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Peter Greene: Why You Should Not Get Excited About the Latest SAT Scores

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2018 //
25

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.”

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

POLITICO: SAT Fails to Narrow the Achievement Gap

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2018 //
113

In 2012, after creating and launching the Common Core, David Coleman accepted the leadership of the College Board, which is in charge of the SAT. At that time, his compensation package was about $750,000. That’s a good starting salary.

The SAT was reconfigured to match the Common Core, and now the results are in. A barely perceptible rise in scores, and the achievement gap remains static. How many billions did that cost Bill Gates and taxpayers? Coleman says that the point of the SAT is “not higher scores” but “the opportunity [for students] to own their future.”

Politico reports:

SAT SCORES RISE, AS DO THE NUMBERS OF TEST-TAKERS: High school students did slightly better on the SAT this year compared with last year, but more than half still aren’t considered ready for college-level courses, according to the College Board’s annual look at student performance and participation on the test. Caitlin Emma has the full story.

— The average score on the test was 1,068, out of of 1,600, compared with 1,060 last year. About 47 percent of students this year scored well enough on math and English that the College Board deemed them prepared for entry-level college courses, compared with 46 percent last year. The College Board considers a college-ready score in English to be a 480 or higher out of 800. In math, it’s a 530 or higher. Seventy percent of all test takers hit that benchmark in English, compared with 49 percent in math.

— Racial achievement gaps persist. This year, just 21 percent of African-American students and 31 percent of Hispanic/Latino students hit both benchmarks in math and English, compared with 59 percent of white students. Those figures were also about the same last year.

— But College Board leaders say recent changes to the test and prep are meant to address inequity. The SAT underwent a major redesign in an effort to make it more reflective of what students are actually learning in the classroom. The revamped test, which debuted in 2016, scrapped obscure vocabulary questions and focuses on evidence-based reading and writing, for example. The College Board has also worked to provide millions of students with free test prep materials through the company Khan Academy, to offset the advantage that wealthier students are able to gain through paid test prep. College Board also began piloting a digital SAT this year.

— “Five years ago, we made a promise to transform the SAT into a test that delivers opportunities,” College Board CEO David Coleman said in a statement. “We changed the test itself, upended the landscape of costly test prep by offering free, personalized practice for all, and propelled students forward with fee waivers and scholarship opportunities. What is at stake is not higher scores. It’s students having the opportunity to own their future.”

Categories Common Core, Testing

Are the PISA Education Tests Rigged?

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2018 //
13

There has long been concern that the PISA international tests are “fixed.” Years ago, Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution criticized PISA for ignoring the selection of Chinese students that are tested. Loveless pointed out that students in Shanghai are in no way representative of students in China.

In this article, Gary Sands reviews the problems of sampling from each country and how some countries can “rig” the samples, which invalidate the results.

Read the article for the details.

Sand concludes:

At face value, the PISA results appear to be a huge propaganda victory for the educational systems of Asians and the Chinese. But the real danger in widely circulating the PISA results lies not in fooling thousands of headline readers around the world, but in the complicit cover-up of the huge disparities in education among Asian provinces. Almost two-thirds of all Chinese children live in rural areas, where school attendance rates can be as low as 40%. A survey by the China Association for Science and Technology showed only 6.2% of the Chinese people held basic science literacy in 2015.

By allowing countries to potentially rig the test, the OECD is failing in its mandate to help governments foster prosperity by providing information. In the case of the bizarre B-S-J-G grouping, PISA administrators have again made another exception for China—just as many foreign businesses have been forced to do—in the hope that the nation will eventually play by the rules. Perhaps the OECD’s intention in allowing cities and groups of cities/regions to compete is to coax China and others into eventually releasing nationwide results.

But in so doing, the OECD is merely kowtowing to Beijing, acquiescing in the samples submitted by other countries and sending a message to our children that bending the rules is acceptable.

Categories International, Testing

SAT Adopts Khan Academy as Provider of SAT Test Prep

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2018 //
58

For years, I have read SAT reports about test results. What you always see is that student scores are correlated with family income. See here for some good graphs.

What I noticed this year for the first time was that the College Board (which administers the SAT) is promoting Khan Academy, a private venture funded by the Gates Foundation. The release says that students who got their SAT prep from Khan Academy got higher test scores. The partnership was revealed earlier this year. The courses are free.

