to any minority who is willing to put up with the teachers and administration that desperately wants them to leave. Because after all, who needs regulations telling those schools what to do?
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NYC Parent,
You are correct that there are important differences between public and private goods as economists define them. Private goods are rival (my use of the good precludes you from using the good) and excludable (people can be prevented from using the good) while public goods are not rival and not excludable. Under that definition of public good, K-12 education is not a public good because it is excludable and subject to congestion. K-12 education is what economists call a club good.
What is your definition of a public good?
The reason rural communities got telecommunication services is because people in rural communities organized phone companies and cooperatives. In 1927 there were about 6,000 independent rural phone companies in the country. Rural phone service is also a club good, congestion coming from party lines.
Once again, fewer regulations is not the same as no regulations. Perhaps an example would help to
Make this clear: saying that I wear less clothing in the summer than the winter does not mean that I wear no clothing in the summer.
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TE, so public education is not public? Public parks are not public? Public transit is not public? Not a public good, eh? I didn’t take that class.
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Dr. Ravitch,
Education is not a public good by the definition typically used be economists. If it was a public good, schools would be unable to keep students out of a school because they do not live in the catchment area or because they have not paid tuition. Public transit is the same (I would advise against jumping the turnstiles). Parks are more of a public good because of the difficulty of excluding people from the park. Musical recordings have become a public good (much to record company’s dismay) thanks to changes in technology.
What is your definition of a public good?
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“a particular score on the SAT would not be required to graduate from high school or to rise to the 12th grade. Instead, the test will be used as one of several measures, including grades and attendance, to decide if a student has met the requirements necessary to move on.”
This is much better as a policy than having everything tied to a single score. Unfortunately the SAT is now contaminated with the Common Core–financed by Bill Gates, produced by “Washington insiders” –a term of art from Rick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute– then foisted on schools if they wanted to compete for federal funding.
Every state should be putting miles of distance between the Common Core fraud and their students. Especially in high school, grades is courses, extra credit projects, even attendance are more telling indicators of learning, especially if teachers are engaged in some due-diligence thinking about achievement beyond test scores on quizzes, mid-terms, and end-of-course exams.
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“This is much better as a policy than having everything tied to a single score.”
And that falls in the category of doing the wrong things righter meaning IT’S STILL VERY MUCH WRONG:
Doing the Wrong Thing Righter
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management/administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
Former Green Beret Master Sergeant Donald Duncan (Viet Nam) did when he noted in Sir! No Sir! that:
“I was doing it right but I wasn’t doing right.”
And from one of America’s premier writers:
“The mass of men [and women] serves the state [education powers that be] thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, [administrators and teachers], etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.”- Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862], American author and philosopher
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This interests me. My own superintendent sent out a notice today that we are joining another Florida district in calling for the state DOE to allow us to use the SAT in 10th and 11th grade instead of the new assessments bought from Utah. They are also calling for using the Iowa tests in elementary and to remove the high-stakes from them.
Is this a national trend? Are some superintendents and school districts fighting back? That would be a welcome development, especially if they succeed in changing the discourse.
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In Utah, the juniors have to take BOTH the ACT AND the stupid AIR testing. I’m tired of the money and redundancy.
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Chris, I have posted several times–41 superintendents in southwest Ohio are fighting back. No specifics but the target is not giving local boards enough authority to make decisions and too much data and unfunded mandates and no time for coherent teaching. The Ohio shill for Students First said the superintendents are just trying to avoid accountability. These shills are in at least 12 states and want to go national because the tests are being counted on by the charter and on-line industries to expand markets. Method–make stress for public schools and set them up for looking bad in any way possible.
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That’s a start, Laura.
Here in Florida last fall we had an almost unanimous petition signed by nearly every superintendent and school board sent to the state DOE decrying over-testing, pleading for 3 years of relief from high-stakes while the new AIR tests were piloted and instruction was adjusted to the ‘new’ CCSS renamed the New Florida Standards.
The legislature agreed to a one year moratorium for students and school grades but did not exempt teachers from VAM. They also passed a law ending EOY testing and district testing as overkill. The state DOE was ordered to research and provide proof that the new AIR tests are valid and fair.
