Obviously not. But as Jonathan Pelto writes, the new SAT will be much harder than the old SAT, including content that many students have never been exposed to. Since Jon lives in Connecticut, he notes with dismay that the state legislature has mandated that all eleventh grade students take the new SAT. He predicts disaster.
He writes:
A New York Times article last week entitled, Everything You Need to Know About the New SAT, laid out the facts about the NEW SAT including the news that,
“The addition of more-advanced math, such as trigonometry, means the test will cover materials from a greater number of courses. That will make it more difficult for students to take the SAT early. Some questions will require knowledge of statistics, a course relatively few students take in high school.”
Thanks to Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy and the Democrat and Republican members of the Connecticut General Assembly, a new state law adopted last spring mandates that high school students now take the SAT in their junior year.
The test results will be used to judge both students and teachers.
However as high schools students (and parents) know, most high school juniors are, at best, tackling Algebra in 11th grade and many are still working to master Geometry.
But that coursework won’t be enough for high school juniors to succeed on the NEW SAT.
Even in academically successful Connecticut, few students will have even taken the courses needed to master the SAT and the majority of juniors may not have been provided with the math content to even survive the NEW Common Core aligned SAT.
According to most recent data published by the United States Government’s National Center for Education Statistics, only 16% of high school graduates in the country had taken a calculus course, 11% a statistics course and only a third had even come in contact with pre-calculus concepts, all of which they will be expected to answer if they want to master the NEW SAT.
And that was graduating seniors, not juniors!
Of course, you know that David Coleman, architect of the Common Core, is now president of the College Board, which sponsors the SAT. So the SAT had to be aligned with the Common Core.
Soon we can expect to hear that Connecticut, one of the leading states on NAEP, has a failing school system. We can expect the charter industry to rush in to the rescue and the revenue.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not only on the SATs. It happens at the beginning of every school year in local schools. Students are given a test on material they have NEVER studied. Why teachers agree to this and think it’s ethical, I’ll never know. Then they are given another at the end of the year. This is supposed to measure how effectively the TEACHER has taught the material (SLO). Poppycock.
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We don’t agree to it, and we certainly don’t think it’s ethical. We are forced to do it by the state education department and the results are used in our evaluations. My most depressing days of teaching are when I have to give there’s pretests to my elementary music students. It’s unfair and cruel. We have NO choice in the matter.
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“Why teachers agree to this and think it’s ethical,”
Bingo, Mamie!
In Missouri it is mandated that all juniors take the ACT. I refused to participate last year, telling them that if I couldn’t read and vet the test before giving it I could not ethically give it. They got someone else to do their unethical business.
To answer your question, though: Because 99% or more of teachers and administrators are GAGA sheeple who would have made excellent ‘good Germans’ back in the 1930s. Because they believe that their own well being trumps the well being of those whom they are charged to take care of and teach, of those they have an ethical and moral duty to protect, of those who are the most innocent in society, the children. Because they turn a blind eye and ear to something like what Andre Comte-Sponville explains about justice and expediency:
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
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“Because 99% or more of teachers and administrators are GAGA sheeple who would have made excellent ‘good Germans’ back in the 1930s.”
I disagree. I don’t think it is as high as 99% and being a member of the “GAGA sheeple” is not exclusive to teachers/educators but to everyone.
Here’s a poem and/or quote that I think that is accurate:
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
“Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
“Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
The credit for this quote goes to Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) who was a prominent Protestant pastor who emerged as an outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps.
Even in Germany during Nazi rule, a few Germans resisted in one form or another. What happened to those few who spoke out?
“Approximately 77,000 German citizens were killed for one or another form of resistance by Special Courts, courts-martial, People’s Court and the civil justice system. Many of these Germans had served in government, the military, or in civil positions, which enabled them to engage in subversion and conspiracy; in addition the Canadian historian Peter Hoffman counts unspecified “tens of thousands” in concentration camps who were either suspected or actually engaged in opposition.[2] By contrast, the German historian Hans Mommsen wrote that resistance in Germany was “resistance without the people” and that the number of those Germans engaged in resistance to the Nazi regime was very small.[3] The resistance in Germany included German citizens of non-German ethnicity, such as members of the Polish minority who formed resistance groups like Olimp.[4]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance_to_Nazism
In other words, fear rules the “GAGA Sheeple” because those in power often ruthlessly crush those who protest and resist their agendas and most people don’t want to be crushed.