In the past, SAT prep has been characterized by paid courses and the ordering of thick books to help students master word-comparison exercises and memorize the so-called “SAT words.” Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy provides online resources that are tailored to each student to help them pinpoint which skills they need to improve. As they practice over time, their study plan will evolve with them and help them level up to more challenging skills.

When I was in high school, we were told explicitly that coaching did not affect SAT scores. That has since been disproved and the College Board now encourages coaching and tells you where to get it.

Never forget that the College Board is a business, always looking for market share.

Categories Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Testing

John Thompson: The Negative Effects of Corporate Reform and Disinvestment in Education

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2018 //
12

John Thompson, historian and teacher, lives in Oklahoma.


The Oklahoma press is focusing on the state’s low level of college readiness as measured by the ACT test, 16 percent, in comparison to the national rate of 27 percent. The state known for dramatic cuts in education funding is ranked 19th in the nation with an average composite score of 19.3. But it is missing the big picture.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/education/college-readiness-rate-remains-level-in-oklahoma-s-second-year/article_f94e7779-4328-56b4-8b21-a1390a634d4b.html

The average ACT composite for my old school, Centennial, is 14.8, which is above average for the high-poverty neighborhood schools in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Even when we were ranked last in the state, our ACT scores were significantly higher. Since I retired, Centennial received a $5 million School Improvement Grant. I believe that its ACT decline is just one example of evidence explaining how and why tens of billions of dollars of corporate school reform drove meaningful learning out of many inner city schools.

The Latest ACT Scores for Public and Private High Schools

The important question is what caused the national decline. Retired PBS education reporter John Merrow argues these ACT-takers “have had 12 or 13 years of test-centric education, and the kids coming up behind them have also endured what the ‘school reformers’ designed.” He also asks, “How much more evidence do we need of the folly of ‘No Child Left Behind’ and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s ‘Race to the Top’ before we take back our schools?”

As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap…..

Since reformers sought to improve low-performing schools, it is significant that Merrow cites the ACT report on recent outcomes:

A higher percentage of students this year than in recent years fell to the bottom of the preparedness scale, showing little or no readiness for college coursework. Thirty-five percent of 2018 graduates met none of the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, up from 31% in 2014 and from 33% last year.

Click to access National-CCCR-2018.pdf

All types of researchers are contributing to the autopsies being performed on data-driven, competition-driven reform. And many of us are especially intrigued by the analyses of corporate school reformers on why test-driven accountability, the expansion of charter schools, and the quest to “build a better teacher” failed. The latest, by the Gates Foundation’s Tom Kane, is very illustrative. Kane acknowledges that media coverage has declared his “teacher quality” effort a failure, but he mostly blamed educators.

Develop and Validate — Then Scale

Kane is typical of many reformers who say the big mistake was rapidly scaling up their teacher evaluation and test-driven accountability models. Kane forgets, however, that he, Bill Gates, other venture philanthropists, and Arne Duncan were the ones who imposed the rapid scaling up of their untested hypotheses.

This leads to my hypothesis about the Tulsa Public Schools, which is led by corporate reformer Deborah Gist and a team of Broad Academy-trained administrators. It may offer a case study in the causes of the reform debacle. The TPS has the nation’s 7th lowest rate of student performance growth from 3rd to 8th grade.

Student growth: What’s the matter with Tulsa?

Tulsa has a lot of advantages due to the Kaiser Foundation’s science-based early education efforts, and it used to have better student outcomes than the OKCPS. Tulsa has received millions of dollars in funding for it value-added teacher evaluations, “personalized” learning, and other corporate reforms. The cornerstone of their approach was the termination and “counseling out” of experienced educators, and demanding compliance to their new model.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/education/tulsa-public-schools-teacher-evaluation-system-is-changing-culture-has/article_6be79be3-d934-5d4a-98ef-5ec90bcea9e9.html

Of course, no single piece of data can prove that Tulsa’s experiments failed for any single reason, but a new database created by ProPublica and Chalkbeat provides valuable new information. Their research shows that many of the biggest experiments, costing hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars and that were once proclaimed as successes, actually increased the achievement gap. Despite false claims to the contrary, many districts that committed to corporate reforms, and often claimed that they improved student performance, actually practiced mass suspensions of poor, black students. And there seems to be an unmistakable correlation between their commitment to teacher quality experiments and the increase of inexperienced teachers.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/10/16/chalkbeat-propublica-collaboration-education-inequity-data-miseducation/
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/newark/2018/10/16/in-newark-reporting-lapses-hide-thousands-of-student-suspensions-from-public-view/

So, how much of the decline in Oklahoma ACT scores is attributable to the top-down reforms funded by the federal government, Bill Gates, and other edu-philanthropists?