This new petition to switch to Iowa and SAT is a sign, to me, that they ate finally finding their voices of dissent. Something that was absent for the past decade.
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Yes, I think College Board just cornered the market in many states. The concept of “free” has not been articulated. Is it a voucher? Will districts pay? Will the state contract with CB?
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Grotesque. No matter what kids do, what parents do, what teachers do, what communities do, only a FIXED percentage of the kids who take this test can ever achieve any particular score. By definition, the majority of kids who take this test, no matter whether they know anything or not will earn an average score. Whether or not they know anything.
So if there are many kids who know quite a bit, only some of them will be allowed to earn a score that reflects their genuine understanding. And, if there are many kids who know very little, most of them will still earn an average grade.
Grotesque.
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Follow the $$$$$ and egos!
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Follow the $$$$$ and egos!
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It is strange indeed that Connecticut is jumping on the SAT band wagon when many Colleges/Universities are dropping the requirement to take SAT. Only thing, SAT is the same every where in the country, i.e., a common test independent of the school district, teachers or administrators.
Moral, if one opposes something long enough or loud enough, something old (worse, or on its way out) will take its place.
Finally, cut score is unimportant, the only thing that matters is that your student gets into a decent college and graduates.
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For teachers, cut score is VERY important. Teacher and school “grades,” based on the number of kids “passing” the standardized tests, effect our evaluations and salaries.
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Cut scores were the most useful tool of Jeb Bush while governor of Florida. When he wanted to demonize schools and teachers in order to get approval for his voucher program and increased charter approvals, the cut score was raised.
When it was a election year and he wanted to claim the mantle of “education governor” and “prove” how successful his reforms were the cut scores were lowered.
Even the rightwing editors of many state papers caught on and started criticizing the yo-yo effect of raising and lowering cut scores and how it made the assessments useless and undermined public confidence.
It sure made a difference to the kids who were forced to repeat third grade multiple times and who weren’t allowed to graduate also.
Once again, Raj proves his ignorance of the reality of public schools in the USA.
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Raj,
Cut scores are very important. They can be manipulated up or down to make students and teachers look bad or good. Raise them high, and the schools are failing. Drop them, and the reforms are working! No truth!
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“. . . a common test. . .”
Common as in humdrum, monotonous, wearisome and/or
run-of-the-mill!
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Raj, I can only assume you are extremely critical of colleges who are dropping the SAT requirement and are obviously “lowering standards”. Maybe you can provide a list of the worst of them so students can avoid them since you find standardized testing so very important.
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Interesting change. Washington State also made an interesting change, but different. Where will this end up and how much will we spend on questionable materials?
Thank you.
C. Ritz
Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android
From:”Diane Ravitch’s blog” Date:Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 12:01 PM Subject:[New post] Connecticut Will Drop Smarter Balanced for 11th Graders and Require SAT Instead
dianeravitch posted: “The New York Times reports today that Connecticut has decided to drop the Smarter Balanced Assessment for 11th graders and require all students to take the SAT instead. Although it is not clear in the article, it appears that students in other grade”
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Diane, I realize that the College Board revised the SAT to be less of an aptitude test and more of an achievement test. But has the SAT really transformed this much? Evaluating schools/teachers on the natural ability of students (per the original SAT) seems patently unfair. And many students are not inclined to attend college. If the College Board has so radically changed the SAT from its prior versions, how will colleges obtain any type of aptitude scores? The ACT always allowed colleges to measure achievement but the SAT was the only standard aptitude test I know.
Has the College Board put out any statements on these issues? I would think the elite colleges would be very disappointed to have a key metric removed from student portfolios.
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I’m afraid you’re a bit out of touch:
http://www.businessinsider.com/colleges-are-dropping-the-sat-2015-7
Last I heard over 80 have dropped the SAT requirement.
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Sorry, they list 800 schools that don’t require the SAT and the Washington Post article referenced lists 180+ “top tier” schools that no longer require SAT scores from applicants.
