Showing posts with label College Board. Show all posts
Showing posts with label College Board. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

College Board's Real Business

Here's the morning's promoted tweet from the College Board


That link takes you to the College Board page tagged with "Transformed Services for Smart Recruiting." Here you can find all sorts of useful headings like

Student Search Service (registered trademark)

 Connect with students and meet recruitment goals using precise, deep data from the largest and richest database of college-bound students in the nation.

Enrollment Planning Service (trademark)

 Achieve your enrollment goals with powerful data analysis tools that efficiently facilitate exploration of the student population and inform a smarter recruitment plan.

Segment Analysis Service (trademark)

 Leverage sophisticated geographic, attitudinal and behavioral information to focus your enrollment efforts and achieve better yields from admission through graduation.

That last one, with its ability to leverage attitudinal and behavioral data-- how the heck do they do that? Exactly what is in the big fat College Board data base.
 
There's a phone number for customers to call, and of course, "customers" does not mean "students and their families." It means all the nice people who keep the College Board in business by paying for the data that they've mined from their testing products. Those folks can click over to the College Board Search Support page to learn that every high school student who ever took a College Board test product (PSAT, SAT, AP exam, or any of the many new SAT products) is in the database.

I don't know that the data miners at the College Board are any more nefarious than those at Facebook or a television network. Though those at least give the datamined subjects a free "product" to play with-- the College Board manages to mine students for data and get them to pay for the privilege.

But so many people think of the College Board and its test products as some sort of public service or educational necessity. It would be useful if we could all remember who they really are, what they really do, and how they make their money.
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Thursday, October 15, 2015

21st Century PSAT

Yesterday was National Support David Coleman's Cash Flow Day, otherwise known as the day that high school juniors across the nation give up a treasure trove of personal information in exchange for the opportunity to take a standardized test that is, if not actually meaningful or useful, at least a venerable tradition.

The P, as I repeatedly remind my highly stressed 11th grade students, stands for "practice." It is, for most of us, the ultimate no stakes test. If a student is perched at the very tippy top of Score Mountain, she will have a shot at a National Merit Scholarship, a scholarship program that functions much like the scholarships attached to beauty pageants-- as a sort of protective fig leaf of uplifting nobility for an otherwise mercenary enterprise. And if you have the misfortune to teach at a school that thinks there's something useful to learn from PSAT-ing every single student, then, well, it sucks to be you.

But for the rest of us, the PSAT means bupkus. Less than bupkus. Just bup.

The College Board (now helmed by Common Core auteur Davic Coleman) has been trying hard to reverse this trend by, among other things, creating more baby PSAT's-- PPPSATs-- to push the market all the way down to eighth grade. Coleman has also worked to position the SAT as an engine for fixing inequality in America, a narrative that has, if nothing else, convinced the USED to shovel a bunch of money in the College Board's direction. Oh-- and because corporate synergy should always be leveraged to foster dynamic growth, the new PSAT is also a marketing tool for AP coursework.

Note too that the PSAT begins with a 45-minute session of having students volunteer their personal information, a process that makes the College Board one of the leading vendors of student information (the subject of periodic unsuccessful lawsuits).

All of these upgrades are part of the College Board's entry into the 21st century. But their relationship with some aspects of 21st century technology are more complicated. Hence this tweet yesterday:

And boy, you would think that the combination of signing the PSAT Secrecy Pledge and this hip tweet referencing a movie that came out when PSAT takers were in First Grade-- you'd just think that would do it.

Nevertheless, #PSAT was trending on Twitter, not because of students tweeting, "My, but that was an educationally valuable experience," but because they were cranking out test-based memes. Heck, the College Board somehow failed to lock down PSAT2015 as a handle, and that account has over 10,300 followers and a wealth of test-mocking memery.

Via twitter I know that the test covered Frederick Douglass's thoughts about the 4th of July, cookies, Herminia the poetess, dinosaurs, and wolves vs. dogs. Many enterprising folks tracked down the source material for the reading passages, leading to this interesting exchange:


Probably nothing. I'm sure the College Board wouldn't violate a copyright.

Other fun tweets about the PSAT:

















If nothing else, the PSAT pumped energy into the use of smartphones and twitter yesterday. But if they're going to join the new century, they'll need to realize that their privacy pledge is stupid and they had better get used to operating in a transparent world. And this is just the PSAT, a test which everyone takes essentially on the same day. Imagine what the internet does to the SAT, given on many separate dates.

Of course, we could just recognize that the kind of test that is seriously damaged by this complete lack of security is a lousy test. But that would hurt test manufacturers bottom line. Living in the 21st century is expensive. Let's hope that Coleman can figure out how to turn a profit and still stay classy.



