I try not to put up two posts by the same writer in the same day, but this one followed naturally from the one that precedes it.
Peter Greene reminds us that the SAT is not just a testing company; it is big business. Right now, the SAT is in hot competition for market share with ACT.
He writes:
When the company brought in Gasper Caperton to help solve some cash flow issues, he announced that he didn’t want to run just “a testing company.” Caperton boosted fees, increased market by (among other things) getting states to punch PSAT tickets for students, and selling student information to colleges. Revenue reports for the non-profit College Board run from “$500 million to $1 billion” The College Board’s Form 990 from 2013 shows total revenue of $840,672,990 with a whopping $98,894,865 left over after expenses.
The College Board is a non-profit, which means it doesn’t have to share any of that $100 million profit with shareholders or owners. When Caperton left, he was making more than the head of Harvard, more than the head of the American Red Cross. Nineteen other executives were making over $300K. David Coleman, in his first full year of head honchoship after being hired mid-2012, received a full $734,192 in compensation.
Meanwhile, the SAT is battling for market share with ACT. Part of that battle has involved a technique familiar to manufacturers of soft drinks and beer– create a larger line of products to suck up space in the store and build market loyalty among customers. To that end, the College Board has rolled out a full range of products, allowing students to start taking some version of the SAT as early as eighth grade.
Think of it. When your state, say, Connecticut or Colorado, makes a deal to test every student with an SAT product, you are aiding the corporation improve its bottom line. This has nothing to do with improving the education of your child. The state has decided to trust the standardized test more than its teachers and is willing to transfer millions of dollars to the corporation that might have gone to hire teachers of the arts or to reduce class size. The same goes for the ACT. You don’t get college-ready by taking tests more often or earlier. You get college-ready by reading more, writing more, and pursuing your interests more deeply.
Your child is neither a product, as Exxon chief Rex Tillerson believes, nor a consumer. He or she is a developing human being. Standardized tests give you standardized information that may be useful in limited settings. But no standardized test can measure his or her worth or potential or gifts. You cannot measure what you treasure.*
*I use that line from time to time because Peter Cunningham, who was Arne Duncan’s Assistant Secretary for Communications and now runs “Education Post,” once said to me in defense of testing that “you measure what you treasure.” I thought about it and decided that it was the other way around. What I treasure cannot be measured. Here is a trivial example: I adore my dog Mitzi and my cat Dandy. How can I measure my love for them? I love my children and my spouse. What scale should I weigh them on? How can I measure my love for them? The Data Gods speak, but they don’t speak for me.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
See below. Possible twist of a quote for parents and educators……”You test what you treasure? No! I treasure what you test!” (My paraphrase.) ———————————————————————————-
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As private as NAEP is one wonders if that too isn’t a money supplier!
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As far as I know no one test preps for it and no curriculum is written to support it.
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Don’t know about the “money supplier aspect” but I do know that NAEP suffers all the same epistemological and ontological falsehoods and errors as identified by Noel Wilson that render any results COMPLETELY INVALID.To understand that COMPLETE INVALIDITY I urge you to read and understand his never refuted nor rebutted “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 words 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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“To that end, the College Board has rolled out a full range of products, allowing students to start taking some version of the SAT as early as eighth grade.”
I don’t know if the Duke Talent Search is tied in with the College Board but my son took the SAT in the 7th grade. Nice to know but hardly educational.
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I’d say these testing profiteers treasure only the measure.
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“you measure what you treasure.”
I guess that’s why they weigh my stinky garbage every time I go to the dump.
Apparently (according to Cunningham) they treasure it.
Like the Grinch, I suppose.
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Broward County Schools is paying the College Board $510K to test every 11th-grader during school hours (even if parents can afford to pay for the test). The scores will feed into a program called Naviance that will track the students through college.
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“The scores will feed into a program called Naviance that will track the students through college.”
You wonder when students themselves will rebel- the goal seems to be to “track” them every waking moment of their lives.
There has to be some countervailing factor. One will eventually appear- if it isn’t parents and teachers it will be students.
I’ve lost confidence in a lot of institutions but I still hold out hope that human beings tend to rebel when they’re treated like lab rats 🙂
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It’s indeed a big money machine. Consider a student applying to a range of colleges, say, about 10. The cost of taking 2 SATs and 3 SAT 2 exams would be about $189 (some tests have fees that vary slightly) and sending out those scores would be an additional $112.50, for a total of just over $300. If the student took, say, 5 AP exams as well, the cost of the exams would be $460 and the cost of sending out the scores to 10 colleges would be $150 for a total of $610. So a student might pay over $900 just to take and send out SAT and AP exams. (Yes, I’m aware that there is one free score report per exam, and I’m also aware that low-income students can apply to have the fees waived.)
Let’s say the student preps with exam books at $20/pop. Or preps with a Kaplan course at something like $800/course. Or a private tutor at who knows how much? How many students go in cold with no prep or just use the online resources, i.e. Khan? Is it any wonder that the prep companies offer free sample tests? It can cost thousands just to survive the testing circuit, and all of this is necessary to unlock the real rewards: financial aid.