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Chris in Florida, I’m not sure any on that list would qualify as “top notch”. You don’t see any Ivy Leagues, CMU, MIT, Stanford, CalTech, etc. You do see a bunch of touchy-feely schools who think they can ascertain kids aptitude via other ways. And you see a LOT of schools known for enormous grade inflation which makes their college GPAs pretty much useless.
There is a reason why kids drop STEM majors for humanities majors in college. It’s called self-selection. And it biases any correlation between high school gpa and college gpa/graduation. If you can’t cut engineering, you opt for history. If you think kids scoring <1100 could pass ANY engineering courses in a "top notch" school, you are kidding yourself. Obviously, you wouldn't know.
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I guess I am your social inferior because I don’t pay much attention to Ivey League schools. Since the vast majority or their admissions are legacy it doesn’t exactly prove anything about the SAT.
The ranking rhetoric was from the Washington Post and the Business Insider, not from me. Personally I think that the US News and World Report rankings used by the Post are a crock of BS but they are used widely as an accepted measure.
I’m not sure why you would rank NYU, Bryn Mawr, Temple, and the other top tier schools listed as ‘touchy feely’. Sounds like some good old-fashioned conservative hippy bashing and liberal hating to me. I could be wrong, of course.
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Chris, the majority of Ivy admissions are not legacies. And MIT has exactly zero students admitted as “legacies”. That quote may make you feel better about yourself but it bears no resemblance to reality.
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Chris,
Neither the majority of admits or students at Ivy Leage schools are legacies. Admits appear to be somewhere between 20 and 30 percent, about 10 to 15 percent of matriculated students are legacies.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/being-a-legacy-has-its-burden.html?_r=0
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Imknew you would take the bait and defend the Ivy Leafue snobbery that maintains the present-day oligarchy.
It matters little to me how many are legacy admissions but I know the number of students that do attend those schools is miniscule compared thenrest of us riffraff in the USA.
I was accepted to Yale and turned it down. I didn’t want to amass a huse debt and then become a snob immune to the poverty and sufering of my Appalachian roots. I was perfectly happy to attend Rutgers and NYU.
Keep on keeping on smartest people in the room! Money is the God of the 21st Century and the Ivy League is the entrance ticket to the 1%’ right?
PS You will never convince me to take your politics and ideology with anything but deep contempt. But keep at it — I enjoy your twisting amd dodging!
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Defend the Ivy League snobbery? Are you suggesting that our top schools just take anyone that applies? That they hold a Powerball lottery to let in any student who fancies attending? First, let me tell you that the quality of the foreign students in these schools consistently outpaces the quality of the Americans. I’m not saying the US students cannot compete, but you are in for a rude awakening if you think our high schools produce all of the best students in the world. This is often the only glimpse we get of how much talent there is outside our nation’s borders. It is fierce. And the PISA results demonstrate that we need to wake up!
The main reason that state schools give academic scholarships is to keep their best and brightest from attending such Ivy League schools. The state schools hope that these students will achieve greatness and raise their school’s profile and/or give large donations in the future. Thus, it is entirely possible that the smartest student in the US is not in a “top notch” school. But overall, schools with higher admission requirements have more talented students. They still must produce after college and that’s another question entirely. But the correlation between SATs and teacher effectiveness is settled. You may not like that fact, but it doesn’t make it false.
And exactly how do you equate attending an Ivy League with becoming a “snob immune to the poverty and suffering”. You do realize that many of those TFA teachers who volunteer to work in urban schools attended those colleges. And there are many graduates who go on to serve in the military, not exactly a ticket to becoming rich. This hatred for those who are successful makes no sense. We are not rich because of the masses. Every nation has masses. Our country is successful because of a system that encourages and rewards risk. And because we have been very successful in attracting immigrants (from Asia and Europe mainly) who start amazingly successful businesses. The poor in America are relatively well off because of the rich. Take a look at the GDP per capita numbers for the US and your prized socialist democracies in Europe. It’s not even close save for one or two that make a killing on North Sea oil.
