Richard Phelps is a testing expert. In this post, he asks why the College Board gets public subsidies when it is able to pay its executives seven-figure salaries.
He says its CEO, David Coleman, garnered more than $1 million in 2016.
Phelps summarizes a shocking number of scandals, turbulence, and staff upheaval at the College Board.
And to think this insular institution is the gatekeeper for higher education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What’s a “testing expert”?
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Someone who went to school to learn how to say
Testing. Testing, 1 2 3 ….Is this on?
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Maybe this will help, Dienne. A bit of a correction on that statement:
“Richard Phelps is a STANDARDIZED testing MOUTHPIECE expert.”
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The story is about the lady, David Coleman and just how crooked he is taking this money off shore and spending on his male wife.
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Don’t give a damn about Coleman’s supposed male wife.
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A testing expert is (or at least should be) the classroom teacher. I’m not sure why teachers have ceded that function to psychomeretricians (other than being mandated to do so).
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Most of the teachers I have worked with w
ould disagree.
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Would disagree with what? That teachers aren’t the testing experts. If they are not they should be and if they are not then they are less than qualified to teach.
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surely as much an expert as many who now run schools and school boards: no educational experience but plenty of Big Money backing
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And to think this insular institution is the gatekeeper for higher education
College board is only the symptom.
The problem is with the colleges and universities. Start by looking at the people in admissions departments.
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It is kind of amusing though- all these colleges and universities with these lofty goals about openness to ideas and debate appointed an incredibly narrow and reductive GATEKEEPER to bar entry to anyone who doesn’t score X on 2 tests.
Just think about that. They built a wall around their campuses and let David Coleman man the single, narrow checkpoint.
Why is he determining the make-up of their student body?
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It’s a self reinforcing system.
Quite purposefully so.
Colleges and universities these days are primarily interested in those who can pay. Test scores give them an excuse to deny people who can’t pay and conveniently, the test scores are a good proxy for family income.
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Only for the colleges and universities that still require SAT or ACT scores.
“Complete Guide: Colleges Not Requiring SAT Scores”
“Not all admissions processes are created equal. One major point of difference among colleges these days is how admissions officers consider your SAT scores. More and more schools are de-emphasizing SAT scores as part of your application with test-optional and test-flexible policies. One college has even eliminated SAT scores completely!
“There are now more than 1,000 accredited, bachelor-degree granting institutions that have changed their approaches to standardized test scores. Keep in mind that the majority of colleges, especially the more prestigious schools, do still require (and strongly consider) SAT scores.”
https://blog.prepscholar.com/the-complete-guide-to-sat-optional-colleges
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“We are a mission-driven, not-for-profit membership ”
People need to understand that “nonprofit” or “not-for-profit” tells you next to nothing about an organization.
It isn’t a blanket grant of good works and pure intentions. These companies are using this TAX designation to avoid scrutiny and criticism and questions and to put a kind of ridiculous, phony halo effect over everything they do.
You don’t know anything about a nonprofit until you follow the money.
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Who is this David Coleman to make this salary, a public university football coach?
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Ted,
This is the same David Coleman who is known as the architect of the Common Core standards. He was also the treasurer of Michelle Rhee’s anti-teacher, anti-public school group ironically called “Students First.”
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I can just picture David Coleman giving his locker room pep talk to his football team: No one gives a s**t what you think and feel, least of all me. So go out there and win, you losers.
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It’s obscene how much money is made from college football, money of which the players getting concussed see none. It’s obscene how much money is made from standardized testing, money of which the students getting misrepresented see none. The NCAA and Coleman’s College Board have both perverted education, and not just higher education, profiting off the public and the hard work of the people.
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I’m sure everyone in college-world knows this but let’s not kid ourselves about what’s going on with these tests.
If you’re applying to a community college or ordinary (not exclusive) public college, the tests are used as a proxy to allow the college to NOT do any real, human analysis of your strengths and weaknesses. I attended community college and the “admission process” consisted of an underpaid, inexperienced staffer checking boxes, one of which was test scores. It’s a way to save costs and increase inefficiency for the VAST majority of the population who do not attend pricey and selective private schools.
