SAT Adversity Score is an Antidote to Poison None of Us Need Take

May 27, 2019May 27, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Eugenics, Junk science, Learning, Politics, Poverty, President, privatization, Racism, School Funding, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Toxic Testing adversity score, college, college admissions, College Board, David Coleman, education, gatekeeper, high stakes testing, nonprofit, Profit, SAT, schools, standardized testing

Let’s say someone gave you a vial of poison.

Would you drink it? Of course not.

What if he gave you the antidote, too. Would you take the poison then?

Heck no!

Why would anyone knowingly ingest poison even if they knew they could counteract its effects?

But that’s pretty much the situation high school students across the country are in today with the SAT test.

The College Board has admitted that the test unfairly assesses students – especially poor and minority students. However, if we add an “adversity score” to the raw score, then voila! Fairness!

The organization is piloting a program at 150 colleges and universities to adjust SAT scores to account for high schools and neighborhoods “level of disadvantage.”

The program is called the “Environmental Context Dashboard” and has been in the works since 2015 at the request of colleges. It provides admissions officers with information about students’ neighborhoods and high schools, such as the poverty level and the availability of challenging coursework. This is supposed to allow them to put raw scores into context before making admissions decisions.

But even if this actually remedies the inherent racial and economic biases inherent in the 93-year-old assessment, why take the bloody thing in the first place!?

The College Board is a 119-year-old organization boasting 6,000 member colleges, universities and other organizations. And despite its nonprofit status, it does make an awful lot of money.

The organization’s annual revenue is more than $750 million, according to its most recent publicly available 990 form. The organization’s CEO David Coleman makes $750,000 a year, its President Gaston Caperton makes more than $1.5 million a year, and 22 other employees earn at least $200,000.

Nice work if you can get it.

As such, the College Board needs to ensure millions of teenagers keep taking its moneymaking test as they apply to institutions of higher education. But more than 1,200 colleges and universities no longer require students seeking enrollment to take the SAT and among those that do the upstart ACT test is gaining popularity and market share.

The SAT’s new adversity score is a marketing tool – nothing more.

It’s the act of rats trapped in a corner. They’re admitting everything critics always said about them and offering a white flag.

We have no need to take it. In fact, we would be incredibly stupid to do so.

What the world needs is not an adversity score to counteract all the bad things the SAT does. It needs the absence of the SAT and all such standardized gatekeeper assessments.

Coleman is infamous as the father of a number of failed education reforms including the Common Core.

It’s absolutely hilarious to hear him admitting the biases of standardized testing since he’s been one of its leading proponents since the 1990s. It’s like hearing Colonel Sanders admit he doesn’t really like fried chicken all that much.

In the case of the SAT, he said colleges need to recognize student qualities that the test can’t capture, such as resourcefulness. Essays, letters of recommendation, and the “profiles” most high schools post sometimes capture the challenges and circumstances students face, he said, but in many cases colleges don’t find this information because they’re blinded by students’ tests scores.

Without a tool like the dashboard, he said, “the SAT could be misleading.”

YOU DON’T SAY!

“To warrant that the playing field is now level isn’t right or just,” Coleman added. “In the America we live in … the vast majority of students are working with a lot less than the top third. To then say that the SAT is enough to reflect what you can do, no, it isn’t.”

All of which begs the question of why we need the SAT test at all.

Why not just look at those essays and letters of recommendation. Look at student extra curricular activities, employment record – heck! – grades!

Classroom grades represent 180 days worth of data compiled by multiple educators over at least 12-13 years.

Admittedly, they aren’t completely objective but neither are standardized test scores. We do not have the power to crack open children’s skulls and see what’s going on in their brains. But classroom grades offer exponentially more data and of a much more equitable kind.

If all of that isn’t enough to make admissions decisions, then nothing will ever be.

But let’s be honest. This isn’t about the needs of schools or students.

It’s about the needs of big business enterprises like the College Board and the standardized testing companies; it’s about their need to turn a profit.

THAT is what this adversity score is out to save.