Maybe you should tell your students that aspiring to attend Yale is foolish and they should set their sights on Rutgers instead. Do you really think the rigor is the same at these two schools? Nothing wrong with Rutgers but why not allow them to determine how much of a challenge they want and whether they have the discipline to push themselves when their classmates can’t keep up.
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Virginiasgp, I have never NEVER seen evidence of a correlation between SAT scores and teacher quality. I know many high-scoring people who were terrible teachers. They couldn’t communicate with children.
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Chris,
Making factually incorrect statements is an excellent way to get people to post the correct information. Congratulations on figuring out this strategy.
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virginiasgp, I’m guessing you aren’t a parent but someone paid to troll on here who doesn’t have school age children.
As a graduate of one of those coveted universities, I can tell you that I believed as you did when my child first went to public school. Those young Ivy-League educated teachers seems to appealing.
It turned out that while some of them — not all that many — were fine, by far the BEST teachers my child had were graduates of no-name city colleges with years of experience. When the “smart Ivy-League” teacher gave up on a child because she just couldn’t learn in the one way the experienced Ivy-League educated teacher who always found school a breeze knew how to teach, the experienced teachers understood that there are many ways to reach a struggling student and sometimes just a turn of a phrase to explain something could turn a struggling student into the most advanced student in the class! And making that child feel misery by repeating over and over again the same “teaching technique” your 6 week course told you would work does not make you a good teacher. It actually makes you a TERRIBLE teacher, and the fact that some easy to teach kids do respond to it signifies nothing. And the fact that you, virginiasgp, do not seem to have the slightest understanding of this speaks volumes.
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NYC public school parent, I have a rising 4th grader and a rising 1st grader. Just like it says in the petition against VDOE. Why would you think I am a troll? Can a parent not take an opposing view to yours? As my neighbors (STEM careers) have told me before, “nothing you say is complicated, it’s just common sense”. We are all on the same page.
I completely agree that there is no perfect mold for a great teacher. I recall Prof Hanushek has noted this same phenomenon. But in general, teachers were strong content knowledge can provide more examples of how to apply a concept in real life. They can provide various analogies that make sense to kids from different backgrounds. I certainly don’t think TFA believes its teachers will simply use their 5-week program as a model to communicate. TFA is counting on physics and math and engineering and literature majors to relay their love of learning to the kids. It is not foolproof but the objective research from UNC disputes your opinions.
There is something to be said for experience. But I have always felt that youth in teaching was an asset. Younger teachers are more in tune with the culture of the kids. Kids can relate better to younger teachers. When students admire a person (singer, athlete, young adult, etc.), they want to earn their respect. Much of being a great teacher is connecting. We don’t typically send 60-yr-old veterans in to dissuade gang members from joining, now do we?
Do you agree that we should use the data to determine the most effective? We can dispute what data that is but shouldn’t we use some type of data as opposed to just saying all teachers are great or using 1 or 2 anecdotes?
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Virginia, the answers to your questions: No, No, No.
Eric Hanushek is a swell economist. I don’t think he knows anything about pedagogy.
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Sorry for the typo: I should have written: When the “smart Ivy-League” teacher gave up on a child because she just couldn’t learn in the one way the INexperienced Ivy-League educated teacher who always found school a breeze knew how to teach, the experienced teachers understood that there are many ways to reach a struggling student and sometimes just a turn of a phrase to explain something could turn a struggling student into the most advanced student in the class!
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virginiasgp, let’s talk about elementary school because that is where the problem begins. It doesn’t matter how well you know physics if you are an inexperienced 22 year old and can’t teach a child how to add. Or how to read. Or how to write. Your magic “love of learning” works fine when your cherry-picked student learns to read on their own and can quickly grasp math concepts – often because his college-educated parents have already introduced those concepts to him. It doesn’t matter how well you love literature if you don’t understand how to give a struggling child confidence and think that if you just keep repeating the same thing over and over again and make a child feel “misery” and suspend him, he is sure to learn it. I doubt very much if your “researcher” found that the 22 year old physics major was the ideal elementary school teacher. Nope — it probably meant the 22 year old was placed in a charter school that weeded out struggling students! Or the researcher didn’t actually look at elementary school education at all. If your theory was correct, no top private school students would need private tutoring because they have the best educated teachers in the country. Is that what you believe? lol! Tutoring is rampant, and they charge upwards $250 an hour! Don’t you find that really defeats your argument if the students of those highly educated teachers are using tutors so frequently, while the low-income public school students can’t afford them?
