Remember when David Coleman, architect of Common Core and then president of the College Board, claimed that the adoption of the Common Core would increase equity and raise test scores for all, especially those farthest behind? Remember, after he took control of the College Board, when he redesigned the SAT and said the New SAT would promote equity? None of that happened.
More students are taking the SAT (good for the College Board’s bottom line), which tends to depress test scores as non-traditional students sign on. But, contrary to Coleman’s assurances, the gaps between groups are growing, not shrinking.
STUDENTS’ SAT SCORES DECLINE: More than 2.2 million students in the class of 2019 took the college readiness exam, but the test also showed a decrease in average scores, the College Board reported today. The percentage of students passing benchmarks that can be indicators of whether they will successfully complete college coursework also decreased.
— The number of students who took the test increased by 4 percent compared with last year’s class, though the average score decreased by 9 points. This year’s average score was 1059 compared with 1068 in 2018. A perfect score is 1600.
— The percent of test takers who met or exceeded both the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing and Math benchmarks also decreased 2 percentage points, from 47 percent in 2018 to 45 percent. Bianca Quilantan has more.”
Behind these numbers was another story: the increase in gaps between different demographic groups of students.
FairTest reports:
FairTest
National Center for Fair & Open Testing
for further information:
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
mobile (239) 699-0468
SAT SCORE GAPS BETWEEN DEMOGRAPHIC GROUPS GROWS LARGER;
TEST REMAINS A CLEARER MEASURE OF FAMILY BACKGROUND
THAN HIGHER EDUCATION READINESS
1,050+ COLLEGES, UNIVERSITIES NOW DO NOT REQUIRE SAT OR ACT SCORES
SAT score gaps between demographic groups grew even larger for the high school class of 2019, according to an analysis by FairTest, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing. The nonprofit organization compared new exam results for this year’s graduates with those from 2018.
“Whether broken down by test-takers’ race, parental education or household income, average SAT scores of students from historically disenfranchised groups fell further behind their classmates from more privileged families,” explained Robert Schaeffer, FairTest’s Public Education Director. “That means access to colleges and financial aid will be even more skewed at schools that still rely on test scores to make admissions and tuition award decisions.”
Schaeffer continued, “The SAT remains a more accurate measure of a test-taker’s family background than of an applicant’s capacity to do college level work. No wonder nearly 40% of all four-year colleges and universities in the country are now test-optional. They recognize that standardized exam requirements undermine diversity without improving educational quality”
More than 1,050 accredited, bachelor-degree institutions now will evaluate all or many applicants without regard to test scores. FairTest’s test-optional database includes more than half of all “Top 100” liberal arts colleges. Upwards of 360 schools ranked in the top tiers of their categories by U.S. News & World Report no longer require the SAT or ACT.
– – 3 0 – –
– See 2019 SAT Scores by gender, ethnicity and parental education below
– Comprehensive free directory of 1,050+ test-optional and test-flexible colleges and universities:
http://fairtest.org/university/optional
– List of 360+ schools that de-emphasize ACT/SAT scores ranked in U.S News’ top tiers
http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/Optional-Schools-in-U.S.News-Top-Tiers.pdf
– Chronology of higher education institutions dropping admissions testing requirements
http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/Optional-Growth-Chronology.pdf
2019 COLLEGE-BOUND SENIORS SCORES ON “REDESIGNED” SAT
with comparisons to 2018 College-Bound Seniors Scores
(2,220,087 Test-Takers in 2019 Graduating Class up 3.9% from Class of 2018)
READING/ MATH TOTAL*
WRITING
ALL TEST-TAKERS 531 (- 4) 528 (- 3) 1059 (- 9)
Female 534 ( -5) 519 ( -3) 1053 (- 8)
Male 529 ( -5) 537 ( -5) 1066 (-10)
Amer. Indian or Alaskan Native 461 (-19) 451 (-18) 912 (-37)
Asian, Asian Amer. or Pacific Islander 586 (- 2) 637 (+ 2) 1223 ( 0)
Black or African American 476 (- 7) 457 (- 6) 933 (-13)
Hispanic, Latino or Latin American 495 (- 6) 483 (- 6) 978 (-12)
Two or more races 554 (- 4) 540 (- 3) 1095 (- 6)
White 562 (- 4) 553 (- 4) 1114 (- 9)
2019 COLLEGE-BOUND SENIORS SAT SCORES BY PARENTAL EDUCATION
READING/ MATH TOTAL*
WRITING
No High School Diploma 464 (- 9) 462 (- 9) 926 (-18)