It doesn’t rise to the level of “proof,” but it is noteworthy that black TPS students are 2.2 years behind their white peers. That is .5 a year worse than the OKCPS gap. (And only 18 percent of TPS students took those college readiness tests, in contrast to the OKCPS where 29 percent took the ACT or SAT.)

https://projects.propublica.org/miseducation/district/4030240

Nearly a quarter of OKCPS teachers are categorized as inexperienced. The same percentage applies to Centennial, and whenever I visit my old school I hear more concerns about the ways that teacher turnover undermines school improvement.

Nearly 1/3rd of Tulsa teachers are inexperienced.

As more data arrives, we will be able to evaluate whether the multi-million Tulsa/Gates Foundation teacher quality initiative drove down the quality of teaching and learning. But this much is obvious. It is easier for competition-driven reformers to suspend poor students than it is for them to increase student learning.

And the “exiting” of large numbers of veteran educators was seen as a feature, as opposed to a flaw in their model. Now we know it is much easier to drive teachers out of the profession than it is to social-engineer better teachers.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Funding, Oklahoma, Testing

Bob Shepherd: The Six Hundred, a Riff on Tennyson

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2018 //
26

Our reader Bob Shepherd has his own blog. As you may have deduced, I’m just wild about Bob.

Here is a wonderful parody of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” who was writing about the British troops who blindly followed orders in the Battle of Balaclava in 1854 in the Crimean War and perished.

Bob calls it “The Coring of the Six Hundred.”

My generation memorized the Tennyson poem. Thanks to the Common Core, this generation will be lucky to encounter any poetry.

Here is the beginning. Open the link and read it all.

Row on row, row on row,

Row on row stationed

Sick at their monitors

Sat the six hundred.

“You may now type your Username”

Said the test proctor.

Set up for failure

Sat the six hundred.

“Enter your password key!

“Mercy upon you!

“During the testing

“No one can help you.”

Someone had blundered.

The unspoken truth. But

Theirs was not to make reply,

Theirs was not to reason why,

Theirs was but to do or die,

Theirs was but to try and cry.

Set up for failure

Sat the six hundred.

Text to the right of them

Complex, out of context,

Bubbles in front of them,

Plausible answers,

Tricky and tortured,

Boldly they bubbled and well

Though smack in the mouth of hell

Sat the six hundred.

This is what reading means,

Now that Gates/Pearson

Has reified testing

Far beyond reason.

Pearson not persons.

Plutocrats plundering

Taxpayer dollars

Spent to abuse.

The children are used.

They bubble and squirm

To reveal their stack ranking

And never again

Will know joy in learning

Never again

Humane joy in reading

And writing, no never again,

Not the six hundred.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Literature, Testing

John Merrow: What Have Our Test-Centric Policies Produced?

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2018 //
36

John Merrow hammers away at the folly of placing standardized testing at the center of all education.

The evidence of this folly, he says, is the latest ACT reports.

What can we learn from them?

Our seniors are not getting smarter as a result of the testing regime imposed on them.

“These seniors have had 12 or 13 years of test-centric education, and the kids coming up behind them have also endured what the ‘school reformers’ designed. How much more evidence do we need of the folly of “No Child Left Behind” and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” before we take back our schools?

“People who have consistently been ‘half right’ have been in charge of public education for too long. Now some are changing their tune (“Perhaps we have been testing too much,” they say) and asking for another chance. Others, however, are doubling down, calling for more charter schools, vouchers and other aid for private schools, and more anti-union initiatives. I say a plague on both their houses.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

ACT Math Scores Drop as Number of Test-Takers Decline

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2018 //
6

FairTest notes that the number of ACT test-takers d3clined.

