You know how sometimes you get a fantastical idea, but you know that it won’t happen? Like, suppose there was a pill that would cut my body weight by 10 pounds in a day or two. Never gonna happen.
How about this: What if blogger Peter Greene became a regular contributor to a major magazine read by people in the business world? Nah, never gonna happen.
But it did! Peter Greene is now writing regularly for Forbes about education, patiently explaining the realities to people who need to read him.
His latest column explains why no one should get excited by the latest SAT test scores. The press releases boasted of higher scores and increased participation. Greene explained that the test score gain was very small, and participation rates went up because some states required everyone to take the SAT. This, “participation numbers are coerced.”
And don’t get excited about the College Board numbers for students who are “college-ready,” because the College Board really doesn’t know.
What does the SAT really measure? I would say it is best at measuring family income and education. Greene doesn’t disagree but he puts it succinctly: “The SAT measures SAT-taking skills.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“I would say it is best at measuring family income and education.”
This is good news, then –it must be showing that family income and education have increased?
In other words, it doesn’t measure aptitude or achievement. It measures nothing. It’s like trying to measure intelligence. It’s like trying to measure love. It’s like trying to measure any abstraction or idea. It’s no more valid than Scientology, measuring the number of outer space alien micro-bodies in one’s soul.
Grades aren’t accurate either, but they are far more meaningful that answers to standardized test questions.
Full disclosure, I’m not among those who think standardized tests do not measure anything besides income or wealth. Although in the aggregate scores will tend to correlate to income and wealth, probably because education corresponds to income and wealth.
I know. You’re good, Flerp. My comment was for the audience.
After years of working with many students who came from immigrant families and often had low income issues, pushing kids into college was always a school goal but it was soon clear to me that kids who had 1) low grades after 10th grade and 2) sporadic attendance were not likely to change habits and do well in secondary ed. venues. Habits and predicatable effort beat test scores as college success predictors every time.
I’m not taking ed reformers seriously on “college ready” until they look into the scam that is “remediation” in colleges.
They are swallowing these claims from colleges about who needs “remediation” whole and that’s just sloppy and lazy.
They’re taking cheap garbage standardized tests to determine if they’re slotted into “remediation”- their whole argument rests on sand, because it rests on tests to determine if students “need” remediation.
It hasn’t escaped my notice, either, that a lot of the ed reformers who push this are employed by colleges and universities.
They’re jamming too many people into remediation- it is costing students hundreds of millions of dollars and it’s based on junk science. Gates should fund a study, but he won’t, because he wants the remediation stats to push his agenda.
My experience with the remediation issue led me to agree with you years ago. I have a jaded view of the issue, of course, being accused by the proponents of remediation of under serving these children.
My observation is that a majority of the children who had to have remedial courses in college were lukewarm about going to college at all throughout their high school years. A small minority were placed inappropriately in remedial courses, where they made extremely high grades doing work I had already taught them.
There’s more to it than that. I don’t blame the kids and their “lukewarm about college” part.
I blame the colleges and universities. These “remediation” classes are a cash cow–all money, and no credits attached. And kids have to take them multiple times. Ka-ching! The more kids they can force into “remediation,” the better. I expect most of those kids don’t need remediation at all, but that would cut off the cash cow to the colleges.
TOW,
Remediation classes at my university are not “cash cows”. They are relativity expensive credit hours for the institution to teach because of the very small class size and our having to hire lecturers specifically for these classes. In addition, students who have to take remedial courses are more likely to drop out and take longer to graduate, both of which hurt my university’s standing with the state legislature.
I think that there is near universal agreement among faculty and administrators at my institution that it would be far better not to admit any student requiring remedial classes than to teach these classes to poorly prepared students.
That’s odd. Most universities view remedial or developmental courses as cash cows.
It is certainly possible that remedial classes are “cash cows” at NYU and Colombia. My experience has been almost entirely at public research universities.
I was not referring to NYU or Columbia
I thought it likely that you were referring to the universities where you taught and probably knew best. Which universities were you referring to?
This is from 2013:
“At a time when more high schools are looking to their graduates’ college-remediation rates as a clue to how well they prepare students for college and careers, new research findings suggest a significant portion of students who test into remedial classes don’t actually need them.