High School Diploma 500 (- 7) 490 (- 7) 989 (-16)
Associate Degree 519 (- 7) 508 (- 5) 1027 (-12)
Bachelor’s Degree 561 (- 5) 560 (- 3) 1121 (- 8)
Graduate Degree 596 (- 3) 598 ( 0) 1194 (- 3)
2019 COLLEGE-BOUND SENIORS SAT SCORES BY SAT FEE WAIVER STATUS
READING/ MATH TOTAL*
WRITING
Used at Any Point 499 (- 2) 488 (- 1) 987 (- 3)
Did Not Use 539 (- 6) 537 (- 6) 1076 (-12)
* scores do not add precisely due to College Board rounding
Calculated by FairTest from: College Board, 2019 SAT Suite of Assessments Annual Report: Total Group
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The College Board has built an empire of standardization that has been accepted too long. SAT scores do not predict “college and career readiness.” High school grades are a better predictor of college performance. Even though men tend to score a little higher than women on the SAT, women tend to do better than men in college. There is really no need for the College Board gatekeepers. It is another flawed, money making, archaic assumption.
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“Even though men tend to score a little higher than women on the SAT, women tend to do better than men in college.”
Well, as David Coleman would argue, that’s just because men have already proved that they are smarter in high school and no longer feel the need.
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The same David Coleman who tried to use the Florida high school massacre to promote AP
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And all the other members of the College Board are little better because they did not DEMAND Coleman’s ouster after what he said.
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Coleman doesn’t know squat. He just likes to push his weight around to prove to himself he is worth something.
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Yvonne,
I agree, but would only add that he also likes to collect millions of dollars for his personal bank account (as salary and bonuses) at the expense of American families.
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“The College Board has built an empire of standardization” – can you blame them? If the federal government does not want to introduce standards, the only hope to get ANY standard is a monopoly of a private business. The government cannot even agree on the same electric plug for electric cars for crying out loud, not even mentioning a single standard for a removable battery, which is why Tesla builds its own chargers. Sadly, unless there is an existential threat, there will be no federal standards. Northern States’ railroads converted to standard gauge only because break of gauge was hindering the ability to move goods and weapons efficiently.
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Your posts inspired a longish response, so I put it under general posts rather than ‘reply’ to get more margin space. Pls scroll to 9/26.
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My daughter did not believe me a few years ago when I told her that she didn’t have to take SAT, AP or ACT to get into a college. She decided to listen to her teachers who were pushing all this College and Career readiness crap and the tests (Yes…..the teachers were telling kids this!!). After going on college visits and hearing that none of her desired college choices were interested in looking at the scores, she is finally realizing that the whole education “industry” is a scam. All of this AFTER she made us pay for 2 SAT exams, 2 AP exams and 1 ACT exam…..that’s about $500 we could have saved for college. Kids are gullible and they don’t want to listen to their parents, but they will believe the gloom and doom from their teachers that if they don’t take the tests they will become nothing in the world but a failure without a college education. Quite frankly, I’m beginning to believe that the whole college education thing is a big scam for most kids.
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and the testing is such an EXPENSIVE scam — otherwise it would not exist
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Your son, however, would be well advised to take the exams. While males get uniformly lower grades stating early in elementary school, they do get equivalent standardized test scores.
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The tests are a scam….and we avoid them when possible.
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“Achievement gap” should always be in quotes and followed by “[sic]”. It’s a test score gap, which has nothing to do with achievement. To the extent it “measures” [sic] anything, it’s opportunity in terms of the student’s household income and parental education, etc.
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Thank you.