We’ve been criticizing the SAT and similar standardized assessments since they were first implemented in 1926. They were the creation of group of psychologists led by Robert M. Yerkes and Carl Brigham.

They were eugenicists who believed that white Europeans were superior to all others and used their pseudoscientific assessments to “prove” their biases. If there’s any doubt of that, I refer you to this passage from Brigham’s seminal work A Study of American Intelligence:

“The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro. These are the plain, if somewhat ugly, facts that our study shows. The deterioration of American intelligence is not inevitable, however, if public action can be aroused to prevent it.”

Yerkes added:

“We should not work primarily for the exclusion of intellectual defectives but rather for the classification of men in order that they may be properly placed.”

It’s no wonder that the SAT is biased. Its creators were, and their assumptions about human nature still underlie the entire standardized testing enterprise.

No adversity score will ever undue that.

There comes a time when we need to simply stop the stupid racist crap we’ve been doing for generations – not try to prettify it so we can keep cashing in.

These sorts of conversions of scores have been tried before and routinely criticized as inaccurate.

The College Board tried something similar in the late 90s called the “striver’s tool.” It identified students who scored higher than expected based on racial, socioeconomic, and other data.

But it was shut down after it became a political football comparable to that of affirmative action – the same that has happened among certain conservatives with the new adversity score.

We’ve been engaged in unfair standardized testing for almost a century now.

Isn’t it time we admitted our mistake and moved on?

Or should we just keep drinking our poison and chasing it with a dubious antidote while our betters count their dirty money?

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Who’s Afraid of Public Schools?

March 16, 2019March 16, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, college, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Grit, Learning, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Privilege cheating, college, college admissions, College Cheating Scandal, Donald Trump, education, George W. Bush, Operation Varsity Blues, parents, Politics, public schools, schools, Students, teachers

Public schools are the bogeymen of American life.

We so often hear the bedtime story of “Failing Schools” that it’s no wonder some folks will do anything to ensure their kids get in elsewhere.

And let’s be honest. It’s the same impulse behind the latest college admissions cheating scandal.

A group of wealthy – though not too wealthy – parents thought their children should be able to enroll in the most prestigious schools.

So they bribed college admissions officers, cheated on standardized tests or paid coaches or other officials to accept their children as college athletes even if their kids had never played the sport.

We see the same kind of thing everyday in public schools – a confederacy of white parents terrified that their kids might have to go to class with black kids. So they dip into their stock portfolios to pay for enrollment at a private or parochial school.

Or they take advantage of a tax scholarship or school voucher to avoid an institution with low test scores by enrolling in one where students don’t have to take the tests at all.

Or they cross their fingers and enter their kid in a lottery to a charter school praying their precious progeny will escape the horrors of being treated just like everyone else’s kids.

And they call it a meritocracy!

What a joke!

They pretend that their children have earned special treatment.

WRONG.

No child deserves favoritism – paradoxically – because all children do!

There are really two important but related points here:

1) The children of the privileged don’t deserve a better education than anyone else’s.

2) Children who come from wealthy families (and or from privileged social circumstances) don’t do anything to distinguish themselves from the underprivileged.

But these nouveau riche parents tried to bribe the way forward for their kids anyway even though to do so they had to launder the money through a fake “charity.” They didn’t care that doing so would earn them a tax deduction and thus result in even less money for the underprivileged. They didn’t care about the underlying inequalities in the system. No. They only wanted their children to remain in the class of America’s chosen few.

And the best way to do that is with cold, hard cash.

America doesn’t run on Dunkin. It runs on greenbacks. Dinero. Swag. Bling. The prosperity doctrine made physical, quantifiable and mean.

No one really denies that there are two Americas anymore. We just lie to ourselves about how you get placed in one or the other.

And that lie is called excellence, quality, worth – the ultimate in class war gaslighting.

It’s a deception that this scandal has shattered to pieces.

The privileged don’t earn their privilege. It’s not something they possess on the basis of intelligence or hard work shown through test scores. They don’t have it because of drive, determination or grit – once again shown through test scores. They have it based on wealth – the kind of wealth that buys time and resources to either pass the tests or bribe the gatekeepers to change the scores.