FDR said, “the only thing to fear is fear itself?” But it is almost impossible to convince a majority of the people to stop feeling fear. Humans are emotional creatures and fear is powerful emotion. That why the corporate education demolition derby relies so much on spreading fear through their propaganda because it works.
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“But it is almost impossible to convince a majority of the people to stop feeling fear. Humans are emotional creatures and fear is powerful emotion. That why the corporate education demolition derby relies so much on spreading fear through their propaganda because it works.”
Quite correct Lloyd! Thanks for that clarification.
How do we go about diminishing that fear? Well, through “fidelity to truth” must be everyone’s guiding principle. What that “truth” is, is the hard part to determine. In regards to the various educational malpractice falsehoods that are identified here on a daily basis it seems that the educational truths as delineated delineated by many posters are well known it behooves us to then question why so many refuse to adjust their “truths” to take into account said truths.
I have a tendency to be not very patient with those who acknowledge the educational malpractices but continue to institute and be a part of them so I quite openly and stridently condemn them for what they resemble ‘good Germans in the 1930-40s’because much harm and injustices are happening to the most innocent, the children of society. The harms and injustices are widely known, every teacher and administrator with whom I have spoken acknowledge them but the vast majority refuse to do anything against said injustices because they are more worried about themselves than they are about the innocents in their charge.
Again, if I may quote Andre Comte-Sponville on the issue of expediency over justice: “Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
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That nails it. Most of the people who will agree what the corporate education demolition derby is doing is wrong will still do what they are told when they are ordered to do it out of fear they will lose their job, income, car, house, vacations, retirement, medical, etc. and become homeless. It’s fear of the unknown that drives this and there is no way to change this until the majority of people have lost all of those material things they value more than freedom.
Only individuals who are financially free can stand up and protest without fear and most of the people in that bracket are the ones we are fighting. Of course there are retired educators but I failed to get most of the retired teachers I know to help out becasue they don’t want anything to do with this mess. They just want to be left alone and forget what they had to deal with when they were still teaching. They want to put that nightmare behind them.
The only recourse then is turn to the legal system, the courts, and elections where the people, who fear resisting in the workplace against autocratic management and CEOs, can vote because there is no way for their boss or even Bill Gates to discover how they voted—at least not yet.
Imagine how horrible that would be if you could get fired for how you voted in a democratic election? I wouldn’t be surprised if David Coleman and Bill Gates and the rest of their mafia want to do just that—monitor how every votes and then punish those who did not vote the way Coleman and Gates want them to.
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Lloyd,
Are you familiar with the White Rose Society? It consisted of a small number of German students who opposed Hitler. They distributed anti-Nazi leaflets. Eventually they were all caught and killed. They knew the consequences. They should forever be remembered.
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Thank you. I wasn’t familiar with the White Rose Society until now, and I found this video.
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The 99% seems really accurate when it comes to college profs. At least in my personal experience. I’d like hear from other people to assure me this is not so.
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College Professors. Wow.
After I became a public school teacher and learned how to teach K-12—arguably a tough and challenging group to teach—-I became a harsh critic of college professors because most of them were never taught to teach. Most of them were boring. Most of them lectured at the front of the class and there was very little or no interactive or group learning. Most of my college professors would make horrible K-12 teachers.
In fact, some of them were so bad, that after I became a K-12 teacher, I’d drop their class and find another professor who wasn’t as bad.
I still remember one professor that I walked out on halfway through his first class and then dropped the class immediately. He leaned against his desk and stared at the floor between his stretched out legs and talked in a monotone most could hardly hear telling us we had to read 100 pages out of a textbook he’d written before the next class and we would be tested on it. Then he started to lecture and there was no way to understand even half of what he was saying as he monotones in a low, mumbling voice.
Another professor’s lecture class was so crowded that it was held in a large room that could hold hundreds and he paced quickly back and forth across the stage lecturing in a fast, loud, shotgun voice and seldom made any eye contact with the large gathering of students. Because I could hear his voice, I scribbled hasty notes and at the end of each lecture, I often filled dozens of pages in handwriting so horrible, I couldn’t read what I’d written. We were also assigned three textbooks in that class and one of them was a book he’d written that cost $150, and he never assigned any work out of his book. That was during my third year of college.