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Good Point!
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The College Board changes their SAT more than an octopus changes it’s coloration when stalking it’s prey.
It’s totally meaningless to compare their test scores over time.
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Or any time, for that matter
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The entire thing is a gigantic money making venture.
They make money on SAT and AP tests, of course.
But they also make money every time your child wants to apply for financial aid at a college because the College Board family financial data is required for that purpose, for a fee, of course.
And if you ever want to know why you get so much junk mail to your sons and daughters from every Tom Dick and Harry College in the US, you need look no further than College Board, which sells the data to colleges and universities.
With a billion dollar yearly revenue stream, they get us all coming and going , but are nonetheless categorized as a nonprofit.
Of course, the way they maintain the latter charade is to pay their numerous executives exorbitant salaries to eat up the profits they are making every year on you and me.
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I told my daughter not to click on the box to receive all the information from colleges, but her teachers had her convinced that if she didn’t, she wouldn’t be looked at by any colleges. All of these have gone into the recycling bin! Many of these mailings were custom printed with her name. How many trees were killed for this over marketing? My eco friendly daughter now realizes her mistake.
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It’s time to break up College Board along with the tech monopolies.
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It’s long past time that we shattered them into a million pieces so they have no chance of reassembling themselves.
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This is off-topic, but I would like to share that I received an opt-out notice from the DOE, regarding charter school mailings. I only left a message for the DOE charter office years ago, complaining about how I did not want charter schools getting my child’s information, but just signed the opt-out papers last week. It was only my older child’s name that was being “sold”.
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This is the predictable result of a fundamental coding error in our national educational software. We are trying to teach all-purpose skills (like “finding the main idea”) that do not exist. E.D. Hirsch is right: we must teach knowledge instead. That is the true font of literacy.
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A superb metaphor, Ponderosa! Dead on.
We must teach both what and how. Descriptive and procedural knowledge.
And we would do well to banish, as leading to utter inanity, vagueness, and puffery, the term “skills” from educational discourse.
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Compare: We’re going to practice our “inferencing skills” to “we are going to learn a set of procedures for potentially falsifying a generalization.”
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Bob,
I know you’re on the same page as me, but I do think you’re off in suggesting kids learn “a set of procedures for potentially falsifying a generalization”. This kind of talk perpetuates the idea that there are general thinking skills that ought to be taught, it seems to me. Do I possess and use a “set of procedures for potentially falsifying a generalization” when I encounter a generalization? No way. My brain just automatically sizes it up to the best of its knowledge. Give kids knowledge and they’ll be better able to discern truth from falsehood. There is no formal skill for doing this.
I agree we have to banish the term “skills”. It is used so sloppily. What exactly do we mean? Where exactly in the brain do these “skills” reside? No one can say. Is there a Joke Comprehension Skill that we can teach? Of course not. Joke comprehension demands particular knowledge. It is the same with reading comprehension. There is no Reading Comprehension Skill we can teach. We can only teach knowledge. This is what enables us to comprehend. Educators live in Fuzzylandia.
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specific procedures, Ponderosa. Hypothesis testing. Sampling. Those can be taught. The problem is in talking in terms of skills rather than in terms of procedural knowledge, which differs from descriptive knowledge. To plane a piece of wood, you have to know what grain is (descriptive knowledge) and to plane in the direction of the grain (procedural knowledge).
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Show me an “educator” committed to “teaching skills,” and I will show you someone who probably does not, himself or herself, read much and is probably pretty ignorant. What a scam this has all been, for a long, long time. I wish I had a dime for every model lesson or teacher training I’ve sat through that encouraged instruction from which the students would leave knowing NOTHING that they didn’t know to begin with.
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“But they’re practicing their [insert vague term here] skills!!!” Imagine eating with no food–just making the motions of eating. LMAO. It’s so ridiculous.
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And to fly a plane, you have to build it before you get in the air, which the deformers never learned.
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And besides, The rain in Spain stays mainly on their brain.
