David Coleman Is Still Clueless

You can be forgiven for having forgotten that David Coleman is a thing. He's been laying low-ish as head of the College Board since his days of dropping Common Core on the US education system like sewage-filled water balloon. But he's still around, still sharing his ideas about education and how to use the College Board's big products-- the SAT and AP courses-- to inflict his vision on students.

Yes, David Coleman. David "Don't Know Much About Teaching Literature" Coleman. David "I Don't Know How To Teach Writing, Either" Coleman. David "I'm a Genius" Coleman. David "I Messed Up the College Board" Coleman. David "I'm an Educational Amateur and That's Why I'm Awesome" Coleman. And, of course, David "Nobody Gives a Shit What You Think" Coleman.

For whatever reason, Alyson Klein at EdWeek sat down for a "far-ranging" interview with Coleman, and it is just one special Coleman moment after another. 

Klein says, "AI tools can pass almost every AP test. Are students taught what they need to know to thrive in a future workplace dominated by AI?"

This might sound like a challenge to AP tests, but that's not what Coleman hears. "High schools had a crisis of relevance far before AI." For once, he's not entirely wrong-- by reducing writing to a simple algorithmic process divorced from expressing ideas, many educators have turned it into a task that a computer can do. You know what pushed us--hard--in that direction? Common Core, and the tests that came with it. 

Coleman says we have to make high school "relevant, engaging, and purposeful" by creating the next generation of coursework. "We," he says, "are reconsidering the kind of courses we offer." So I guess he's not going to address that whole "AI can beat your test" issue.

But it's this next exchange that shows how far off the rails College Board is ready to go.

Klein: College Board has previously partnered with higher education to create courses. Will you now be partnering with employers/industry?

Coleman: What we are doing is giving employers an equal voice.

So, an example of a new partner [in course design] is the [U.S.] Chamber of Commerce. What’s cool about what we’ll do with business or cybersecurity is that it will simultaneously get you college credit at institutions that offer it and get you that workforce credential. [After successfully completing] AP Cybersecurity, you could definitely get some really good jobs and be qualified for them.

So, to expand their market, they're going to take the "college" out of College Board. Coleman says they might also take a whack at health care, sort of integrate chemistry and physiology and health care careers. 

Klein points out that employers want "tricky-to-measure skills, like creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking." Does Coleman have a plan for dealing with this stuff?

He does, and it's dopey. The big move will be AP Seminar-- less required content, more group work. Also, the business and personal finance course "has heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship and responding to change, plus flexibility, adaptation, and resourcefulness. 

So how do you measure stuff like resourcefulness asks the man who still hasn't acknowledged that AI can beat his current set of tests. And he has another non-answer:

In the business course, every student needs to make a business plan and share it and have a competition [around] it. And they have to act as a financial adviser to a family similar or different than their own. With those two projects, you can test students for their ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Okay, but how do you test them? Give them a multiple choice question with one answer that is the resourceful one? Is there a special resourcefulness rubric for the project? Coleman is skating past a huge question here-- how do you use a standardized box to assess how well a student functions outside the standardized box?

Klein steers him back toward AI. Could an AI write the paper for that Seminar class? 

The answer, buried under some verbage, is yes, and the student might be scored "whether they’ve effectively used it to advance their work. Also--

What we definitely are thinking about is, “How can students skillfully use AI without replacing their own skills development? How can you use AI resourcefully and powerfully without it totally eclipsing what you’re trying to get kids to learn?”

I think that interplay is essential for advancement in the AI world. We always want the check and balance of what can you do with it and what can you do without it, to see what you’re gaining separately from [the course].

Behind all this argle bargle is... nothing. It's meaningless noise until it's turned into specific plans. How would those "checks and balances" work? There is nothing remotely insightful about saying, "Students should know how to work AI and they should know how to work without it."  

Will teachers be trained in AI or cybersecurity? Coleman's answer boils down to "Not really." Just give them enough resources to "stay a step ahead of their kids." 

But Coleman also answers a question that Klein didn't ask-- would the AI replace teachers? 

Teachers recruit kids who did not believe that they could do [rigorous academic work]. They give feedback and encouragement daily. It is just foolish to condense teaching to the transmission portion of the teaching job.

So sure, someday we could get wonderful lectures and tutoring through AI. But not the encouragement, support, and engagement that a teacher does in responding to humans in front of him or her.

So, pretty much like the computer-delivered education models that don't require teachers-- just coaches to encourage and monitor.  

How will they keep courses up to date? The course framework will be a 'living portion," which is some great corporate baloney-speak. But hey-- Coleman never built any capability for update in the Common Core, so maybe he has learned something?

How about AP Data Science? Coleman says the AP Computer Science Principles really covers that. Also, the new verbal section of the SAT includes charts, because to be literate you can't skip the tables in a science article ("unless you're just gonna read fiction," and we know Coleman's not a fan). 

Also, they're not changing the AP African American Studies course, and states, schools, and students can choose.

Look, the College Board lost its way ages ago. The SAT division now trues to flood the market with variants, like a cookie manufacturer trying to some up with new flavors in order to suck up market shelf space. I look forward to the Fetal SAT, given in each trimester of pregnancy. The Advanced Placement courses and tests were arguably a good-ish idea, but they have lost their way (read Annie Abrams' Shortchanged for a fuller telling of that story).

But this is clearly not an improvement. Coleman has never shown himself to be a fan of the liberal arts, so perhaps it's a surprise that he hadn't already shifted the AP course from liberal, college level academics to some high end vocational training, but here we are. Never mind that artsy fartsy thinky stuff; let's dig out the graphs and charts. Dump those crazy abstract maths and get down to crunching the kinds pf numbers that corporate overlords are interested in. Maybe as colleges and universities shift away from liberal arts education and toward meat widget prep, the AP was destined to be dragged along with them.

Thing is, Coleman, at least in this interview, doesn't seem to have a real vision of where he's headed-- just some obvious platitudes and vague gestures. And he can make noises about next generation education programs, but that doesn't really address the problem that a LLM bot can breeze through his tests (and, one wonders, how much bots are being used to score that same test). 

Nothing here indicates that Coleman gas a plan-- just a vague impulse to get more vocational and computery. We'll see if that's enough to hang onto his steadily eroding market share.