Renee Dudley of Reuters has dug deep into a story that seldom reaches public view: the internal battle inside the College Board–sponsor of the SAT–that followed the arrival of David Coleman.
Or, how the architect of the Common Core imposed his “beautiful vision” on the SAT and created massive disruption inside the organization.
“NEW YORK – Shortly after taking over the College Board in 2012, new CEO David Coleman circulated an internal memo laying out what he called a “beautiful vision.”
“It was his 7,800-word plan for transforming the organization’s signature product, the SAT college entrance exam. The path Coleman laid out was detailed, bold and idealistic – a reflection of his personality, say those who know him.
“Literary passages for the new SAT should be “memorable and often beautiful,” he wrote, and students should be able to take the test by computer.
“Finishing the redesign quickly was essential. If the overhaul were ready by March 2015, he wrote in a later email to senior employees, then the New York-based College Board could win new business and counter the most popular college entrance exam in America, the ACT.
“Perhaps the biggest change was the new test’s focus on the Common Core, the controversial set of learning standards that Coleman himself helped create. The new SAT, he wrote, would “show a striking alignment” to the standards, which set expectations for what American students from kindergarten through high school should learn to prepare for college or a career. The standards have been fully adopted by 42 states and the District of Columbia – and are changing how and what millions of children are taught.
“Redesigning the SAT to reflect the Common Core has solidified Coleman’s influence as one of the most powerful figures in education. He has emerged as “the arbiter of what America’s children should know and be able to do,” Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education for President George H.W. Bush, wrote in her blog.
“But Coleman’s “beautiful vision” for remaking the exam soon met some harsh realities.
“”Internal documents reviewed by Reuters show pitched battles over his timeline to create the new test and whether the push to meet the deadline could backfire.
“The documents, which include memos, emails and presentations, reveal persistent concerns that aligning the redesigned SAT with the Common Core would disadvantage students in states that rejected the standards or were slow to absorb them. The materials also indicate that Coleman’s own decisions delayed the organization’s effort to offer a digital version of the exam.
“Today, less than a year after the new SAT debuted, the College Board continues to struggle with the consequences of Coleman’s crash course to remake the SAT and its companion, the PSAT, a junior version of the exam.”
The question now: what will happen to the Common Core-aligned SAT in the era of Trump, who claims to hate Common Core. If state’s drop Common Core, the SAT may be out on a limb.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Poor little David….even his mother wouldn’t comment on what a disaster he has made. I guess all those that resigned from College Board don’t really give a shit how David thinks or feels about things. Karma
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Basically he built the F-35 or the new littoral combat ship. Some grandiose idea that includes everything usually doesn’t deliver. Everything takes more time and more money, two things that are always in short supply.
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The path Coleman laid out was detailed, bold and idealistic – a reflection of his personality, say those who know him. (I question who on earth could believe this).
I have not David Coleman, but some materials he circulated to art teachers, all in an effort to bring them into the fold, were superego-centered, but also revealed that the emperor had no clothes.
Take a look at this post to see how Diane’s views changed. https://dianeravitch.net/2012/05/19/who-is-david-coleman/
This is a video of the emperor at work. https://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/top-ten-scariest-people-in-education-reform-9-david-coleman/
The website says that Coleman will be in office until 2025. You can see the top tier of his enablers here. The question is whether they have the courage to undo the damage. But then, I am not a fan of the tests to begin with. They make it too easy to exclude students from pursuing higher education. They are one manifestation of the lazy approach to college recruitment—thumbs up or thumb down https://www.collegeboard.org/about/governance/trustees
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If Trump succeeds in making the Common Core irrelevant, maybe the SAT and the ACT will become irrelevant too.
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One can only hope considering how onto-epistemologically bankrupt and invalid those tests are.
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To apply David Coleman’s own words (presumably intended to apply to the hapless proles who are subject to his and Bill Gates’ Common Core) to him, who gives a s&#$ what he says or thinks?
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Colemen even ignored criticism that SAT math questions were too wordy, convoluted and vague to assess skills fairly, especially for disadvantaged students – according to another Reuters article. “I’ve never encountered so many seriously flawed items”, says one SAT reviewer.