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I’m all for teaching procedural knowledge –but domain specific procedural knowledge, not generic procedural knowledge. Teach how to orient a board when planing, but not the skill of Doing Stuff Right. Teach how to solve two-variable equations but not Problem Solving.. You’re right: we reify too much. We give something a name (e.g. complex text reading skill) and think ipso facto that it is a thing. Just because it has a name doesn’t mean it’s a thing. Let’s start teaching real things.
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Recently went to curriculum night at my son’s middle school. Very little talk about the substantive knowledge that will be taught. Most of the time was spent trying to explain “mastery based learning” in completely incomprehensible jargon-speak. Parents could not have looked more depressed.
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Had I been there, I would have insistently asked, “But what is he learning? Not how, but what?”
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I should have brought you.
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No, this a predictable result of the absence of federal standards.
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Common Core Is the closest we will ever come to federal standards.
How did that work out?
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CC was a one-time thing to legitimize 1990s math programs. It is a smoke-and-mirrors operation. Were it a proper federal program, it would be kept updated and would be consistently improved. Well, at least it should have been, like all other countries do. Japan rehashes its education program once in a decade just to not become stagnated. Finland does too, but it went too far this time with project-based learning.
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One-time? Common Core was adopted by 45 states, that proceeded to spend billions of dollars changing tests, textbooks, teacher training, etc. It lives.
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But it is not being developed further. Unless you consider NGSS part of CC. Still, it feels like it is in maintenance mode at best.
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Originally, the idea was that such tests would help break the barrier of privilege, would allow talented persons not from privileged backgrounds to prove that they had the right stuff. That still seems a somewhat laudable goal, and for that reason, I can see the value that such tests might have to some few IF THEY WERE OPTIONAL. However, even there, there are issues. The first is that the current test–the Common Cored one–is a joke, a nightmare–full of the same sorts of absurd, twisted, convoluted Common [sic] Core [sic] questions that one finds, these days, on state tests. The second is that if too many kids and schools take the tests to establish admission worthiness, we end up with a situation like that which we have today, in which the test is a measure of a) the parents’ socioeconomic status and b) the family’s ZIP code. The third is that the tests are not broad and deep enough to capture the range and depth of relevant talent, knowledge, and accomplishment. The fourth is that the tests have never been better than high-school grades at predicting long-term college success. The fifth is that the College Board itself has never been able to make the case that the test validly measures either aptitude (the claim they started out making) or accomplishment (the claim they replaced that one with, before discarding it as well in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary).
They keep resurrecting this vampire test. Put a stake in it.
And in Coleman’s puerile Common [sic] Core [sic]–that regressive/backward, vague, confused, alternately absurdly general or absurdly specific, uninformed, incomplete bullet list of which, amusingly, given its quality, Coleman is said to be the “architect.” Look, Ma, a box made of Popsicle sticks. I’m an architect!!!
A box made of Popsicle sticks would be a far, far more impressive accomplishment than is the moronic Gates/Coleman bullet list.
Dear David: You should rename your Common [sic] Core [sic] version of the SAT the Senseless Common Core Arbitrary Answer Test, or SCCAAT.
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“Originally, the idea was that such tests would help break the barrier of privilege, would allow talented persons not from privileged backgrounds to prove that they had the right stuff.”
Very true. This was a part of reform Darwinism, the idea that the competition that produced the fittest from the population should allow for the real cream to rise to the top. The test was supposed to give us the real cream. Not unlike the hope for the technology of TV (Sesame Street), the hope for testing to be the answer to egalitarian dreams was dashed in the last 20 years. Soon someone will suggest the same for personalized learning (that has already happened, I believe) and just as soon the dream will be dashed.
Do we expect income equality will do any better?
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Under the current system, a lot of extremely useful (to everyone else) stuff is greatly undervalued (teaching, nursing, caring for the elderly, making up beds in hotels) and a lot of not-so-useful stuff (planning a marketing strategy, figuring out how to pay less of the medical costs of people insured by one’s company) is greatly overvalued.
