Ruining The College Board

David Coleman has been the President of the College Board since 2012. David Coleman was one of the people responsible for developing the Common Core standards. He has now brought his total misconceptions of what works in education to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), long used as an indication of a student’s ability and possible clue to how well they would do in college.

Yesterday The New York Times posted an article that reported the following:

The College Board, the company that administers the SAT exam taken by about two million students a year, will for the first time assess students not just on their math and verbal skills, but also on their educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, entering a fraught battle over the fairness of high-stakes testing.

The company announced on Thursday that it will include a new rating, which is widely being referred to as an “adversity score,” of between 1 and 100 on students’ test results. An average score is 50, and higher numbers mean more disadvantage. The score will be calculated using 15 factors, including the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s neighborhood.

The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker.

The new measurement brings the College Board squarely into the raging national debate over fairness and merit in college admissions, one fueled by enduring court clashes on affirmative action, a federal investigation into a sprawling admissions cheating ring and a booming college preparatory industry that promises results to those who can pay.

Below is a picture of what constitutes the adversity score:

The American Thinker quoted Tucker Carlson, who noted the following about the idea:

It’s kept a secret. “Trust us,” in effect, they say. There is no appeal possible. And as a black box whose inner workings are secret, it becomes an ideal vehicle for engineering the racial results admissions offices desire.

It is easily gamed – fake addresses, even possible income manipulation (by claiming a lot of depreciation, for instance, the way that Donald Trump reported negative income in the 1980s)

And it provides perverse incentives, rewarding victim status, not achievement. Parents who start out with no advantages and work hard to provide a better life for their kids will now be handicapping them if they have high incomes and live in nice neighborhoods with good schools.

Obviously if you are a middle class parent living with the father of your children in a respectable neighborhood, the answer would be to divorce your spouse and move to Detroit. That is obscene.

It might also be a good idea to consider the consequences of this new program–how will children who do not have good SAT scores but have great adversity scores do in college? What will be the drop out rate? Will they understand the classes they are taking? The way to achieve diversity in colleges is to change the culture in communities where the work ethic has been lost. There are many first-generation Chinese children living in New York City in poverty that are gaining admission to the top schools in the city because their parents have taught them to work hard in school. Rather than risk putting students in college that are academically unprepared for what they are going to face, shouldn’t we simply encourage a cultural change in poor communities that rewards hard work in school. It can make a difference–Ben Carson is a shining example of a child growing up poor with a single parent who lacked education that taught her children the value of education. Let’s lift people up instead of making excuses for them because of where they grew up.

An Exercise In Futility

On July 16, 2014, the North Carolina General Assembly ratified SB812 (follow link for full text). The bill charges the State Board of Education with the task of conducting a comprehensive review of all English Language Arts and Mathematics standards adopted under G.S.115C 12(9c) and propose modifications to ensure that those standards will improve the students’ level of academic achievement, meet and reflect North Carolina’s priorities, and other goals. The law sets up the Academic Standards Review Commission composed of eleven people who are charged with reviewing  current standards and making recommendations. Unfortunately the way the law is written, the Commission is simply going through the Common Core standards line by line (by hearing a presentation of the Department of Public Instruction [DPI], which supports Common Core). There is no objectivity in the presentation, and there is no factual information at this point that indicates Common Core does anything to raise academic standards.

In May of last year, I wrote an article about the introduction of Common Core in Massachusetts. The article cited a Wall Street Journal article detailing the changes in Massachusetts education during the 1990’s. Education in the state was reformed in 1993, and SAT scores rose for thirteen consecutive years. In 2005 Massachusetts scored best in the nation in all grades and categories on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. They have repeated that performance every time they have taken the test.  Massachusetts is doing very well educationally right now.

On October 1 of this year, I wrote another article about Common Core in Massachusetts. The article was about the Lincoln-Sudbury School Board‘s decision to decline a chance to offer the PARCC (Common Core) to students next spring, sharply criticizing the standardized test that could end up replacing the MCAS in the state.

That article quotes a Massachusetts newspaper article that states:

One board member equated the trial run of the exam as making “guinea pigs” out of students, whom he said wouldn’t see any worthwhile benefit from the dozens of hours they would put into practicing for and taking the test.

Lincoln-Sudbury, like all public high schools in Massachusetts, had a choice to administer the PARCC, short for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, in ninth and 11th grade later this year. The new test, which was introduced in a small pilot roll-out this past spring, was developed by a consortium of states to closely conform to the new Common Core standards adopted by most schools in the nation.

…Several committee members also bemoaned the PARCC’s potential effect of putting increased emphasis on standardized testing, arguing Lincoln-Sudbury on its own is able to come up with much more effective measures of students’ grasp of learning standards.

No matter how hard the Department of Public Instruction tries to sell it, Common Core is untested. If the Commission is truly concerned about the education of North Carolina students, they will look to other states that have successfully improved the academic achievement levels of their students. I am sure there are many communities in Massachusetts who would be willing and able to help with this task.

Meanwhile, today’s meeting was a biased, self-serving presentation by the Department of Public Instruction–a department that was not interested in changing anything (except possibly the name Common Core). That is unfortunate.

If the parents and grandparents of North Carolina students are truly concerned about their students’ education, they need to get involved very quickly. There will be a meeting next month in which the DPI will do a presentation of the mathematics section of Common Core similar to the one they did today on the English Language Arts section. So far there has been no public examination of any set of standards other than the unproven Common Core standards. If that continues, the students of North Carolina will be the victims of an exercise in futility that accomplished nothing.

 

 

This Seems Rather Ironic To Me

Last Tuesday the International Business Times posted an article reporting that the College Board has announced that all students taking the SAT and ACT tests will be required to provide their photo ID’s on their applications.

The new rule was triggered by a cheating scandal on Long Island which involved about twenty students who paid people $500 to $3,600 to take the SAT or ACT for them.

The article reports the plan for increasing security at the test sites:

For the photo IDs, students that wish to take the tests will be required to upload or mail in a photo of themselves upon registering for either test. In return, the student will receive an admission ticket into the testing site with a copy of their scanned photo, which won’t be printed directly on the admission ticket, but on the test site roster, so it can be checked against the photo ID that the student provides at the test center itself. The same photo will be attached to the students’ scores.

That is a really good idea. When are we going to get smart and apply the picture ID standard to voting in America? How many voter fraud cases will be needed to convince people that identification is needed for voters?

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