Jonathan Pelto, former legislator and current courageous blogger in Connecticut, says that his daughter will not take the SAT test required of all juniors.
In response to parental objections to the Common Core-aligned Smarter Balanced Assessment, Connecticut dropped SBAC and replaced it with the Common Core-aligned SAT.
“Thanks to a contract signed by Governor Dannel Malloy’s Commissioner of Education, Dianna R. Wentzell and approved by Malloy’s political appointees on the State Board of Education, Connecticut taxpayers will be shelling out in excess of $4.3 million in scarce public funds, over the next three years, to the College Board, the company that owns the SAT. In return, the College Board will allow students to take their NEW SAT — a test that has yet to be validated and has come under increasing criticism because, despite their claims, the SAT fails to adequately predict how students will do in college.
“This latest debacle started last spring when, in the face of growing opposition to the Common Core Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) testing scheme, the Connecticut General Assembly and Governor Malloy decided to replace the unfair, inappropriate and discriminatory 11th grade SBAC test with a new mandate that all high school juniors take what is likely to be an equally unfair, inappropriate and discriminatory NEW SAT.
“However, neither Governor Malloy, his Commissioner of Education nor the legislators had ever seen the NEW SAT that they are now trying to force 11th grader to take. They hadn’t seen it because the new version of the SAT isn’t even being released until March 2016.
“As the College Board website proclaims, students across the United States can take the NEW SAT for the first time on March 5, 2016 which means that Connecticut’s 40,000 juniors are truly little more than an initial round of guinea pigs for a testing company whose revenue is already in excess of $841 million a year….
“In my daughter’s case, of the dozen or so colleges that she is considering applying to, the majority DO NOT require an SAT test.
“For those schools that do require a standardized test score, my daughter will be taking the old version of the SAT on February 20, 2016. The last date for taking the old version of the SAT was supposed to be last week (January 23, 2016) but due to the snow storm on Saturday, the testing was postponed until the end of February….
“While she won’t be participating in the SAT test being “mandated” by the state of Connecticut, on March 2, 2016, if we determine that she should take the NEW SAT, then there are plenty of options to take the test in the spring, summer and fall, after the initial problems with the NEW SAT have been identified and resolved.
“What we won’t do is serve as pawns for the state of Connecticut’s attempt to collect standardized tests results so that they can unfairly evaluate teachers. Governor Malloy’s “education reform initiative” requires local school district to base 22.5 percent of a teacher’s evaluation on the standardized test results of their students.
“My daughter won’t be relegated to being a test subject for the College Board’s attempt to reclaim market share.
“Instead, we will do what is best for my daughter’s college aspirations – the state and its testing obsession be damned.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Or the ACT.
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“there are plenty of options to take the test in the spring, summer after the initial problems with the NEW SAT have been identified and resolved.
The initial problems with the very first SAT (given in 1926) were never resolved, which is why it has been changed so many times — and is still being changed every few years.
So what makes Pelto think the problems with the NEW improved SAT will be resolved?
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Beat me to that line SDP. Had it highlighted and controlled C’d ready to roll.
The New, Improved, Modern, Up to Date and any other marketing phrase one can think of SAT suffers all the inherent epistemological and ontological errors and falsehoods identified by Noel Wilson that render the whole process COMPLETELY INVALID. To understand those errors, falsehoods and psychometric fudges all should 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. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other 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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Been a while since you’ve posted this, Duane – you been slacking in retirement? 😉
New nom de plume: Duane Slacker
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It would be great if more followed.
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Yes, it would.
But how many do you think will?
And how many public school administrators, guidance counselors, teachers – and superintendents – will advocate a boycott of the SAT (and ACT), much less Advanced Placement courses and tests?
As I’ve said multiple times on this blog, it makes no sense to oppose the Common Core and yet be in favor of the SAT (and ACT) and AP courses and tests.
They are all part-and-parcel of the very same thing.
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“They are all part-and-parcel of the very same thing.”
Quite correct, democracy, as shown by Noel Wilson referenced above!
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Connecticut is not the only state mandating high school juniors to take the new SAT.
http://blog.prepscholar.com/which-states-require-the-sat
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Back in the late 60s to 70s we were told you couldn’t study for the SAT, but when my daughters took the exam in the 90s there were some SAT prep courses available, while now taking an expensive SAT course to prepare for this exam is a common practice (at least in the suburbs).
Big business at work.
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Why is Connecticut’s Common Core resistance so weak?There are armies of warriors in NY, RI, and Mass … chirps from Connecticut.
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Remind us again who is in charge of the College Board?
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Who gives a shit?
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So this legislator wants:
1. His daughter to take an SAT that is more aligned with IQ (old SAT) than achievement (new SAT)
2. Pay for his daughter to take the new SAT in the fall as opposed to having the school pay for the same SAT in the spring
3. Other students serve as the initial test-takers but not his daughter (if Pearson had to obtain test-takers on its own, I’m sure the same legislator would claim those students “were not representative” and thus the results “invalid”)
Please send your daughter to one of the overpriced colleges that does not require the SAT. She can receive inflated grades, an inflated sense of self worth, and then find it impossible to repay her loans with that useless degree.
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Virginia – even if all your comments were true (I have a different interpretation) this parent is trying to make a statement.
You are saying – hey look, free SATs – that’s a good thing.
He’s thinking – I like to have some control of my daughter’s life and I don’t want her being used as a Guinea Pig for this new, unproven test.
I am saying – Why, as a taxpayer, should I sponsor ALL students, college bound or not, by paying for their college entrance exams?
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