Separate studies from Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education come to the same conclusion: The way colleges are using standardized placement tests such as the College Board’s Accuplacer, ACT’s Compass, and others can misidentify students”
Have ed reformers made any progress into looking into this scam, or are they still repeating “remediation” rates like parrots?
If they actually cared about low income and first generation college students they would start asking why colleges are sticking them into “remedial” classes when they don’t need to be there. It’s a scam and it costs students tens of millions of dollars a year. Why are ed reformers pretending it’s a valid measure? Because it supports their political agenda?
Let’s see some “science”- what’s the science behind this junk?
Now that we have proof that preparation can alter your ACT or SAT score, why should we not on that basis alone cast these attempts at predicting college performance into the furnace along with the bamboo rod at which Dickens protested.
Since the tests are often now used as part of the school report card, which changes their purpose dramatically, they are especially divorced from any reality of purpose. Of course reality and purpose was never their intent. Rather they purposes to make money.
Exactly
Spoiling Bodies and Minds
Spare the rod
Spoil the bod
Spare the test
Spoil the rest
SAT scores do not measure a student’s motivation to learn and get the work done. That’s what GPA shows. Students that earn the highest GPAs are often if not always the students that are paying attention in class, asking questions, reading and getting the work done at home and in class.
GPA is often linked to family income as well.
There are certainly some kids who do exceptionally well, who are from low income homes, but many do not because of things like “summer slide”, working part time, and providing all of the care for younger siblings. Its’ hard for kids to stay focused on school if their parents aren’t supportive of academic achievement, either.
What you say is all true. I taught in schools that were located in a barrio. The high school where I finished the last 16 years of the 30 I taught had 70-percent of its students living in poverty. Only 8-percent of the student population was white. Today that HS has 80-percent of its students living in poverty and the few white students have left.
The number of students that worked hard to earn high GPAs was small compared to the number who made little or no attempt to cooperate or learn.
Halfway through a semester it was common to see half of my students earning failing grades. But with a lot of time invested on my part to call parents, the fail rate was down below 40 percent by the end of each semester. I made hundreds of phone calls each semester.
The students that failed didn’t do any homework and seldom finished any classwork. The violent multi-generational street gang-drug culture didn’t help. When I started teaching in that district, my first principal warned all the teachers to never walk off campus or we might vanish and even our bodies wouldn’t be found. Drive in and drive out, he said and stay on campus at all times. Even the local police wouldn’t patrol the streets in that barrio after dark. I worked with children (repeat children) who were known shooters with numerous rival gang kills under their belts before they reached teen years. I witnessed drive buy shootings from one of my classroom’s doorways once after school and one night while working late, one gang shot a rival gang member as he was walking out the back gate a few blocks form his house. They used a shotgun on his torso. It was winter and dark out ,,, about 7 PM and I was working late with the student editors of the school paper. The shooting was right outside the door of my corner classroom that was beside the back gate for the high school.
And yet, in every class I taught there were always a few students that lived in that barrio who worked hard and many of the few went to college even if it was the local community college where they could earn a skill that led to a better paying job.
Well, Diane (and others commenting on the SAT & measurement), you all had to know this was coming, eh!
“What does the SAT really measure? I would say it is best at measuring family income and education.”
The SAT doesn’t measure a damn thing. It poorly assesses supposed student learning and the results do correlate (again rather poorly as a function of chance vs causation) with family wealth.
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
What the SAT measures
Test measures wallet
Of those who make test
Short and the tall of it:
Fattest is best
Duane: I think I have read this before. My advancing years steal from me the immediate memory, but I am sure I have. What I do not remember (I should have done a close reading, I suppose) is the reference to proof by proximity. I am sure this is the weapon of choice for those whose logic rest solidly on thin ice.
Well, Roy, I’m sure you’ve seen it here as I probably have posted it on average once a week for the last couple of years. A little shorter version of it is also in my book-Ch 6.
It is so nice to see Peter Greene writing for a national audience that involves more than preaching to the choir. I hope his writing is received by those beyond the teaching profession with the attention it deserves.