FairTest
National Center for Fair & Open Testing

for further information:
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
cell (239) 699-0468
for use with annual ACT scores, Wednesday, October 17, 2018

NUMBER OF STUDENTS TAKING ACT DECLINES SHARPLY AS
MANY MORE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES DROP ADMISSIONS EXAMS;
1020+ SCHOOLS ARE NOW ACT/SAT-OPTIONAL;
K-12 “TEST-AND-PUNISH” POLICIES DID NOT HELP “COLLEGE READINESS”

The number of students taking the ACT college admissions exam plunged for the second year in a row, for the high school class of 2018. The decline — more than 175,000 or 8% over the two-year period — counters a long-term trend in which the ACT overtook the SAT in popularity, according to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) (http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/ACT-SAT-Annual-Test-Takers-Chart.pdf). FairTest Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer explained, “A portion of the drop-off likely stems from the rapid growth in students applying to test-optional colleges that do not require either the ACT or SAT.”

A FairTest analysis also reveals that average ACT scores within racial groups either dropped or stagnated over the past five years. Schaeffer concluded, “This provides additional evidence that K-12 test-and-punish policies pursued by the federal government and many states have not improved readiness for higher education, at least as measured by this exam.” Flat or declining scores have also been reported on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the SAT.

At the same time, a rapidly growing number of colleges and universities adopted policies to waive consideration of ACT/SAT scores for all or many applicants. A FairTest tally shows that more than 1020 bachelor-degree granting institutions are now test-optional (http://fairtest.org/university/optional). In the past five years, more than 130 schools eliminated or reduced their ACT and SAT exam requirements (http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/Optional-Growth-Chronology.pdf), a pace of one every two weeks. FairTest’s test-optional list now includes more than 320 colleges and universities ranked in the top tiers of their respective categories by U.S. News & World Report. (http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/Optional-Schools-in-U.S.News-Top-Tiers.pdf).

– – 3 0 – –

ACT ANNUAL HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS TESTING VOLUME
Class of 2015 1,924,436
Class of 2016 2,090,342
Class of 2017 2,030,038
Class of 2018 1,914,817

Source ACT, The Condition of College and Career Readiness 2015 – 2018
2018 COLLEGE-BOUND SENIORS AVERAGE ACT SCORE

Categories Testing

Peter Greene: Even Reformers Have Noticed the Failure of Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2018 //
23

Peter Greene has noticed that some of the leading reformers acknowledge disillusionment with the “Big Standardized Test.”

And yet we plod along, one foot in front of another, obeying a law that requires teachers to do what they know is wrong.

He cautions:

There is one critical lesson that ed reform testing apostates should keep in mind. The idea that the Big Standardized Test does not measure what it claims to measure, the idea that it actually does damage to schools, the idea that it simply isn’t what it claims to be– while these ideas are presented as new notions for ed reformers, classroom teachers have been raising these concerns for about 20 years.

Teachers have said, repeatedly, that the tests don’t measure what they claim to measure, and that the educational process in schools is being narrowed and weakened in order to focus on testing. Teachers have said, repeatedly, that the Big Standardized Tests are a waste of time and money and not helping students get an education. Teachers have been saying it over and over and over again. In return teachers have been told, “You are just afraid of accountability” and “These tests will finally keep you honest.”

After 20 years, folks are starting to figure out that teachers were actually correct. The Big Standardized Test is not helping, not working, and not measuring what it claims to measure. Teachers should probably not hold their collective breath waiting for an apology, though it is the generation of students subjected to test-centered schooling that deserve an apology. In the meantime, if ed reform thought leader policy wonk mavens learn one thing, let it be this– the next time you propose an Awesome idea for fixing schools and a whole bunch of professional educators tell you why your idea is not great, listen to them.

Reformers listen to teachers? What an idea! Don’t hold your breath.

Categories Accountability, Failure, Testing

Rochester Engages in a Community Read of Daniel Koretz’s Book, “The Testing Charade”

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2018 //
10

Rochester NY’s Coalition for Public Education, in collaboration with the University of Rochester, Writers & Books and the Rochester Teachers Association recently began a “community read” project using Daniel Koretz’s book, “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.” The project involves having as many community members as possible read the book and/or attending a presentation by Dan Koretz, and attending one or more of several discussion/problem-solving/action meetings to generate alternatives to high-stakes standardized testing to education policy-makers.