Think about it.

George W. Bush got into Yale and Harvard and graduated with a 2.35 GP A. Why? Not because he had the grades and demonstrated his worth. He was a legacy. Like at least one third of all admissions to Ivy League schools, he got in purely because he had family who graduated from there.

You think Donald Trump threatened the College Board not to release his grades because they were all A’s!?

According to one account, his scores were merely “respectable.” Yet he still dropped out of the prestigious Fordham University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania after two years based on family connections and the reputation of his father, Fred Trump, one of the wealthiest businessmen in New York at the time.

Moreover, his kids, Don Jr. and Ivanka, were both enrolled at Penn around the same time as their father made hefty contributions. They began classes in 1996 and 2000, respectively, just as the university and its private Manhattan clubhouse received more than $1.4 million in pledged donations from Trump, the school newspaper reported.

This is not merit. This has nothing to do with what these people deserve. It is money – a pure transaction, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

The only thing that separates what the Trumps and the Bushes did with this latest scandal – the so-called Operation Varsity Blues – is the amount of wealth involved.
If you’re super rich, you can get away with it. If you’re just rich, you’d better not get caught.

And if you’re poor or middle class, you’d better stay in your lane.

But there shouldn’t be any lanes on this highway. Or at least they should only be in place to maximize fairness and student success.

We sneer at the idea of Affirmative Action but only because it’s directed at people of color. No one says anything about the real Affirmative Action that’s been in place since before our country even began – the system of reciprocity and privilege keeping wealthy white families in positions of power like Lords and Ladies while the rest of us serfs scramble for their leavings.

All children deserve the same opportunities to succeed. All children deserve the chance to get an excellent education. All children should attend a first class school filled with highly educated and experienced teachers who can draw on plenty of resources, wide curriculum, tutoring, counseling and support.

And the only way we’ll ever achieve that is through a robust system of public schools.

I’m not saying they’re perfect. In many neighborhoods, they’ve been sabotaged and surgically dismantled, but that’s a problem with an easy solution. Invest in public schools!

Because the stated purpose of public education, the reason it exists at all, is equity.
The alternatives – private and charter schools – are essentially unequal. That’s their raison d’être – to create a market that justifies their existence.

In order for charter and private schools to be a thing, there must be schools that don’t otherwise meet students’ needs. There must be an unreasonable demand that schools indoctrinate students into parents’ religious beliefs. There must be schools that aren’t as well funded or that have to meet ridiculous federal and state mandates.

The result is a two-tiered system. Schools for the haves and for the have-nots.
It’s an apparatus that perverts the public to make room for the private.

In the public system, students are segregated into communities based on race and class and then their community schools are funded based on what their parents can afford. The rich shower their children with the best of everything. The poor do what they can.

Then the federal government pretends to hold everyone “accountable” by forcing students to take standardized tests that merely recreate the economic and racial disparities already present in their districts and neighborhoods. In turn, this provides the justification for charter and voucher schools that further erode public school budgets and increases the downward spiral of disinvestment.

Meanwhile, few notice how the equity built into authentic public schools gets left behind by those enrolling in privatized alternatives. No more open meetings. No more elected school boards. No more public comment or even a voice in how the money is spent.

So long as there are two Americas, the fear of being in the wrong one will motivate the privileged to cheat and steal their way to the top. They will horde resources and wealth for themselves and their children while denying it to others.

It is a self-perpetuating system – a loop that we’re all caught in.
We must break the chain. We must recognize our common humanity and stop the zero sum game.

And perhaps the best way to begin is by supporting authentic public schools and not privatization.

We have been taught to fear public education, because it is really our only hope.

College Remediation is Less About Bad Students Than Academic Elitism

October 5, 2018October 5, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, college, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Learning, Politics, Prejudice, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, small class size, Special Education, Standardized Testing, standards, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized Budget, college, college admissions, developmental psychology, education, educators, Elitism, Higher Learning, Post-Secondary, Profit, Psychology, Remediation, school funding, schools, standardized testing, teachers, Test Prep

Ah, college.