As long as we’re all clear on what this is about. It’s about assigning a number as a proxy for the student. I can live with that, but not if no one admits it.
If we stopped using the tests as proxy we’d have to hire people to do an actual case by case analysis, and we have no intention of doing that for low or middle income students.
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It’s not simply a matter of making the admissions process more efficient
More importantly, the teests are a proxy for family income, which is of great interest to colleges and universities which have basically become big businesses.
By denying entrance to kids with low tests scores, the colleges and universities can deny kids whose families can not pay without looking like they are discriminating against them. They can just make their usual claims about the objectivity of the tests.
It’s a very convenient ruse the colleges AND for David Coleman and others at College Board.
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“As long as we’re all clear on what this is about. It’s about assigning a number as a proxy for the student. I can live with that, but not if no one admits it.”
Wow! Really, Chiara?
You’re okay with a completely invalid process that assigns bogus numbers to the students? And all it takes to be okay with that is if everyone says it’s okay?
No entiendo eso.
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Kids themselves know this. Ask any student who is undergoing this testing process. They recognize EXACTLY how reductive and narrow it is- they recite a number.
I give them credit for being much more honest than they adults. We’re measuring them, and we’re doing it with one test and unless they’re applying at a selective school we’re batch processing them exactly like we would an auto part or a can of tomatoes.
Let’s at least stop lying to them and insisting they are being evaluated as whole human beings- they’re not. There’s not even any point in lying to them- they know exactly what’s happening.
Elite colleges are a tiny and unrepresentative slice of what most people experience. Most people get batch processing and these tests are key to that.
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Yep….batch processing. My DD is in the midst of the testing but her friend is a Sr. The friend sent in 9-10 applications and most have responded back in a matter of 3-4 weeks. You can’t tell me that these universities have enough staff to process, read essays and sort the thousands of applications that they receive at the same time. They are looking for a cut-off score on the stupid test and nothing more. It’s a scam! And yes, the kids know it, too.
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“We’re measuring them,”
No, we are not measuring them. That is THE major onto-epistemological LIE that standardized test supporters want you to believe. NOTHING is being measured. Or at least the “nonobservable” is supposedly being measured. Hmmmm. . . how the hell does that happen? (Hint it can’t.)
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.
Those supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
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Hey Duane, this is literally the first TED talk I’ve ever seen and it made me think of you (in that I think you’ll like it):
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An interesting talk that reminded me of the book “Being Wrong: Adventures on the Margins of Error” by Kathryn Schulz. Thanks for sharing it!
To me it shows the subtle power of framing the issue, whether visually or with words. Context matters much more than we realize. Same words in different contexts can have different meanings.
Again, Thanks.
Here’s a TED by Schulz for ya:
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After her book “Being Wrong” was published, Kathryn Schultz interviewed as part of her study of what she calls Wrongology.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Bill Gates and Alice Walton adnitted they were wrong?
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It seems that most billionaires can’t admit they are wrong.
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Oh, and I don’t necessarily agree with all that Schulz wrote about in the book or in the TED talk.
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At least we can actually perform a valid measurement on a can of tomatoes (mass or volume) and label it accurately.
As Duane has pointed out many (many (many (too many manies to fit in this comment box))) times, the so called measurement performed by a standardized test is not a real measurement — not in the real scientific sense.
It’s a fiction defined by whatever a particular test says it is. Unlike real measurements, it’s specific to a specific instrument.
I can measure the speed of an object ,(eg, a car,), in many different ways ,(with many different instruments,:radar, lidar, speedometer,sonar, etc,) and as long as the instruments are calibrated properly, I get the same result. This is quite unlike the standardized tests, each of which SEEMs to be messuring something unique to the particular test. That alone tells you that they are NOT real measurements.
It’s fake metrology (fake science) and the people who push it are fake metrologists (fake scientists) I doubt most of them even realize how dumb what they are doing is.
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Was it you, SDP, who came up with the term “psychomeretrician”?
Whoever it was it’s a good one!
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There was a professor at the U of Texas who got into big trouble by documenting the fact that standardized tests measure the ability to pass standardized tests.