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Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Coleman's New SAT

The unveiling of David Coleman's New, Improved SAT Suite is just around the corner, and that means its time to ramp up the marketing blitz for this great new product.

The College Board website is freshly festooned with a festive font that shows that the new SAT Suite is ready to hang with the cool kids. I mean, you can follow the SAT on twitter! All the young persons are following the twitter, right?

The whole business seems charmingly cheesy in its commercial crassness, but it stands as one more part of David Coleman's crusade to redefine what it means to be an educated person in this country. We've been watching this come down the pike for a while; what can we spot now that it's almost here?

 I Can Has Skillz

The new SAT comes complete with a new motto-- "skilled it." And copywriters have made sure that theme permeates the site. "Bank on skills." "Show off your skills." "Let's talk skills." "Skill Mail." "Calling all skills." "U of Skill."  "Skilled in class. Skilled for college." "Take the test that measures the real skills you've learned in class to show colleges you've got what it takes." Can you spot the unifying feature here? Only one of the blurby graphics mentions the K word-- "Show off the skills and knowledge colleges want most."

The SAT suite has been brought in line with the many unappealing qualities of the Common Core-- a disregard bordering on antipathy when it comes to actual content knowledge.

Granted, the SAT has always been a soul-sucking hypocrite when it comes to this issue, subjecting generations of students to verbal tests that claimed to measure reasoning while actually just being expensive, complicated vocabulary tests. But our new goal seems to be to turn the SAT into PARCC's step-brother. I could, if I wished, prepare my students for the Big Standardized Core test by doing nothing all year but reading newspaper articles and pages from storybooks, followed by multiple choice questions. Coleman wants to take the SAT to that place-- the place where a student's worth is judged by their ability to perform the right tricks.

This is the Coleman vision of education. An educated person doesn't Know Things. And educated person can Do Things. After all, what's the point in knowing things if you can't turn your knowledge into deliverables, use it to add value, grab it like a might crowbar that you can use to pry open the secret moneybanks of the world. Do you think Coleman had to know anything to write the Core or re-configure the SAT? Of course not-- he just had to Get Things Done. An educated person has marketable skills. What else do you need?

Co-opting Khan

Part of the new SAT initiative has been to try to shut down the lucrative SAT prep industry, and to that end, the College Board has teamed up with Khan Academy to provide free test prep of their own. There's even a nifty video of Coleman and Khan videoconferencing about how swell it all is; Coleman seems to think that the Khan academy stuff will achieve college and career readiness all on its own (because that's the core of what it's all about now).

Free seems like an excellent price, especially to build such brand recognition. I'm just going to go ahead and type "There's been such a demand for more tools that give more in depth preparation that we are pleased to make these available for a small fee" now so that I can link back to it a year from now when I want to show off my prognostication skills.

 Not For Stupid Eggheads

The new SAT push has been weirdly anti-intellectual. The website is repeatedly clear about how it has thrown off the shambling shackles of smarmy smartitude, pointing out that the test will measure what you learned in high school (provided your school followed Coleman's blueprints) and what you need to succeed in college (a bullshit claim that's not backed up with anything concrete for the same reason that Coleman can list the tools you need to trap a Yeti). And this:

 If you think the key to a high score is memorizing words and facts you’ll never use in the real world, think again. You don’t have to discover secret tricks or cram the night before.

Yup. They list the secrets of success: take hard courses, do your homework, prepare for tests (but not with test prep?) and ask and answer lots of questions.

So What's Inside?

In addition to links to the Khan stuff, the site has samples and explanations for each of the test sections. A page gives a general description, noting once again that cramming facts and flashcards won't be necessary, and takes a chatty tone, even using the word "stuff."

Reading

The reading intro includes a sideways definition of reading, opening with the lilting line, "A lot more goes into reading than you might realize — and the Reading Test measures a range of reading skills." That includes Command of Evidence, Words in Context, and Analysis in History/Social Studies and in Science.

A quick look at the sample questions shows selections including Ethan Frome, a piece about commuting's cost in productivity, a piece about turtles navigating sea migration, and a 1974 speech by Barbara Jordan (all excerpts, of course). The intro to the Jordan speech lets us know that it was delivered in the context of impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon, and it opens with this paragraph:

Today I am an inquisitor. An hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution as a whole, it is complete, it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.

It also includes a quote from Federalist No. 65. Then it asks what the best description of Jordan's stance would be (correct answer-- an idealist setting forth principles). And, as seems required in standardized reading tests, a couple of question require the test-taker to speculate on the author's thoughts, feelings, and intent. This test is well-aligned with all the other BS Tests that Common Core has inflicted on us.