The school on a hill.

The marble columns, wood paneled studies and ivy encrusted gardens.

It’s never really been a place for everybody. But in rhapsodizing the college experience, our lawmakers have pushed for universities to enroll an increasing number of students. The demand for free or reduced tuition – especially for low-income students – has meant more kids putting on a letterman jersey and giving it the ol’ college try.

Teenagers who wouldn’t dream of higher education in previous decades are going for it today.

And the result has been a greater proportion of incoming college freshman taking remedial courses before they can even begin the normal post-secondary track.

According to a 2017 report by the Hechinger Report, more than half a million students at two- and four-year colleges in 44 states had to take such courses.

This costs up to an estimated $7 billion a year.

So, as usual in our country, we’re looking for someone to blame. And look! Here’s our favorite scapegoat – the public school system!

The gripe goes like this: Incoming college freshman wouldn’t need remediation if the public schools had bothered to teach them correctly!

However, the argument ignores several important factors and jumps to a completely unearned conclusion.

1) Public schools don’t decide who is accepted at colleges. College admissions departments do.

If people in higher learning think all these teenagers don’t belong in college, don’t accept them. Period.

But that would mean fewer students, less tuition and forgoing the lucrative revenue stream provided by – surprise! – these same remediation courses!

We pretend that colleges are special places where honor and scholarship rule the day. It isn’t necessarily so.

They are run by people, and like anywhere else, those people can be ethical and egalitarian or petty and materialistic.

Colleges aren’t immune to small mindedness or the economic realities facing institutions of learning everywhere.

Like most schools, they’re starved for funding.

The state and federal government have slashed subsidies to colleges and universities just as they have to public schools. Colleges have to make up the shortfall somewhere.

So they enroll students who don’t meet their own academic standards and then charge them for the privilege of attempting to get up to snuff.

It’s a good deal. You get to blame kids coming in AND reap the rewards.

2) How exactly do we determine that these kids need remediation?

In many schools, they use standardized tests like the SAT or ACT to make this determination. Others give their own pretest to all incoming freshman and assign remediation based on the results.

You’d expect more from institutions of higher learning.

You’d expect them to know how inadequate standardized tests are at assessing student knowledge. After all, most of the mountain of studies that conclude these tests are worthless are conducted at the college level. However, it seems people in admissions don’t always read the scholarly work of their colleagues in the departments of education and psychology.

I remember when I was in college, several classmates were being pressured to take remedial courses but refused. It didn’t stop them from graduating with honors.

3) Let’s say some of this remediation actually is necessary. Why would that be so?

These are high school graduates. What has changed in public schools over the past few decades to increase the need for these additional services at colleges?

It seems to me the answer is three-fold:

1) School budgets have been cut to the bare bone

2) Schools have to fight for limited funding with charter and voucher institutions

3) Standardized testing and Common Core have been dominating the curriculum.

If you cut funding to schools, they won’t be able to prepare students as well.

That’s a pretty simple axiom. I know business-minded number crunchers will extol the virtue of “doing more with less” and other such self-help platitudes, but much of it is nonsense.

You never hear them explain how cutting CEO salaries will mean corporations will run more effectively. It’s only workers and schools that they think deserve tough love and penury.

Look, schools with less funding mean fewer teachers. That means larger class sizes. That means it’s more difficult to learn – especially for students who don’t already come from privileged backgrounds.

None of this is bettered by the addition of charter and voucher schools sucking up the limited money available. We don’t have enough for one school system – yet we’re asking two or more parallel systems to exist on that same amount. And we’re stacking the deck in favor of privatized systems by prioritizing their funding and not holding them to the same accountability and transparency standards as traditional public schools.

It’s like deliberately placing leeches on a runners back and wondering why she’s started going so slowly.

Moreover, it’s ironic that the Common Core revolution was conducted to make students “college and career ready.” It has done just the opposite.