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“Do we expect income equality will do any better?” I was following you every step of the way until this closer. Not sure what you mean here. From your posts, I know you cannot mean that our current gross rich-poor gap has no impact on opportunity/ achievement. Perhaps you mean, programs such as Yang’s proposed $12k/yr stipend wouldn’t change things? (But surely it might, even if just providing stable shelter for currently homeless families, which would help their kids, schooling-wise). Or—my mind is wandering to ‘70’s consensus among US liberals that Scandinavia’s broad safety-nets/ jobs programs removed incentives to achieve, created disaffected, alienated youths?… Please elucidate.
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Today an intelligent & healthily skeptical mom of a 12th grader told me that SAT is needed to override the biased ‘grading’ [by admissions screeners] of individual schools. She says that despite the boost given to their middle-class NJ district [Edison] by highly-motivated, high-scoring S Asians, the school is ‘graded’ on an average, & theirs has no hopes of competing with e.g., Westfield‘s or W Windsor [Princeton area]’s high-income, virtually lily-white districts in the eyes of Princeton or ‘even’ Rutgers… She may have a point. Selective colleges focus admissions efforts on finding highly-qualified low-SES kids, & lean on high-income districts for both achievement & ability to pay. What happens to truly qualified students from middle-class sch districts, who may be dinged if their high GPA is from a mediocre school district? [My sense personally is that she’s leaning too heavily toward big-name uni’s w/astronomical prices! Her kid will probably major in chem &/or math, but has high ability in humanities as well… I keep trying to tell her to cast a wider net…]
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The percentage of students passing benchmarks that can be indicators of whether they will successfully complete college coursework also decreased.
“can be indicators”… and then again those benchmarks hide a lot of assumptions about the intended course of study or major for students. For fine arts majors, the “indicators of choice” are probably grades in high school art courses and a digital portfolio of your work. And then there is the other issue of the number and kinds of art courses available in the school or schools you attend, and that depends a lot on the size of the school and where you live.
The favorite indicator for Bill Gates is Algebra 2.
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Re: the growing achievement gap.
As we substitute “literacy” skill lessons for history and science content in elementary schools, we’re depriving disadvantaged kids of the world/word knowledge that makes for true literacy. Upper class kids get this knowledge at home. This exacerbates the achievement gap. The solution is, as E.D. Hirsch points out, is to make knowledge transmission the focus of school. France had this before 1990 and the achievement gap shrank. When France shifted to a “skills” focus, the achievement gap grew.
Another culprit in the growing achievement gap is the turn toward inquiry/discovery learning as opposed to direct instruction. Research demonstrates that inquiry widens the achievement gap because the top students are much more likely to get something out of it, while the weaker students often get nothing out of it. In fact one study shows LOSS of learning in these students when given inquiry instruction. NGSS firmly embraces inquiry. This is a disaster for our struggling students.
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Remember A Nation at Risk? Remember the Sandia report? Few remember it. It is in Wikipedia: When the systems scientists broke down the SAT test scores into subgroups they discovered contradictory data. While the overall average scores declined, the subgroups of students increased. In statistics this is known as Simpson’s paradox.
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We here often reference both ‘A Nation at Risk’ & Sandia Labs’ critique. And remember how ‘A Nation at Risk’ ‘s stats were warped by Simpson’s Paradox, so that what was actually incremental improvement in all subgroups appeared to be declining overall achievement, because the increasing participation of minorities/ poor wasn’t factored into the average. Just wondering what’s your point – how does this connect to the discussion?
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Although it is quite fair to whinge about ETS/College Board I cringe at what I’m currently seeing in high schools; trends that those who are not current educators have no inkling of.
Our current generation of students are cell phone addicts; devices that are literally altering students’ brain structures and it’s not turning out well. The last couple years’ classes of high school freshmen I’ve seen are borderline dysfunctional.
Likewise, any high school student in Colorado, California, Washington and a number of other states can score vape canisters with THC concentrations ten times higher than anything people smoked back in the 60’s and 70’s. We’re currently raising an entire generation of dysfunctional drug addicts.
And no one is talking about it…
Say what you want about the suitability of the SAT, ACT and other exams, but the trends in annual scores are going to be severely negative for the foreseeable future.