Writing and Language

Well, now I just want to punch myself in the brain. This is basically an editing exercise, with a certain amount of spelling, punctuation and usage questions, along with a few tasks that involve making the stylistic choice preferred by the kind of boring white-bread dull writers whose work is favored by test manufacturers. The goal is to insure that nobody on earth could have prior knowledge of the content, so the work is often selected from the Big Book of the Most Boring Damn Pieces of Writing Ever Written, so that it's a chore just to look at their lifeless prose spread out against the page like a patient etherized upon a table.

SAT Essay

I have a sneaking suspicion that Coleman oversaw this makeover personally. You'll read a passage, explain how the author builds an argument to persuade the audience, support your explanation with evidence from the text. You have fifty whole minutes to do it and--

You won't be asked to agree or disagree with a position on a topic or to write about your personal experience.

In other words, the top scoring essays should all be close to identical.

Worst. Standardized. Writing. Test. Ever.

The only good part is that it's optional. Somehow, I don't see any colleges finding this particularly useful.

Key Content Differences

So what's actually different about the test? Well, the College Board says these are the key changes--

Words in context-- "Many questions on the new SAT focus on important, widely used words and phrases found in texts in many different subjects." I'm not sure how the College Board measures importance of words and phrases, but I do know that description sounds like part of the cover copy for the dozens of new test prep books about to come out so that people know what to put on their flashcards when they're cramming the night before.

Command of evidence-- The College Board already knows what the point of a selection is, and they already know which words and phrases in the selection are the important evidence. In effect, the College Board has figured out how to turn a multi-paragraph excerpt into a larger, trickier multiple choice question. As always, no personal thinking or interpreting allowed. Read the selection and come up with the right answer, supported by the right evidence for the right reasons.

That's exactly how college works, right??

Math that matters most-- You know I'm not a math teacher. The CB tells us what Most Important Mat is on the test. But the methodology described seems... well... "Current research shows that these areas are used disproportionately in a wide range of majors and careers." So, you know-- know only the things that will help you get a job. College is High Class Vocational Training, right? That's what an educated person is, right-- someone who knows how to leverage what they can do into a nice payday?

Also, they repeat their line about how all this will be real-world related. You know, like Ethan Fromme and Barbara Jordan's 1974 speech quoting the Federalist papers in regards to Nixon's impeachment.

Oh-- that last part goes with the new SAT focus on US Founding Documents and the Great Global Conversation they started. Really.

Expanding the market 

Of course, the context of all this is not just David Coleman's desire to impose his own vision of education on the entire country. The context is also that the College Board needs to get revenue rolling into their cash-strapped coffers.

Some of this they have accomplished by conning some states into making every student take the test. And they've had government-backed success with other products, like the AP tests that are part of some schools' evaluation. I know I'm just a simple English teacher, but I would love to sit in on the conversation where a corporate rep convinces elected representatives that it's a good idea to make all the citizens of a state buy his product. It's impressive and unprecedented.

But that's not enough-- the SAT folks are also expanding their reach by adding new testy treats, like the PSAT 8/9, "a test that will help you and your teachers figure out what you need to work on most so that you're ready for college when you graduate from high school." It tests the same stuff as the SAT, PSAT and PSAT 10 (Oh, yeah-- there's a PSAT 10, too) so that your students can be using our products throughout their entire career. Ka-ching!! And what could be better test prep than taking the test manufacturers test prep test annually?

Not enough cross-marketing? Don't forget-- the PSAT will now give you recommendations for which AP courses you should be taking! Ka-chingggggggg!!

College Board's Big Roll of the Dice

This could go great for the CB. Just as the PARCC made noises about encroaching on their territory (why don't colleges just go ahead and use Core Test scores for college admission), the SAT is now positioned to push the various Common Core Big Standardized Tests right out of the market. They've already got the product, they have the experience, and they're run by the guy who wrote half the standards you're trying to test. Plus, they already have a long standing (if unfounded) claim to being monumental measurers of post-secondary preparedness.

With so much product and government backing, they could do the Coke and Pepsi trick of pushing all other colas off the grocery store shelves.

On the other hand, even more colleges could decide to do the right thing and stop holding their future students hostage to a money-sucking test industry that still, after years of playing this game, does not predict future college success better than a student's high school grade point average. The rewrite of the SAT could be David Coleman's New Coke, finally highlighting just how obsolete and useless his product is. This could finally kill the beast.

We shall wait and see. In the meantime, I will stay obnoxiously optimistic and partially positive. Also, I'll grudgingly round up test prep materials for my suffering juniors.



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Friday, September 4, 2015

OMGZ!! SAT!!

As surely as students head off to school with shiny new trapper-keepers in hand, we must have the annual handwringing over dropping SAT scores.

Some outlets went with a bare, facts-only approach, while many went with some scary use of the "lowest point in decade" headline, a proven winner that has been winning clicks for years.