Narrowing the curriculum to weeks and months of test prep has consequences. You can increase students ability to jump through the hoops of your one federally mandated state test. But that doesn’t translate to other assessments. It doesn’t mean they’ll do better on the SAT or other college entrance exams. Nor does it mean they’ll possess the authentic learning we pretend we’re after in the first place.

The bottom line: if we really want to improve student academic outcomes in public schools, we need to fully and equitably fund them. We need to abandon school privatization schemes and fully support public schools. And we need to stop the obsession with standardized assessments, curriculum and – yes – even canned standards, themselves.

That might actually reduce the numbers of students who allegedly need remediation at the college level.

However, there is another aspect that we need to consider that is harder to remedy…

4) Developmental psychology.

Schools – whether they be post-secondary, secondary or primary – are built to meet the needs of human beings. And human beings don’t grow according to a preconceived schedule.

Just because you think someone should be able to do X at a certain age, doesn’t mean they’re developmentally ready to do so.

Speaking from experience, I was a C student in math through high school. It wasn’t until I got to college that I started to excel in that subject and earned top marks.

I didn’t have to take any remedial courses, but I was forced to take a quantitative reasoning course as part of my liberal arts majors.

I’m not alone in this. Many people aren’t cognitively ready for certain concepts and skills until later. That doesn’t make them deficient in any way nor does it betray any problems in their schooling.

That’s just how their brains work. We can whine about it or we can accept human nature and do what we can to help students cope.

And this brings me to my final reason behind the college remediation trend – a problem that is more insidious than all the others combined.

5) The elitism behind the whole post-secondary system.

For centuries, higher learning has been seen as a privilege of the wealthy and the upper class. Sure a few exceptional plebians were let into our hallowed halls just to “prove” how egalitarian we were.

But college was never seen as something fit for everyone.

As such, the attitude has always been that students are on their own. Many who enroll will not end up graduating. And that’s seen as perfectly acceptable. It’s part of the design.

It’s the baby sea turtle school of education – thousands of hatchlings but few survive to adulthood.

However, if you really want to make college the right fit for an increasing number of students, you have to get rid of the elitist attitude.

If students come to college and need remediation, stop whining and provide it.

And it shouldn’t incur an extra cost from students, either. This should just be a normal part of the process.

If a patient comes to the emergency room with heart disease, you don’t penalize him because he didn’t eat heart healthy. You do what you can to help him heal. Period.

That’s how colleges and universities need to approach their students.

You know – the way public schools already do.

SOLUTIONS

In summary, it’s not a case of colleges vs. public schools. And anyone who tells you differently probably has a hidden agenda – the standardization and privatization industry, for instance.

We need to support colleges and universities. We need to support public schools. Both need additional funding and political will.

However, colleges need to become more accepting and supportive of the students enrolled there. They need to meet them where they are and provide whatever they need to succeed.

Moreover, public schools need the autonomy and respect routinely given to college professors.

The answer is a transformation of BOTH institutions.

That’s how you make a better school system for everyone.

That or we could just keep grumbling at each other, forever pointing fingers instead of working together to find solutions.

Grades and Test Scores Don’t Matter. A Love of Learning Does.

May 4, 2018May 4, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Common Core, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Eugenics, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers ACT, Bill Gates, cheating, college admissions, common core, communicating, Corporate Education Reform, corporate school reform, creativity, curiosity, David Coleman, Finland, grades, high stakes testing, intrinsic, language arts, love of learning, Opt Out, policy, Politics, reading, rigor, SAT, schools, self-esteem, standardized testing, statistics, teachers, teaching, test optional college admissions, test-based accountability, valedictorian, Writing

My daughter probably would be shocked to discover what I truly think about grades.

They don’t matter all that much.

The other day she brought home a pop quiz on sloths from her third grade class. It had a 40% F emblazoned on the top in red ink.

I grabbed the paper from her book bag and asked her to explain what had happened.

She smiled nervously and admitted that she had rushed through the assignment.

I told her I knew she could do better and was very disappointed.

Then we reread the article in her weekly reader and found the right answers to the questions she’d missed.

But if my little girl would be stunned, my students would probably be even more gobsmacked!