Walter Stroup
https://www.texasobserver.org/walter-stroup-standardized-testing-pearson/amp/
Diane
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A good article. Thanks for sharing it, Diane.
But Stroup is not the first to point out those flaws. The main problem that has NEVER been addressed in any way, manner or fashion by any main stream report such as the article is the mis-usage and abuse of the term “measure”. There is no measuring being done as the way the term is used in the article. They almost got it right in talking of using a weight scale for measuring height but even that is not correct. As I have explained many times in many places (see above) nothing, or as Phelps claims, the ‘nonobservable’ is being measured.
How such a simple concept-measuring-can be misconstrued to be being done when it is not and then to have damn near everyone believe that it is being done would defy the best work of the best magicians. Almost everyone is bamboozled.
Just because Stroup claims that student learning/achievement, whatever it’s called can be measured does not mean that is what is happening and shows how completely embedded that nonsense is.
Words matter and by using the term measure psychometricians falsely claim a mantel of scientific objectivity that is not there. There is no scientific objectivity at all in the process. If anything claiming such is the antithesis of scientific objectivity as the very foundations, the onto-epistemological foundations are full of error and falsehoods (as shown by Wilson and others.
I wonder, if instead of claiming that the tests “measure” test taking skills he had said that the results of the tests indicate that there is a solid relationship between test taking skills and the student’s score would he have been so harassed?
I wonder if he would have pointed out the whole absurdity of the process and the concomitant harms to the students if he would have been so harassed.
Perhaps one day those who believe in such falsehoods as “measuring what a student has learned” will realize it is worse than a fool’s errand-it’s an unethical, unjust and immoral malpractice for all the harms that are foisted upon all the students.
I doubt it!
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“I can measure the speed of an object… and as long as the instruments are calibrated properly, I get the same result.” How come the same person can take the same standardized test twice and get two different scores?
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Even with legitimate measurements, there is always a certain amount of error involved.
I should have said the same result within the margin of error.
Standardized test scores are also given with a standard error, but the thing that demonstrates that they are not real measurements is that the scores can be increased from one test to the next by amounts that are FAR outside this error margin of error simply by using very basic test taking strategies — and unlike real measurements hich fluctuate about some mean value, a standardized test score can be maintained at the new higher level. In other words, the margin of error that is given is really a fake statistical construct in the case of the test.
What this all means is that the tests are not really measuring anything other than the ability to take the test.
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“What this all means is that the tests are not really measuring anything other than the ability to take the test.”
And that is where I disagree, SDP.
“What this all means is that the tests are not really measuring anything.”
There, corrected.
Standardized tests are assessing something. Something that is not fully understood nor completely assessed, even in the most basic questions such as 1 + 1 = ___. Are we assessing “math knowledge” or computational skill? Is it a question of memorization or realization that one plus one equals two? Or is it just a lucky guess that the student got it right?
We can’t ever actually know. We can extrapolate, we can judge, we can evaluate but we can’t ever get inside the head of a learner to know what has gone on.
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I should have been more careful with the way I put that and it’s difficult not to fall into using the language of the testers.
But what I meant was that a score on the test indicates only how well you give the answers that the test takers want.
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“primary goals are to improve college and career readiness and increase access to opportunity for all students through focused assessments, rigorous instruction, personalized practice, breaking barriers to college entry, and access to better planning tools and skills needed most for tomorrow’s lobs.[1]”
This line says it ALL. Tell me HOW a test can improve college and career readiness. Tell me HOW a test can increase access to opportunity. You can’t make a pig gain weight by weighing it everyday and you can’t make kids any readier/smarter for college by testing them. I truly despise College Board and ALL of it’s “products”.
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skills needed most for tomorrow’s lobs.[1]”
For tomorrow’s lobs?
Are these soccer skills they are talking about? Or tennis?