I changed majors at the end of that semester from architecture to journalism and in journalism I had a host of great professors who had all worked in the media first and from them I learned not to trust the media because they taught us what it is really like out there in media land. It’s not about truth. It’s not about letting the public know what’s really going on in government at all levels. It’s more about the money that comes from attracting the largest audience and to do that it means giving the audience what they want (and that isn’t always what they should read) or what someone with a lot of money wants them to hear.
I earned a BA in journalism in 1973 and have never trusted anything I’ve read or heard in the media since without doing some fact checking, and I even reserve doubt for the fact checkers. When you doubt the fact checkers, the only place to look is the most reliable sources that gather the facts. For instance, the CDC or the Census and then we still can’t totally rely on them. Nothing is absolute but death.
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Lloyd – I had a mixture of good and bad.
Dr. Julian Ambrose who taught an infectious diseases course at UB gave the most interesting lectures. I looked forward to hearing his stories even though I was only attending the class to spend time with my boyfriend (not for a grade). It was held in a huge lecture hall. One time he gave a pop quiz and I scored a higher mark than his actual students.
I loved college. It was a time to explore and be exposed to all sorts of new ideas. Of course, that was in the 70s. Now the focus is career readiness and not intellectual development.
True students never stop learning. We are training our children to hate the learning process not to welcome it with open arms.
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Even with lousy professors, I also enjoyed college and if possible I would have made a career of it—not as a professor but as a career student completing one major after another. I enjoyed learning new things and sometimes you get a really great professor who teaches a class. I ran in to a lot of great professors in the journalism major. I don’t remember even one of them being lousy, but then I was into that subject 100% and wanted to learn everything I could.
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Lloyd, my comment was more about 99% of profs being GAGA, but what you are saying about profs less than adequate preparation in teaching is quite accurate.
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And many of these GAGA college professors no longer have the safety of tenure to fall back on as universities turn to hiring more adjunct professors to fill position who have no job protection, ever, and are paid horrible wages often without the benefits most K-12 teachers still enjoy, but if the corporate education demolition derby has its way, K-12 teachers will be in a worse boat one day—working 60 to 80 hour weeks on average but paid for 25 hours and all of this without any job protection or benefits.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one day walking by a K-12 school, we will be able to smell and sense the fear and stress radiating out from the classrooms. That is if the frauds achieve all their goals and destroy democracy.
No wonder these professors are GAGA.
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Well, the annoying part is how many tenured profs behave. I fear by the time they wake up, it’ll be late. Now, they still have power to turn things around. In 10 or even 5 years, they won’t have the power at most universities.
In community colleges, tenured profs already see the problems, but they feel helpless.
At least this is what I see in Tennessee.
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At most colleges and universities, most professors do not have tenure and never will
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Yes, those pre-tests that teachers are giving are ridiculous. My son was given one in his math class where there were no formulas included. Then, on the post-test, it was the same problems. Only, this time, the formulas were included. All so the teacher can show growth. This system has been quickly gamed to manage the data.
He could have been learning instead of wasting time on that junk.
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It could be worse. At my son’s school, he had a pretest at the beginning of the year and got 24% on it. The teacher recorded it as a full test score, so he was failing the class after the first week!
It was only with me and my husband strong pushing that this “pretest” was changed so he wasn’t failing the class. Ridiculous!
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I hope you watched that “teacher” like a hawk the whole year. That individual obviously had some holes in his/her understanding of assessment and grading. I hate to think what else he/she did or didn’t do.
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Yes, but only if all (underscore “all”) students have never been exposed to the material and are then tested on it. That makes the test fair. All non-swimmers are equally able to drown when you throw them into the deep end. But it’s good to set high expectations.for everyone.
Of course, pre-selected kids in schools that offer more challenging or enriching courses will have an advantage–demonstrating the worth of their schools and the wealth and wisdom of their parents. All other schools must be closed, re-designed or taken over by those who are enlightened.
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If I may adjust your last thought, Fred: “All other schools must be closed, re-designed or taken over by those who are enlightened BY THE PROFIT MOTIVE.”
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LOL Fred! I represent the unenlightened.
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I can’t find the column on Jonathan’s blog.
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Here is the link. It should work. https://jonathanpelto.com/2015/11/04/education-reform-testing-kids-on-content-theyve-never-learned/
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When i read this post, I was thinking of me when I was in high school and had no intention of going to college. In other words, since I didn’t want to go to college when I was a teenager why should I be forced by the state or feds to be college ready and have to take the SAT test or any test for that matter?