These are the key points that organizers of the Rochester Coalition for Public Education circulated to readers of the Koretz book:

FIVE CRITICAL POINTS FROM DANIEL KORETZ’S BOOK: “THE TESTING CHARADE: PRETENDING TO MAKE SCHOOLS BETTER”

 

  1. Education policy makers have created and implemented many non-research-based and harmful practices in the name of accountability, including the following:
  • Basing teacher evaluation scores, to a significant degree, on test scores of students who have significant variables in their lives that negatively impact their growth and development.
  • Holding English as Second Language students, who have little or no English language experience, accountable for passing standardized English exams, after only one year of learning English.
  • Using unreliable, invalid, non-field-tested standardized tests to hold students accountable,
  • Holding all students accountable for meeting grade-level expectations, when some students may not be developmentally ready or may be deprived of the resource help they need.
  • Punishing students, teachers & school communities, by labeling them as failures.

 

  1. High-stakes standardized test scores are often inflated for some of the following reasons:
    • Teachers focusing on “teaching-to-the-test,” rather than student interests and areas not often tested, like citizenship, music and current social problems,
    • Some students and/or teachers “cheat,”
    • Middle & upper class students may receive “paid” extra tutoring,
    • Some students are taught skills for more accurately guessing correctly.

 

  1. Standardized tests can have a useful role, if the following criteria were used more often:
    • Used for diagnostic vs. “high-stakes purposes,”
    • Test student sample populations vs. every student,
    • Set realistic, appropriate test score goals for individual students,
    • Use “performance-based” vs. memorize and regurgitate tasks,
    • Piloted for validity and reliability, before implemented,
    • Test what is important, and
    • Use human judgment as part of the process.

Koretz states: “ The problem is not tests. The problem is the misuse of tests. Tests can be a useful tool, but policymakers have demanded far more of them than is reasonable, and this has backfired. Used appropriately, standardized tests are a valuable source of information, sometimes an irreplaceable one. For example, how do we know that the achievement gap between minority and majority students has been slowly narrowing, while the gap between rich and poor students has been growing?”

 

  1. “Campbell’s Law,” generally states that whenever a socio-economic goal is reduced to a number, corruption and perversion of the process to attain that goal is inevitable. This phenomena is demonstrated in a number of ways, including: cheating, teaching to the test, ignoring student needs and interests, and creating invalid teacher evaluation systems that devalue the role of teacher judgment.

 

  1. The high-stakes standardized exam-driven, approach to school reform has been a huge failure. Koretz

states: “If you line up the effects of this approach, the answer is clear: It has been a failure. The improvements it has produced have been limited, and these are greatly outweighed by the serious damage it has done. Of course, in many places, improvements appeared to be big, but most often, this was just inflated test scores.”

HIGH-STAKES STANDARDIZED TESTING

DISCUSSION/PROBLEM-SOLVING/ACTION GROUP MEETINGS

 

  • October 11th, Thursday, 4:00-6:00 pm at Nazareth College, Golisano Academic Complex, Room 211, led by Professor Shawgi Tell
  • October 15th, Monday, 7:00-9:00 pm at St. John Fisher College, Mid-level Gateway Room, Basil Hall, led by Professor Jeffrey Liles
  • October 18th, Thursday, 7:00-9:00 pm at Writers & Books, 740 University Avenue, led by Rochester Coalition for Public Education Coordinator, Dan Drmacich
  • October 29th, Monday, 7:00-9:00 pm, at Pittsford Barnes & Noble, led by Howard Maffucci, former East Rochester Superintendent & current Monroe County Legislator
  • November 8th, Thursday, 3:45-4:45, LaChase Hall, Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education, University of Rochester, led by Professor David Hursh

 

Please go to our website www.roccoalitionforpubliceducation.com, to register to attend any of these discussion/problem-solving/action meetings. Our objective is to submit well thought-out proposals to our educational policy-makers for meaningful change in our current public school tests. Please get involved and bring your ideas and colleagues. You need not have read Koretz’s book to be involved, but we do encourage reading the first two and the last chapter of his book: The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=l6DK0B8PCqE

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Hoax, Research, Testing
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