I believe in data, which is why I started to oppose charter schools when I realized what the data showed. In NYC, it showed that the one supposedly “successful” charter chain was losing as many of 50% of its at-risk, low-income students. But the so-called “researchers” just looked at the results of the ones who stayed. Guess what? They were pretty good! Because unlike public schools, the charter schools very inexperienced teachers could just make a struggling child feel misery until they left. Or fail them over and over again because despite having millions of dollars in donations, they could not seem to teach many at-risk children without failing them or making them so miserable that they left. But don’t worry, that only happened when the charter school gave priority to at-risk kids who only had a failing public school as a “choice”. Now the charter school is going after the much easier and cheaper children of college-educated parents instead (as long as they have no learning issues), so I guess their parents get “choice” while the at-risk children either shape up or get the “you don’t really fit and why don’t you find a better place” treatment. I find it shocking that you are a parent of two children and don’t seem to care at all that this kind of practice is what gets those great results you think gives a “choice” for the affluent, easiest to teach children.
What is terribly wrong is a two tier system where the private Cancer Treatment Centers of America get paid the same amount to treat the stage one easily curable cancers with their low-paid doctors, while anyone with a more advanced cancer gets a public hospital with no resources or has to be rich enough to pay for a private hospital that will cost them a cool million dollars (but since these are billionaires, no problem). Your private Cancer Treatment Centers of America CEOs will celebrate their great results and their billion dollar profits, while the sickest Americans get the underfunded hospital. It’s called cherry-picking and it is what nearly every charter school that calls itself a “success” is very, very good at. The ones that actually educate the at-risk kids and keep them all — well, their results aren’t so stellar and pretty soon they will be taken over by more charters for the easy and rich kids. And that, virginiasgp, is what happens when charters are allowed to take over with no regulation. In fact, if the DOE also regulated charter schools, they would make sure that they couldn’t just get rid of hard to teach kids by making them feel misery, but since the only regulation is the pro-charter oversight, that is the system we have.
Maybe you’ll agree with me that the school boards should have oversight of these charters to make sure these abhorrent practices aren’t rewarded with millions in donations? I sure hope you aren’t one of those parents that likes it that their charter weeds out the undesirable kids. Because that isn’t a school that offers a “choice” except to the selected few students they want to keep.
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“The ACT always allowed colleges to measure achievement but the SAT was the only standard aptitude test I know.”
Or as Wilson sardonically states:
“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.”
Or as Swacker stridently states:
“It’s all a bunch of mental masturbation and/or obligatory onanism.”
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It seems that Washington State had fewer that half 11th graders take the SBAC and the 10th graders outperformed the 11th graders. So, they are speculating there is a problem-duh! Perhaps CT has seen that as well.
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Perhaps some of the commenters on this thread misunderstand what the Connecticut move means.
Since the College Board makes the PSAT (there’s now a PSAT 8/9 and a PSAT 10), the SAT, and the Advanced Placement program, and since the College Board was a major player in developing the Common Core, and since it says all of its products are “aligned” with Common Core, then this move not only allows for the College Board to expand its influence and revenues, but also it enhances the viability of Common Core.
I’ve said this for some time, but it bears repeating. Educators (and parents, and others) cannot simultaneously be against Common Core but in favor of (participating in) College Board products. They are part and parcel of the same thing. As the College Board has stated: ” As new assessments emerge and existing assessments are enhanced, the College Board will conduct additional studies to understand the alignment of other forms of assessments that may be administered in support of the Common Core State Standards, including end-of-course and end-of-domain assessments.”
But here’s the thing. The SAT is not an “aptitude” test nor is it an achievement test. But it is very much a test that measures family income. College enrollment specialists say that their research finds the SAT predicts between 3 and 15 percent of freshman-year college grades, and after that nothing. As one commented, “I might as well measure their shoe size.” The ACT is only marginally better. These are – mostly – educationally worthless tests.