As a 7^th grade Language Arts teacher, it’s my job to hand out grades. And I don’t give my students too much slack.

Just this morning, I turned to one of my kiddos placidly drawing a Spider-Man doodle in homeroom and asked if he had given me yesterday’s homework.

He wasn’t sure, so I pulled up the gradebook and surprise, surprise, surprise – no homework.

So he took out the half-completed packet, promised to get it done by the end of the day and promptly began working on it.

Don’t get me wrong. No one would ever confuse me for a teacher obsessed with grades and test scores.

I’m way too laid back for that. But my students know I will penalize them if they don’t hand in their assignments. And if it isn’t their best work, I’ll call them out on it.

The way I see it, grades and test scores offer an approximation of how well a student tries to achieve academic goals.

In Language Arts classes like mine, that’s reading, writing and communicating.

After a year of study, I want my students to leave me with an increased ability to read and understand what they’ve read. I want them to form a thoughtful opinion on it and be able to communicate that in multiple ways including verbally and in writing.

An overreliance on testing and grading can actually get in the way of achieving that goal.

According to a University of Michigan study from 2002, a total of 80% of students base their self worth on grades. The lower the grades, the lower their self-esteem.

Common Core fanatics like Bill Gates and David Coleman probably would say that’s a good thing. It provides incentive for children to take school seriously.

However, I think it transforms a self-directed, authentic pursuit of knowledge into grade grubbing. It makes an intrinsic activity purely extrinsic.

Learning no longer becomes about satisfying your curiosity. It becomes a chase after approval and acceptance.

We already know that measuring a phenomena fundamentally changes that phenomena. With a constant emphasis on measurement, children become less creative and less willing to take risks on having a wrong answer.

That’s one of the reasons I prefer teaching the academic track students to the honors kids. They aren’t used to getting all A’s, so they are free to answer a question based on their actual thoughts and feelings. If they get a question wrong, it’s not the end of the world. It hasn’t ruined a perfect GPA and put valedictorian forever out of reach.

Too much rigor (God! I hate that word!) creates academic robots who have lost the will to learn. Their only concern is the grade or the test score.

It also increases the motivation to cheat.

According to a national survey of 24,000 students from 70 high schools, 64% admitted to cheating on a test.

But if the goal is authentic learning, cheating doesn’t help. You can’t cheat to understand better. You can only fool the teacher or the test. You can’t fool your own comprehension.

If you find a novel way of realizing something, that’s not cheating – it’s a learning strategy.

I know this is heresy to some people.

Even some of my colleagues believe that grading, in general, and standardized testing, in particular, are essential to a quality education.

After all, without an objective measure of learning, how can we predict whether students will do well once they move on to college or careers?

Of course, some of us realize standardized testing doesn’t provide an objective measurement. It’s culturally and racially biased. Those test scores don’t just correlate with race and class. They are BASED on factors inextricably linked with those characteristics.

When the standard is wealth and whiteness, it should come as no surprise that poor students of color don’t make the grade. It’s no accident, for example, that American standardized testing sprung out of the eugenics movement.

Yet you don’t need to crack open a book on history or pedagogy to see the uselessness of testing.

High stakes assessments like the SAT do NOT accurately predict future academic success.

Kids with perfect scores on the SAT or ACT tests don’t do better than kids who got lower scores or never took the tests in the first place.

Numerous studies have shown this to be true. The most recent one I’ve seen was from 2014.

Researchers followed more than 123,000 students who attended universities that don’t require applicants to take these tests as a prerequisite for admission. They concluded that SAT and ACT test scores do not correlate with how well a student does in college.

However, classroom grades do have predictive value – especially when compared to standardized tests. Students with high grades in high school but middling test scores do better in college than students with higher test scores and lower grades.

Why? Because grades are based on something other than the ability to take one test. They demonstrate a daily commitment to work hard. They are based on 180 days (in Pennsylvania) of classroom endeavors, whereas standardized tests are based on the labor of an afternoon or a few days.

Yet even classroom grades have their limits.