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The prevailing view in the U of California and Cal State systems, is that one must take as many APs as possible to game the grade point average. These schools do allow students to add a point to their grade point average, changing an A from a 4 to a 5. How nice, more $$$ for the College Board. They’ve sold the dream of college entrance for these students, and for many, it turns into a nightmare when you find you are struggling to keep your head above water in a class for which you have little aptitude or interest. Are APs more rigorous? Probably, but no one said that you can’t provide more rigor or differentiate in the “regular” class. Are the courses actually college prep? No, chances are the student would benefit by repeating the class in college because you don’t get enough depth. APs are designed to teach to the test. Can you get enough credits to graduate early or save money in college? No, rules for credit vary, but many will not accept scores for college credit below a 4 or 5 on the exam. So, in the end, a big win for the College Board, sketchy benefits for students at best. Selling AP classes as “college prep” is marketing genius; parents have bought it, literally, hook, line, and sinker.
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“No, chances are the student would benefit by repeating the class in college because you don’t get enough depth. APs are designed to teach to the test.”
Addressing your last statement first: I was certified to teach AP Spanish and I guarantee that teaching to the AP test was the main thrust of that certification process.
Now, the concept of repeating a class, or at least taking a similar class? Repetition is a wonderful teaching and learning device, especially as one gets into more “difficult” subject matter with readings that may be far above most students level. Rereading is an amazing process in helping to understand what it is that the author is trying to say. Not many practice double/triple readings.
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My son, who is now studying aero engineering, took two AP Calc classes because he’s clearly a math student. He understands it, has aptitude for it, likes it. He did get some college math credit so that frees him up to take other classes. But, I told him to take Calc 2 again in college, rather than Calc 3 because I was pretty sure that Calc 2 would cover more material than he had in high school. Sure enough, he got new material, so then he was ready for Calc 3. So, in this case, it made sense, but I’ve heard so many stories of kids who were steered into a class that they weren’t ready for, and just got slammed. I even knew someone who became so overwhelmed by the stress of the workload, that they had a mental breakdown and had to quit school. That is so wrong and so damaging to our children.
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You gave your son very good advice.
AP calc BC is NOT equivalent to the fresmsn calc taught at a decent college or University. You are right: the college course covers more and in more depth.
I took calculus in high school, got a 5 on the test, placed out of the freshman calc sequence and went immediately to the second year of calc. It was a big mistake. I survived but I would have gotten a much better grounding had I repeated the basic calc sequence.
You get better at math every time you are exposed to the concepts. It makes no sense to try to get ahead of the game because you only end up behind.
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And not incidentally, the AP tests are really a joke. They are not good guages of how well you have mastered the concepts involved, but mainly just how much stuff you have memorized for the test.
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The same thing happened to me with AP calculus, SDP.
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I just can’t convince my DD that taking these AP classes are just a bunch of baloney. She wants to believe me, but the guidance counselors and teachers at the school push this with such force that she doesn’t know who/what to trust. Where I live, it’s “AP for all” being pushed and it’s wrong on so many levels. The parents here are crazy for AP and SAT testing…..they have really partaken of the wrong colored KoolAid.
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See my comment above. This is partly the result of the competition insanity between schools, in which APs are included in the rankings/ratings of schools. The AP data is now also included at the state level, at least here in California.
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It’s a coup by the College Board who have convinced all the high schools that AP is the only way.
And AP is baked into the system by high school rankings by US News.
College Board should really be prosecuted under the RICO statute because what they are doing amounts to racketeering.
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Oak mom: I would like to support Duane on this matter. I attended a college prep school and took a AP exam on the basis of my regular classes. It got me out of basic English composition and allowed me to get six credit hours. OK, I guess. The real story is that I was able to take USHistory in college over. It was a wonderful repetition, for no one ever repeats it the same way. Moreover, I met Dr. Barton McCash, who became like a father to me for the next phase of my intellectual life.
I have one question for those who think we ought to be doing dual credit and AP. Why is it in the best interests of a society to educate your brightest students half as much? I think the answer is too obvious.
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The College Board and the products it markets — PSAT, SAT, AP, Accuplacer — constitute one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on public education.
A serious problem, identified by several commenters here, is that way too many parents, students, administrators, guidance counselors, and teachers — basically, a very hefty chunk of the entire human infrastructure of public schooling — has bought into the nonsense. To put it mildly, lots of those who endorse College Board crap and that of the ACT are just clueless.
And nothing is going to change until the perceptions of this very big constituency change.