Hmm, maybe skewed just a bit towards the upper middle class?
And yes, I’m the parent of a high school student!
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Aren’t all the NYC public high school students getting a free SAT test this year through some deal with the college board? There must be 80,000 students in each grade.
I am always wary of people offering “gifts” that sound too good to be true without there being a catch.
On the other hand, the nice thing is that no matter what, a student can’t be forced to pay for the SAT if they prefer taking the ACT instead. The SAT was losing market share to the ACT because even the most elite east coast colleges were happy with students submitting ACT scores instead.
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I believe that some schools are offering the free SAT this year; maybe next year is the free SAT for all? At my child’s school, though, the free SAT does not include the writing component. While not technically required, the writing section is actually necessary for applications to most of the selective colleges, including those that meet most or all of financial need. So, one asks, what good does the free SAT do? Answer: quite a lot for the data collectors. For the students, perhaps not so much.
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District 13 parent,
Nothing is free. Someone else is paying, using tax dollars that might have reduced class size or bought musical instruments.
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They were selling the data? They were selling the data?! I must’ve given up the data of a thousand kids — without their parents’ permission — when a previous principal bought the PSAT for all my students and had me administer it during class for seven years. Many of those kids had aspirations beyond their still developing, adolescent abilities, aspirations against which the scores spoke. I have been tricked. I have been used. This cannot happen again.
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No, we can’t measure how much you love your dog but we can measure dog ownership in America and consider what it says about our collective values. Clearly we like pets. And while we can’t measure everything in education, we can certainly measure things like attendance, grad rates, discipline, integration, access to rigorous high school classes and proficiency in some subjects and consider what these data points say about our values and aspirations. Americans clearly value educational success and want to measure it. We also value things we cannot easily measure like pride in a child performing in a student play or musical group. Einstein said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts” but he would never suggest that we stop counting.
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Peter, so glad to know you read my blog. I agree with you that data can be valuable. I agree with your examples. What matters most is to know what can and cannot be measured and to know how reliable the measure is. As I have grown older, I have learned more about the limitations of standardized tests, what they can and cannot tell us. Like me, you have children, and in my case, grandchildren. We know that they are far more precious than any standardized test can measure and that what those tests say is one dimension of them, and a very limited one.
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“. . . we can certainly measure things like attendance, grad rates, discipline, integration, access to rigorous high school classes and proficiency in some subjects and consider what these data points say about our values and aspirations. . . ”
NO!, we cannot “measure” those things. We can assess, we can count and we can evaluate but doing so does not mean we are “measuring” them. Counting is not measuring % of integration or # of disciplinary referrals.
Measuring by definition must have an agreed upon standard, a measuring device that is calibrated against that standard (and that will always have some error of measurement) and then using that device. None of those exist for the teaching and learning process. Standardized tests are not measurements of anything. They are piss poor attempts to assess student learning and by (false) extension the teaching and learning process and by (further false) extension the teachers capabilities and abilities. It’s all a hoax stamped with the veneer of scientism, aka pseudo-science. Or as we say out here in the hinterlands of this country “It’s pure bullshit!”
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As you know, I have been reading your stuff for many years. I don’t disagree with you about the limitations of standardized tests but I shudder at the thought of their absence. Without some pressure to serve kids at risk, too many states, districts and schools will ignore them. Even with pressure, many do. We’ll see if states build more balanced accountability systems under the new federal law, or simply retreat. Let’s hope.
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Peter, I miss you. When you come to New York City, let me know and we can have a Coke or Pepsi or drink.
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“but I shudder at the thought of their absence.”
Why?
Because “without some pressure to serve kids at risk, too many states, districts and schools will ignore them.”
Horse manure. That’s utter speculation with no basis in reality. That pressure has been brought to bear upon the system through laws, the effects of lawsuits, and administrative directives.
Really, standardized test results as “bringing pressure”. How friggin gullible to you think we rubes are?? Here’s one for you that’s more likely to be true than standardized test results bringing that pressure: I’ve some beautiful white sand ocean front beach property for sale cheaply over at Lake of the Ozarks in Central Missouri to sell you. Operators are standing by, call now!
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The College Board also is in the curriculum business via its Common Core-infused Springboard math and English courses for middle & high school.
I received training in the Springboard Algebra program last summer & fall, and I briefly used portions of it before changing jobs. I actually was pretty impressed with its resources.
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Not a fan of the College Board, & never have been of the SAT. Always thought the ACT to be a better test for most students–I’m very much in agreement w/District 13 parent comment, “Hmm, maybe skewed just a bit towards the upper middle class?”
Finally, it’s nice to see all the colleges/universities who no longer require either as criteria for admission, but, instead, treasure the treasure!
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And Diane do not forget AP courses. A big business!!!! Should not that money go to local IHEs who provide dual enrollment?
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