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I don’t know, maybe I’m minimizing things, but could it be any worse than the ’60’s when I was in hisch? Everyone was vegging out on TV [which replaced the telephone mania of ’50’s kids] 6-8 hrs/day; the adventurous among the hi-IQ types were stoned on pot during class & experimenting off-hrs w/ LSD & mescaline, while the jock crowd scored so many alcoholics via beer that they were already showing up at my sryr CCD classes warning about the dangers of alcohol addiction?
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Left Back, Diane’s history of US education, shows that it’s been a sh**show for a long time in our beloved schools. Bad ideas abound, and crowd out good ideas. However E.D. Hirsch calls the Fifties the “Silver Age” of American education (there was no Golden Age, he concedes).
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My ‘50’s school experience was Golden Age. I attended our village’s ca.1823 one-room schoolhouse (complete w/rope-pull bell in belfry}: 30 kids total in 1st-3rd. For 4th-6th we joined the next, larger village’s elemsch, a 1921 bldg w/ample grounds: 3 large classrooms [2 grades in each] & a small gym, in a nbhd surrounded by Cornell’s Botanic Gardens. [They eventually bought the sch bldg & made it the Gardens’ hdqtrs.] There were many traditional elements– even some decades-old grammar primers– veteran teachers, & the open-school sort of methods reqd when you’re teaching 2-3 grades at once.
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In response to BA’s 9/25 7:44pm et al posts:
Learning standards aren’t parallel to standards for a plug or a battery. Those examples are particularly different, as they’re about standardization for purposes of efficient manufacture. But govt doesn’t ‘agree on’ & issue stds for mfg in any event; it has no monopoly on the knowledge and experience reqd. Stdzn for purposes of efficiency evolves as needed. Many mfd prods are not suited for stdzn, as applications differ & customization is reqd. In other cases, natl stdzn would stifle innovation. Industry stds are developed by natl ind orgs through suggestion, trial, input, feedback, modification etc. The govt steps in w/regs where there’s an impact on natl safety, health, security. Govt involvement in setting [what became] std RR track gauge was pursuant to its funding of the midwest-Pacific run, & already in use in the Northeast. Southerners jumped on last at end of Civil War.
Private enterprise funded the devpt of uniform natl ed stds ‘90’s-‘00’s not because there was some natl void dictating the need for monopolies to step in. It was done w/an eye to capturing a publicly-funded market for sw/hw/testing matls, i.e. the ed-industry prods consequent to ‘natl stds.’ The fed govt opened the gates [pun intended] by spuriously claiming a ‘natl security’ need via the ‘80’s report entitled “A Nation at Risk”—based on stats that were thoroughly debunked by the independent researcher hired by govt to analyze the report—but industry monopolies [primarily MS] were already involved in ed-stdzn devpt, & lobbied the govt to repress those results for a decade.
Let’s not confuse natl ed stds in other countries w/those devpd here for testing alignment [CCSS & its state-tweaked variants, the basis for SAT/ ACT – used virtually everywhere in the US]. We are unique in these ‘ed-accountability systems’ geared to computer-testable skill-bytes. Euro/ Scand countries’ natl ed stds are open-ended frameworks much like pre-CCSS stds in longtime top-achieving states here.
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“In other cases, natl stdzn would stifle innovation” — you sound like a typical Ayn Rand supporter. Standardization is good. If every beer company used the same bottle, we could return them for cleanup and refill instead of breaking them into pieces. This is what a dozen of Oregon breweries are actually trying — standardizing on the same beer bottle. This is what countries like Russia had all along. It was not poverty, it was efficiency: reuse instead of recycling. Now they have switched to disposable plastic, and they are about to haul trash from Moscow to Far North to dump it, they cannot dump it in the ocean like this country does, after China stopped accepting American plastic junk. Standards for TV, gasoline, voltage, sheetrock, they are important part of interoperation and reuse and efficiency.