For that reason, I never took algebra, geometry, trigonometry, etc. in high school. Instead, I met my math requirements by taking general math every time until I met the math requirement for HS graduation, and general math did not cover algebra, geometry and trig.
Let me say that again, because as a teen in high school I decided I did NOT want to go to college, i avoided college prep classes as much as possible and had no intention of ever taking the SAT, and I never did.
Here is the current requirements for high school graduation in Connecticut and nowhere does it specifically say that a student MUST take the specific courses the SAT tests.
b) For classes graduating from 2004 to 2019, inclusive, no local or regional board of education shall
permit any student to graduate from high school or grant a diploma to any student who has not
satisfactorily completed a minimum of twenty credits, not fewer than four of which shall be in English,
not fewer than three in mathematics, not fewer than three in social studies, including at least a one‐half
credit course on civics and American government, not fewer than two in science, not fewer than one in
the arts or vocational education and not fewer than one in physical education.
Click to access CT_Graduation_Requirements.pdf
Of course, when I was in the Marines and fighting in Vietnam at the age of 21, I changed my mind and decided that maybe college wasn’t such a bad idea—it took a sniper who almost took me out to change my mind.
I better be careful what I write here or some state legislatures and the Department of Education under Duncan or King will mandate that kids must be shot at by snipers to make them college ready.
In 1968, I started in a community college. I never took the SAT. But the community college did require that I take all of those college prep courses I avoided in high school and for the first two years I carried more than 20 units a semester and graduated with an AS degree before transferring to a four year college to continue on and eventually earn a BA in journalism
And I never used any of the crap I was forced to learn in Algebra, Geometry, Trig, Calculus, physics and chemistry to earn that two year AS degree or the BA in journalism or the MFA in writing that came later.
How did I ever make it through college without proving I was college ready by taking a bubble test?
Gasp, could it have been because I was an avid reader by the time I was ten years old and devoured books while I was barely making it through K-12. Homework and classwork wasn’t my thing—-reading what I wanted to read was my thing.
Schools and teachers should NOT be judged by SAT scores for this same reason—that there are teenagers out there in high school who have no intention to go to college or take the courses that SAT tests unless they are forced to and any FOOL should know what happens when you force people to do something they don’t want to do—for instance, be college ready when you don’t want to go to college.
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“And I never used any of the crap I was forced to learn in Algebra, Geometry, Trig, Calculus, physics and chemistry to earn that two year AS degree or the BA in journalism or the MFA in writing that came later.”
Seriously, Lloyd? None of those courses influenced you in any way in how you think about the world? None of these courses improved your ability to think critically about important issues? I don’t remember a lot of specifics about what I took in high school or college or even graduate school. However, I do know that through the process of schooling my ability to think critically about complex problems and to participate in discussions about complex issues matured incredibly. My ability to express myself was, without a doubt, enhanced by my exposure to a broad overview of different disciplines.
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“None of those courses influenced you in any way in how you think about the world?”
Not the algebra, the geometry, the trig, or the calculus, and I soon forgot everything I struggled to learn during the two years in that community college. But I enjoyed the philosophy classes and similar ones like it. I can’t remember them all but the math from Algebra to Calculus I could have done without.
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Okay, I can accept that. I didn’t get “into” math until I had to teach it to special ed students. When I went back and pulled apart the concepts I was trying to teach I discovered how fascinating numbers can be. One of my sons discovered why he should have paid more attention to geometry when he became a carpenter. I was reacting to an ad that has been running on TV about creating super schools starting with the premise that they are presently wretched. The spokesperson, dressed as an astronaut, starts off with asking people facts like what is the capitol of India as if to say if you can’t answer that question your education was obviously seriously deficient.
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I had to laugh about the capital of India question. Have you ever read Oliver Sacks?
Anyway, early in my teaching years it became apparent to me that the key to reaching my students (or as many as possible) was to understand how the brain learns and how the memory works so I focused on that and read quite a bit. In fact, whenever there was an opportunity offered to attend a workshop that focused on how the brain learned and how memory works, I went.
Just because a random person on the street doesn’t know the name of the capital of India or the names of all the U.S. Presidents, the states, the names of the Founding Fathers, etc. doesn’t mean that person wasn’t taught those facts by their teachers.
How many people in the world have super memory recall of every event and detail that ever happened in their lives? So far, they haven’t found many. Less than ten I think. 60 Minutes had a segment on these people with super memories and they are very rare.
Our brains do not all learn the same way, and our brains do not all remember everything we see, hear, read or are taught.