Reminds me of PARCC and Smarter Balanced. I met someone who wrote SBAC items and asked her why, after several years, the same typos and confusing questions persist. Her reply? It costs too much to make changes and they were trying to meet a deadline.
Rushing products that affect millions of futures and cost taxpayers billions is simply unacceptable. Let’s dump ’em.
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“The Common Core’s reading standards [says Coleman] ‘focus on students’ ability to read carefully and grasp information … based on evidence in the text'”
Ability to read is a function of knowledge, not some mythical “complex text reading skill”. If you KNOW what the words mean and KNOW enough about the subject, you can form a situational model of what’s going on and then grasp the information. If you don’t have this knowledge, no amount of reading skill practice will avail you. Coleman is a fraud.
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David Coleman’s brain was the epicenter of the biggest education failure/disaster in human history. The perfect storm of arrogance and ignorance.
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He has a muddled understanding of what makes a good reader. In some places he praises E.D. Hirsch, whose work thoroughly discredits New Criticism; yet the thrust of his vision is based on New Criticism –i.e. that practice at close reading is the main thing that makes you a good reader. Hirsch shows convincingly that this is not so. Yet the masses of American teachers (who sadly are poorly versed in this controversy) accept the Coleman vision uncritically.
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Coleman is the classic interfering, and maybe even well intentioned, adult who has zero understanding of children that grew up outside of his elitist bubble. And he is beyond clueless about the group dynamics of teaching large groups of young adolescents from dysfunctional families. His ideas do not work well with those from affluent and privileged families and are disastrous for those underprivileged kids who lack the background knowledge and vocabularies necessary to be successful readers. His failure to address the cognitively impaired, mentally ill, and ELLs did nothing to help his credibility as the self-proclaimed Father of 21st Century Learning.
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I’ve said for quite some time on this blog that that SAT is a mostly worthless test. College enrollment specialists say that their research finds the SAT predicts between 3 and 14 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.
The ACT and the SAT are not used – really – to gauge student performance in college. They are used to enhance the ‘selectivity’ rankings of colleges, and they are used used for the purpose of “financial-aid leveraging.” Instead of using a $20,000 scholarship for one needy student, schools can break that amount into four $5,000 grants for wealthier students who score higher, who will pay the rest of the tuition ($15,000 a year) and who will bring the school more cash and “will improve the school’s profile and thus its desirability.”
As Matthew Quirk wrote, “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.”
See: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/the-best-class-money-can-buy/4307/
Here’s how Bloomberg News reported it: “U.S. colleges… are using financial aid to lure rich students while shortchanging the poor, forcing those most in need to take on heavy debt…To increase their standing on college rankings, more private colleges are giving ‘merit aid’ to top students, who are often affluent, while charging unaffordable prices to the needy…”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-08/colleges-soak-poor-u-s-students-while-funneling-aid-to-rich.html
This is how the ACT and SAT are used. They have little if anything to do with “career and college readiness.” It truly is sad that education “leaders” either don’t know this or, if they do, they refuse to say anything about it.
So, here’s the crux. Unless and until education “leaders” (for the record, few of them really are) and parents and students and “selective” colleges abandon the SAT and ACT, they will remain prominent. So too the College Board’s Advanced Placement program, which has about has much educational credibility as the SAT.
As to David Coleman, he honestly seems to be clueless. When Reuters asked for his comments on Trump’s education pick, Betsy DeVos, he emailed them this brief statement:
“Betsy DeVos is a remarkable citizen leader. She believes fiercely in our founding principles of liberty and equality of opportunity. We can’t wait to see what she does next as Secretary of Education.”
Talk about putting lipstick on the pig.
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SAT, ACT, NAEP, Common Core, etc. . . are all manifestations of the same illogical disease that infects public education practices, actually malpractices, that of the foundational conceptual (onto-epistemological) error and falsehoods and psychometric fudging that permeates the educational realm. Noel Wilson has shown us how those errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudgings can only result in the standards and testing regime to be COMPLETELY INVALID.
I implore all to read and comprehend Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted dissertation “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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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