Educational standards are also meant for interoperation and reuse and efficiency: you go to 6th grade in one city, then you move to another city, or even another state, or even another country, and you continue from where you left. You know what you are going to learn now, next month, next year, all the way for 12 years ahead. You can get a textbook which will be 100% aligned with the curriculum. When you apply to university you know what they will be expecting. Yes, it is more like an assembly line and less like old-school Greek-style schools. We cannot educate 7 billion people using Greek method, but we can make the conveyor line more user-friendly.
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One can standardize mechanical objects and things. Not people.
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““In other cases, natl stdzn would stifle innovation” — you sound like a typical Ayn Rand supporter.” ROFLMAO. Nope, just your std flaming lib suppporter of regulated capitalism, which should be obvious from my criticism of unreg-monopoly devpt of unsuitable ed stds. But I do have some experience in the engrg/ mfg field. “In other cases” means what it says: just as some applications require custom-engrg rather than stdzn, some have many possible approaches whose potential would be untried if pre-ordained by govt. Your Oregon bottling example illustrates my “Stdzn for purposes of efficiency evolves as needed.” I’d much rather have it that way—innovations devpd/ trialed in a region, then catching on elsewhere [as also w/std gauge track] than depend on the whims of a dictatorship to get it right for everybody “all along.”
Diane points out that people aren’t widgets, & you’re generalizing even engrg/mfg from a ‘widget’ point of view. In properly-regulated capitalism, widget stdzn happens when it makes good market sense, w/n govt limits imposed by safety/ health/ natl-security concerns. I think devpt of ed stds & practices—in a country that actually prizes & funds public education appropriately—should resemble what we see in the engrg disciplines: done by natl professional orgs through suggestion, trial, input, feedback, modification etc.
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I think BA has a point. I’m grateful there are statewide history standards here in CA. Kids who transfer to my school have had roughly the same exposure to history as kids from my district. Yet having standards doesn’t guarantee that schools will take advantage of their potential. There is still so much wasteful reinventing the wheel. Over the past 16 years I’ve built up a history curriculum mostly from scratch (I have adapted a few off-the-shelf lessons). This has taken thousands and thousands hours of off-the-clock labor that might have been devoted to giving better feedback on student assignments, etc. Yet there are thousands of other teachers in CA teaching the exact same subject with the exact same standards. Where are their lessons? Well, some are on the Internet, but it’s disorganized and there’s no quality control there. Would you trust a cookbook written by a bunch of random cooks? Why aren’t we systematically seeking out and testing promising lessons from across the state and then disseminating the best ones, and making a kit of these proven, excellent lessons to hand to new teachers? Part of the reason is county offices of education don’t care about history –it’s all about ELA and math. But I don’t think that’s the sole culprit.
BA: we DO have de facto national standards: Common Core and NGSS. But they’re horrible standards, inducing horrible “skills” teaching instead of knowledge teaching. You must admit that anarchy is better than this toxic order.
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BA wants the federal government to set mandatory standards. Under Betsy DeVos.
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“I’d much rather have it that way—innovations devpd/ trialed in a region, then catching on elsewhere [as also w/std gauge track] than depend on the whims of a dictatorship to get it right for everybody “all along.”” — well, I would rather have a single national bottle standard, or even a world bottle standard, say 0.25, 0.33, 0.5, 0.7, 1.0, 1.25, 1.5, 2.0. A special Coca-Cola bottle with a waistline is a waste. And yes, this is where government can have its say: everyone uses the same bottles, they are collected, washed and reused. Call it a dictatorship, but it simply makes sense. Traditional capitalism is wasteful and it already have brought the planet to the brink of collapse.
ponderosa, CC and NGSS are crappy standards. In the ideal world they would be improved, and not by administrators, but by actual professors of mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, etc. No, I am against anarchy. Chicago school district just assigned $135K for its own math curriculum, which they either develop in-house or purchase (I bet they will purchase it). Either way, the free EgageNY curriculum for some reason did not suit them. This is waste, happening every day in every school. There is no point spending so much money on education, it all being eaten by incessant pointless reinventing the wheel.
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Please name some human activity that is standardized by the federal government, not a mechanical process for inanimate objects.