I remember my high school graduation – sitting on the bleachers in my cap and gown listening to our valedictorian and salutatorian give speeches about the glorious future ahead of us.

Yet for each of those individuals, the future wasn’t quite so bright. Oh, neither of them burned out, but they didn’t exactly set the world on fire, either.

In fact, when I went to college, I found a lot of the highest achievers in high school struggled or had to drop out because they couldn’t adjust. The new freedom of college was too much – they partied and passed out. Yet a middle-of-the-road student like me (Okay, I was really good in English) did much better. I ended up in the honors college with a double major, a masters degree and graduating magna cum laude.

And it’s not just my own experience. The research backs this up.

A Boston College study tracked more than 80 valedictorians over 14 years. These high school high achievers all became well-adjusted professional adults. But none of them made major discoveries, lead their fields or were trailblazers.

For that, you need someone willing to take risks.

The folks the researchers followed admitted that this wasn’t them. Many confessed that they weren’t the smartest people in their classes. They just worked really hard and gave teachers exactly what they thought they wanted.

So what’s the point?

Some people will read this and think I’m against all testing and grading.

Wrong.

I give tests. I calculate grades. And I would do this even if I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted. (Though I would throw every standardized test right in the garbage.)

I think grades and testing have their place. But they aren’t the end, they are a means to an end.

They are crude estimations of learning. They’re an educated guess. That’s all.

We need to move beyond them if we are to modernize our public schools.

Don’t get rid of grades and testing, just change the emphasis. Put a premium on curiosity and creativity. Reward academic risk taking, innovation and imagination. And recognize that most of the time there may be several right answers to the same question.

Heck other countries like Finland already do this.

For the first six years of school, Finnish children are subjected to zero measurement of their abilities. The only standardized test is a final given at the end of senior year in high school.

As a result, their kids have some of the highest test scores in the world. By not focusing on standards and assessments, they counterintuitively top the charts with these very things.

There’s a lesson here for American education policy analysts.

And that lesson is the title of this article.

Absurd Defense of Standardized Testing in Jacobin Magazine

April 1, 2018April 4, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, bloggers, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Education, Junk science, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Racism, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Teachers, Toxic Testing bias, college admissions, Democrats in Name Only, Fake Democrats, Freddie DeBoer, high stakes testing, Jacobin, Matt Bruenig, People's Policy Project, progressive, Robert Yerkes, SAT, standardized testing

A bizarre article appeared in this Month’s issue of Jacobin – a left-leaning, even socialist magazine.

It was titled, “The Progressive Case for the SAT” and was written by Freddie DeBoer.

In it, the author attempts to explain why the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) – though flawed – is a more unbiased way to select which students deserve college admissions than indicators like K-12 classroom grades.

It’s all convoluted poppycock made worse by a baroque series of far left think tank connections, intellectual bias and mental illness.

In short, DeBoer argues that our schools are unfair, so we should embrace unfair high stakes tests.

I know. That doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Let me slow it down a bit, premise by premise so you can see his point – or lack thereof.

The current education system privileges white affluent children, says DeBoer, so they have an easier time getting into college than poorer children of color.

Check so far.

Richer whiter kids often go to schools that are better funded than those that teach mostly impoverished minorities. Therefore, the privileged get smaller classes, wider curriculums, more extracurricular activities, more counselors, better nutrition, etc. – while the underprivileged… don’t.

Then DeBoer says that classroom grades are often dependent on the resources students receive. Richer whiter kids get more resources, so they often get better grades.

Still with you so far.

Therefore, he concludes, we need standardized tests like the SAT to help equalize the playing field. We need so-called “objective” assessments to counteract the “subjective” classroom grades.

But DeBoer admits standardized tests aren’t objective! They are also the result of resources – that’s why richer whiter kids tend to score better on them than poorer blacker kids!

The argument makes no logical sense.

Justifying one unfair system with another unfair system is beyond bonkers.

Plus DeBoer contends out of nowhere that classroom grades are more easily manipulated than the tests and thus the tests are more valid.

Wrong again.

Classroom grades are based on roughly 180 days of instruction a year for 12 plus years. The SAT is roughly one day. More if you retake it.