College enrollment managers know this, and they leverage it. Matthew Quirk reported this in “The Best Class Money Can Buy.”
“The ACT and the College Board don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions; enrollment managers say the practice is far more prevalent than most schools let on.”
The Common Core was funded by Bill Gates. It is supported ardently not only by ACT and the College Board but also by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, tech and communications companies (Intel, Microsoft, Dell, Verizon), big insurance companies (Aetna, State Farm), and others.
Many of the very same groups who seek to “reform” American public schooling so that no child is “left behind” are also some of the biggest tax cheaters and avoiders in the country. The Chamber and the Roundtable were and are the biggest supporters of laissez-faire supply side economic policies, the same policies responsible for a huge pile-up of budget deficits and debt and the Great Recession.
Those who lead these groups are selling snake oil that will –– 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.” For schools and teachers, But not for them.
What’s remarkable is that the NEA and AFT, ASCD, the National PTA, the National School Boards Association, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National Association of Secondary School Principles, and the American Association of School Administrators have all issued statements supporting the Common Core. Many of these same groups advocate the CommonCore-aligned products made by ACT Inc. and the College Board.
So, perhaps someone explain how the Common Core and corporate “reform” will die when some of its core elements are woven into the fabric of public schooling.
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I am not for or against thr SAT at this point. I have always been against high stakes testing of any kind.
I can’t speak for the other commenters here but my interest is simply focused on how my superintendent here in southwestern Florida is jumpimg on a bandwagon (which she is prone to do) that is simultaneously being dragged through CT and other states.
Why? How? Who? are the questions I am interested in answering.
Why suddenly replace the PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and AIR tests with the SAT? Is it because of the pushback?
How did the SAT get disparate school districts to support them? Is there a quid pro quo happening here?
Who is behind this move? David Coleman is not exactly popular or persuasive. Who else backs it and why?
I am also interested in the fact that the largely silent and compliant group of current superintendents here in Florida are suddenly pushing back and circulating petitions to the state DOE urging change and resisting some of the reforms, even if caution and too much refirm rhetoric. It’s unprecedented here and something is afoot in reform land. I’d like to know what it is.
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Chris,
“I am not for or against thr SAT at this point. [You should be, see below] I have always been against high stakes testing of any kind.”
A gate keeping test that denies students entry into a college isn’t “high stakes”?????
Get off the fence Chris, make a stand, draw the line in the sand and do the right, both logically and ethically/morally, thing and fight against these abominations of educational malpractices.
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Duane, from a pragmatic standpoint the SAT in 10th and 11th grade with the Iowa test in 3rd, 5th, and 8th only in place of the AIR test in 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th and SAt 10 in K, 1st, and 2nd may be a huge improvement in my district — triage, if you will. It also defangs VAM somewhat by ending EOY testing in all subjects and all grades so that is a slight improvement too.
Baby steps after 13 years of reform abuses here but I’m remaining agnostic for now until I beleive we can eliminate testing altogether.
I myself never took the SAT (ACT for me) and I did pretty good with full academic scholarships for 4 degrees from a state and a prestigious private university. I am for colleges and universities eliminating the SAT and ACT altogether in admissions requirements.
I won’t be eligible for the big Florida SAT bonus unless I go take it now, LOL.
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Perhaps the College Board realizes that the SAT and ACT are more palatable than PARCC or Smarter Balanced testing.
So, substitute one for another.
But the same problem remains…they are part and parcel of the same thing.
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It ‘s a Solomonic choice but if we can spare thousands of children from the stress and harm of yearly testing and EOYtests on top of that in my district then I’ll take that for now. We only had 7 students opt out last year. Until that movement grows we are stuck with testing and I’ll take the Iowa and SAT over the AIR tests right now.
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“. . . it bears repeating. Educators (and parents, and others) cannot simultaneously be against Common Core but in favor of (participating in) College Board products. They are part and parcel of the same thing.”
Bien dicho, exactamente, democracia, mil gracias por decirlo.
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“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.
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.
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