A teacher can teach (using a variety of methods) the capitals of all the states and countries and assign work designed to influence the child to remember those details, but that doesn’t mean their students will remember all those details even the next day.
There’s short term memory and then there’s long term memory and the process of keeping a few of the daily memories in short term takes place when we sleep. We are not in charge of what crosses over and is stored in the brain, and what is deleted, and even the ones that are kept, we have little or NO control over that memory staying part of the network of memories in our brain.
Research, a lot of research, has clearly proven that if we don’t use what we learn on a regular basis the links (I can’t remember the proper terminology at this time) to those memory nodes disconnect and that memory is lost and can not be retrieved on call.
In addition, Sacks revealed through his research and writing that in our sleep we can revise and manufacture memories to make us think we did things we never did.
For instance: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/speak-memory/
This is a major reason why this test-based crap is so totally WRONG and Machiavellian. It’s a crime! It’s fraud! It’s foolish! It’s horrible! It’s is teacher abuse! It is child abuse!
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“the state legislature has mandated that all eleventh grade students take the new SAT
Those legislators who voted for this should have to take the SAT and have their scores posted for all to see.
I shake my head in complete and utter dismay at these insane and inane legislators who have no clue what the teaching and learning process consists of/in. A fine bunch of IFs if I’ve ever seen one.
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Q: Is it fair to test students on content they have not studied?
A: Good point. Require them to study it.
Isn’t that how it goes?
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FLERP, are you saying that the College Board should determine what is taught and at what age?
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No, I am just noting that to my recollection, the complaint that students are being tested on what they have not studied is a prelude to increased alignment of the curriculum with the tests.
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FLERP, that’s called teaching to the test
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Agree.
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How many careers require a mastery of statistics, advanced algebra, or calculus? Why bother going to college if you can achieve exemplary levels of math and English by your junior year of high school? Please note: Even though many students take AP courses, only a minority do well enough to get college credit.
Unrealistic expectations can not be met whether a child attends a public or charter school. Stop pushing and let kids be kids. There’s time enough for all this stress when they become adults. In other words, opt out. (Oh, and who is paying the exorbitant fees required to take the SAT? The school district or the individual students? And is this requirement legal?)
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“How many careers require a mastery of statistics, advanced algebra, or calculus?”
I am a mathematician, and I don’t use most of the stuff they teach in High School or later in college.
They teach lots of little technical details, formulas the knowledge of which is useful for nobody.
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Since SAT and ACT came up, I mention here another big, perhaps even bigger (and older) problem: these tests are speed tests. Instead of trying to figure out what kids really know, they test how fast they think, how fast they can whip out answers.
Most people are not going to work in the ER, won’t be trial lawyers, where fast thinking is required. And selection and preparation for those professions can wait until college, anyways.
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This Saturday my niece took SAT still old version but BRAND NEW RULE:
NO WATER DRINKING IS ALLOWED DURING THE TEST only in 5 min breaks.
This rule just came out and the instructor announced it before the test as a new SECURITY measure, because, supposedly, someone was glancing on smart watch while drinking water at the previous test administration. Well, my niece feels she absolutely has to drink water during the test because the paperwork requires so much speed that she feels like running a marathon so she cannot do without taking sips of water.
This change at the test took her by surprise. By chance my niece was seated next to the proctor and during the test she begged the proctor to allow her to get a sip of water from her water bottle, but the proctor refused. My niece started to feel so thirsty she could hardly bear it but continued working on the test.
Another strange thing that occurred was that the proctor suddenly decided that for security the desks in their class had to be moved in the middle of the test during the break between the test sections. I am not sure if that was a new requirement as well or not. After moving the desks students grew uneasy one girl went to the office to cancel her scores as she felt she lost the concentration. My niece stayed on.
After the test was over my niece went to the office and cancelled her scores as she was absolutely sure she did not do her best. This was the second time my niece took SAT.
A few months before my niece took SAT and she scored 1990 but wanted to do better
this time so that she could get into those 2200 ranges for top schools. The difference is just 1 or 2 questions you could do right and wrong during each of the section. In the summer my niece was studying very hard and practiced a lot. Now after this test, she says she feels she will not endure another SAT (even though she spent so much effort preparing for this format) and will try ACT after she takes rest for a year or so. Arriving at the SAT test center at 7:30 am and completing the test at 1:15pm with these adventures took a toll on her. I feel very bad for her and I feel what happened was wrong.
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