It is MORE difficult to influence 2,160 days worth of grading than 1 or 2 or 3. Not the other way round.

Moreover, classroom grades are tabulated by numerous teachers, many of whom have little or no contact with each other. Standardized test scores are tabulated by a handful of temporary summer workers who often collaborate on the scores.

Whether students get good or bad grades generally doesn’t affect a given teacher. However, low test scores are actually beneficial to testing corporations because they allow the company to make additional money by retesting and selling remediation materials to the district.

If one group is more subject to bias, it is those grading the standardized tests, not the classroom teachers.

He has a point that getting rid of standardized testing won’t by itself eliminate inequality. But doubling down on it certainly won’t either.

That’s just logic.

DeBoer seems to be ignorant of history, as well.

The SAT test didn’t just spring up out of the ground. It was written by people – Psychologist Carl Brigham building on work by U.S. Army Psychologist Robert Yerkes to be exact.

Brigham devised the SAT in the early half of the 20^th Century based on Yerkes’ and his own deeply racist eugenicist theories.

And when I say they were eugenicists, I’m not speaking in hyperbole. They truly believed that some races were just smarter, more moral and downright better than others.

“American education is declining and will proceed… with an accelerating rate as the racial mixture becomes more and more extensive,” wrote Brigham in his seminal A Study of American Intelligence.

“No citizen can afford to ignore the menace of race deterioration,” wrote Yerkes in 1922.

And this idea was the foundation of their application of standardized testing, as Yerkes noted a year later:

“The contrasting intellectual status of the white versus the negro constituents of the draft appear from table 3. Few residents of the United States probably would have anticipated so great a difference. That the negro is 90 per cent. [sic] illiterate only in part accounts for his inferior intellectual status.”

Brigham was basing his ideas on another test created by Yerkes, the Army Alpha and Beta tests.

As noted above, Yerkes used test scores to “prove” black soldiers in WWI were inferior and thus more suited to menial service and the trenches while whites should be given better positions.

And Brigham continued this practice with his SAT test.

In both cases, the psychologists used standardized testing to back up a racist and classist status quo.

Yet it is this same SAT test that DeBoer is suggesting we keep because it reduces racial and economic bias!

Certainly the SAT has changed some since Yerkes time, but it hasn’t changed THAT much!

And that brings us to DeBoer, himself.

Who is this guy and why did an allegedly respectable publication like Jacobin print his crap theory?

DeBoer appears to be a very troubled individual.

Back in December of 2017, he published a blog post about his mental illness, almost being committed to an institution, the antipsychotic drugs he was taking and the break he would have to take from being a “public intellectual.”

I don’t mean to shame anyone who suffers from mental illness. But when someone offers such a bizarre policy suggestion, questions of stability arise.

Next, there’s DeBoer’s think tank connections.

On the same Website, DeBoer talks about “My anti anti-SAT take for the People’s Policy Project” – the same theory he expanded upon in his Jacobin article.

People’s Policy Project (3P) is a left-leaning think tank created by another frequent Jacobin contributor, lawyer and policy analyst, Matt Bruenig.

You may recall Bruenig. In 2015, he criticized schools that provide more resources to impoverished children by dubbing them “welfare schools.” He saw the inclusion of free healthcare, free meals, free pre-K, and other wraparound services as increasing the welfare state and making children and families dependent on the government for survival.

And, yes, like DeBoer, this is a guy who claims to be a far left Democrat.

This is all very troubling.

Sometimes we fall into the lazy attitude that high stakes testing, charter schools and other corporate education reforms are only championed by the right.

Certainly the left – or at least the far left – is immune to this neoliberal agenda.

You definitely wouldn’t expect to get a heaping helping of top down supply side school policy in Jacobin!

It just goes to show you how little policymakers on both sides of the aisle understand education and how ignorant they can be when we don’t force them to include the experts in the conversation.

I am, of course, talking about real, live classroom teachers.

Until we prize what they can tell us about education, we will continue to be led in circles by the ignorant.

gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

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