Let’s review.
Many people believe – still – that the ACT and the SAT and other standardized test scores are good measures of “effectiveness” and “college readiness” and “intelligence.” The same people who subscribe to this nonsense have never taken the time to think any of their beliefs through, nor have they taken the time to educate themselves on the severe limits of testing, especially standardized testing, which routinely and quite specifically separates test-takers into “winners” and “losers,” those ABOVE the mean, and those BELOW. That’s a built-in requirement of the “normal distribution.”
So, half of all test-takers will always be below the average…who will they be?
As Richard Rothstein reported nearly a decade-and-a-half ago in the American School Board Journal:
“Twenty years ago, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, two researchers from the University of Kansas, visited families from different social classes to monitor the conversations between parents and toddlers. Hart and Risley found that, on average, professional parents spoke more than 2,000 words per hour to their children, working-class parents spoke about 1,300, and welfare mothers spoke about 600. So by age 3, the children of professionals had vocabularies that were nearly 50 percent greater than those of working class children and twice as large as those of welfare children…Deficits like these cannot be made up by schools alone, no matter how high the teachers’ expectations. For all children to achieve the same goals, the less advantaged would have to enter school with verbal fluency that is similar to the fluency of middle-class children.”
Indeed, test scores are merely proxies for family income.
Several commenters have commented on their personal experiences with Advanced Placement courses – one of the College Board’s biggies, with millions of students (nearly 3 million in 2017) taking millions of exams. Others have noted the push from school guidance counselors for students to take AP courses. But what does the research on AP say?
Research has shown that in Advanced Placement courses “the focus is on delivering information, perhaps even more than is found in an introductory course” at college. That same research found that instruction in most AP classes was “INconsistent with the results of the research on cognition and learning” [emphasis mine]. The report said that AP courses and tests were often a mile wide and an inch deep.
A 2004 study found that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average, and a high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.”
But high schools award bonus points – in some states, like Virginia, it’s mandatory – and that’s why many students take AP, to pad their transcripts.
A 2005 study found that AP students are “…generally no more likely than non-AP students to return to school for a second year or to have higher first semester grades.” Moreover, the study authors concluded that “close inspection of the [College Board] studies cited reveals that the existing evidence regarding the benefits of AP experience is questionable,” and “AP courses are not a necessary component of a rigorous curriculum.”
A 2006 MIT faculty report noted ““there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years earlier, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard.” A Dartmouth study found that high scores on AP psychology tests do NOT translate into college readiness for the next-level course.
Students readily admit why AP is important to them: “You’re not trying to get educated; you’re trying to look good;” and, “The focus is on the test and not necessarily on the fundamental knowledge of the material.” Students know that AP is far more about gaming the college acceptance process than it is learning.
Even more perversely, the College Board –– which also produces the PSAT and SAT and helped to create the Common Core, and says all of its products are “aligned” with the Common Core –– now recommends that schools “implement grade-weighting policies…starting as early as the sixth grade.” The SIXTH grade! And people still take them seriously.
I’ve said this before. It bears repeating. We’ve lost our way. The emphasis – the focal point – of public schooling in a democratic republic is not – and should not be – standardized test scores. Nor should it be STEM. Or the “competitive global market.” Or “college readiness.”
It ought to be the development of democratic citizenship.
We could use a healthy dose of it.
Meanwhile, we bear witness to what is going on in Wisconsin, and Michigan and North Carolina, especially the election fraud playing out in the 9th district of that state. Newly-elected Democrats in the House of Representatives want to repair damage done to the Voting Rights Act by Supreme Court conservatives. Republicans in the Senate say the idea is dead-on-arrival, with South Carolinian Lindsey Grahams saying “States run elections. Let’s keep it that way,” Um…Southern states – especially – have a poor, poor history of protecting voting rights. And the person in the White House doesn’t believe US intelligence agency findings on the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, doesn’t believe US scientists – or scientists around the world – on their conclusions about climate change, and still hasn’t come clean about his conspiracy with Russia and his obstruction of justice, or his bone-seep corruption, nor will he until he’s made to.
Interesting times.
Time for a change.
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Bien dicho, democracy!
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