The DeVos standards for history and science?
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Ponderosa, I certainly like the idea of a pamphlet of promising lesson plans made available to new teachers. That’s in the context of the 2016 history-soc studies CA state stds, which you’ve trialed & found useful.
CA’s sure look a lot better than ours in NJ (devpd 2009, minor changes 2014). I can’t imagine how teachers figure out what content to teach, or when. To this layman the NJ soc stud stds appear to be an indecipherable matrix of competing skills-topic threads—mostly current– headlined by a series of questions that grad students in history/ econ might ponder after 16 yrs of studying content. [Supposedly there’s a Soc Stud Timeframe Table but believe it or not, not linked, and ungooglable…]
I suppose in the absence of decent state stds—which is typical for ELA anyway [based most everywhere on CCSS]– &, I gather, Science [NGSS]—one is left to devise good lessons based on whatever textbook is assigned. Those w/your level of experience can do much better (w/1000s hrs’ work over yrs), & your lessons should absolutely be made available in such pamphlets.
The idea is such a no-brainer: teachers w/differing strengths & styles would contribute, giving newbies a chance to try their hand at different approaches. Such a thing should be organized by one of the natl prof’l soc stud orgs I see referenced in the NJ soc stud stds. Shouldn’t that be what they’re all about? But apparently they’re all in w/the skills-stds craze…
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“headlined by a series of questions that grad students in history/ econ might ponder after 16 yrs of studying content” –well-put!
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The SAT is set up so that only a certain proportion of test takers can ever score at any particular location under the bell curve. So, if family wealth is correlated with SAT scores, and if family is becoming more, not less, concentrated, as well as becoming concentrated among wealthier white families, then we shouldn’t be surprised to find that the performance gap has gotten wider. Only about 10-15% of SAT test takers can ever do well by the standards commonly assumed in these discussions, so let’s stop talking about ever closing the achievement gap. It cannot be closed— by definition and because wealth is skewed and by and large white. Please let’s stop talking about changing something that cannot be changed. It’s intellectually dishonest to talk about fixing the achievement gap as defined by SAT scores.
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Steve,
Does it seem to you that France has lessons for us about narrowing the achievement gap?
And are you familiar with the research that shows inquiry learning (central to NGSS and the new CA history framework) widens the achievement gap?
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Ponderosa
I don’t know much about the French system.
As for inquiry learning, please see the impressive results of the New York Performance Standards Consortium high schools.
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Steve,
NYPSC’s higher graduation rates and graduates’ increased college attendance are certainly promising signs. However I’d need to know more details about the curriculum of both NYPSC schools and conventional NYC schools to be able to say this validates inquiry. Does NYPSC supplement inquiry with strong direct instruction? Do conventional schools, with their poor results, also use inquiry?
I’d also like to know if NYPSC schools benefit from stealth cherry-picking? I.e. do the most difficult and disruptive students for some reason not attend these schools? Thus these promising results might not stem from use of inquiry at all.
Higher graduation rates might just mean the performance-based assessments are easier to pass. I wonder NYPSC graduates do on conventional measures of academic ability (e.g. NAEP).
And even if NYPSC students learn more than those in conventional NYC schools (presumably saddled with wretched Common Core test prep curriculum), that may be an extremely low bar. Compared to a direct-instruction-based knowledge-centric school, NYPSC students might appear to be getting a deficient education.
If you read the Kirschner paper (http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/kirschner_Sweller_Clark.pdf), you’ll find lots of studies that show the DI beats inquiry, especially with novice and intermediate learners. You’ll also find new cognitive science that explains why these learners often learn much less through inquiry than fully-guided instruction.
France had a knowledge-centric curriculum prior to 1990. During this time, French schools shrank the achievement gap. Then France American-ized its curriculum, shifting to a focus on “teaching skills” rather than content. Since then French schools have been widening the achievement gap for kids as they proceed through the schools.
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Ponderosa
Serious and thoughtful questions about a topic that deserves a lot of attention. Too bad we have a SED that seems like a subsidiary of for-profit education companies rather than leaders of public education.
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