Is this exciting? Should we panic? Does it prove anything about anything?

Eliza Gray correctly notes that one way for the average score to go down is to have more and more non-wealthy students (who generally do more poorly on standardized tests) take the test. The old pattern was the panic headline would be followed by broken-out-by-group analysis that, for decades, has been pointing out that while the overall average is headed down, the averages for subgroups are headed up. But more low-scoring subgroups taking the test drag the average down. This is not nothing-- it demands a look at why some sub-groups always score low. But that's a different problem from "OMGZ!! THe Kidz is getting dumberer!!"

Unfortunately, it looks like sub-group growth reversed over the past few years (though again-- overall drop, or more low-scoring students taking the test). It is worth noting that by now, the awesomeness of Common Core and other reformster programs should be reaping rewards in heightened SAT scores, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I can think of a zillion reasons for that non-result. Pick your favorite.

But keep in mind that the upcoming SAT will be super-duper Common Core attuned. This is truly one of the most awesomely audacious scams in the history of ever. David Coleman rewrites the nation's standards (and curriculum) to fit what he thinks an educated person should be, and then he goes to head up the College Board and rewrite the SAT so that his test measures how great his standards are. There is no question that Coleman has the most massive brass cojones in the world.

Here's how Gray puts it {with corrections]

In an effort to make the test more reflective of what [David Coleman said] students [should] do in high school—and therefore make preparing for standardized tests [from David Coleman's company] a more productive exercise in getting ready for college—the SAT is launching a [Coleman-directed] redesigned test in March...

But we really need to remember that the College Board is not, as Gray sadly suggests by her treatment of them, some sort of impartial arbiter of college readiness. They are a company with products to sell-- products that are grouped around the issue of college readiness. More specifically, they are a company concerned about growing their revenue stream and market share.

The Connecticut Post did one of the better jobs covering the annual story-like event, including talking to Bob Schaeffer of FairTest. Here's a fun juxtaposition:

While Schaeffer points to the growing number of colleges that have have dropped ACT/SAT requirements, Coleman points to the growing number of states giving the SAT to all high students.

In other words, "Neener, neener, we found a way to work around that problem with our product sales." The College Board has done an outstanding job of getting government to serve as a College Board marketing department. Some states (such as mine) now count AP course offerings toward school ratings. Others have been convinced to buy the SAT test product for every student. There is no real reason to believe that any of these things actually improve education, but they sure do wonders for the College Board revenue stream. It's like Ford convincing the feds to require all teachers to drive a Taurus to work.

So, there are many questions raised by this annual exercise in chicken-littling. Are SAT scores truly dropping? What is causing this drop, if it's actually happening? If this year's scores are so meaningful, why are students taking a different SAT next year?

But I would propose a different question: Why should anyone (who isn't financially invested in the College Board) care?

Sure, you care about how your own child did (though maybe you really shouldn't worry all that much). But do the big picture figures tell us anything about anything that we need to care about? That, unfortunately, will not take up much of the frantic score coverage.

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Wednesday, October 8, 2014

SAT: Going Nowhere Fast

The latest news from the College Board folks has been widely published since being released (see here and here). The lede in most cases is that SAT performance is flat, followed by breathless concern that not enough students are taking advantage of opportunities to be college and career ready (which seems to mean, generally, that they aren't consuming enough of the College Board product line).

Three thoughts here:

 One. What other corporation in America does such a good job spinning its marketing reports as legitimate news?

Seriously. If Ford has a drop in sales, they don't manage to get writers across America to wax rhapsodic about the state of automotive transportation, or decry the gap that leaves so many people without a vehicle. And they certainly don't get writers to talk about Ford as if it were the only company producing cars.

But somehow every time the College Board makes another bid for more market share, it's treated as a referendum on the State of American Education. I'll give David Coleman this-- he and his people sure know how to sell shit.

Two. Do you mean to tell me that after the years of Common Core high stakes corporate education reformster baloney, SAT scores haven't gone up??!! Are you saying that a product which markets itself as the premiere arbiter of college readiness says that our students are no more college ready than they used to be? You mean to say that Common Core didn't fix everything??!! I'm shocked. Shocked!!

It's particularly notable that coverage has studiously avoided mentioning that David Coleman, College Board Head Honcho, is also David Coleman, Common Core Architect. In fine government-revolving-door style he has positioned himself to profit from his own regulatory work, and yet, nothing has budged. Both the test results and the SAT market share are stuck.

Three. Corporate baloney. Cyndie Schmeiser, College Board chief of assessment, declares the low performance level "a critically low level" that cannot be tolerated. The whole release this time ties together all the College Board products, with reports on the PSAT and AP classes.

Why put it all together? Nick Anderson at the Washington Post suggests that the College Board is trying to transfer some of the sheen of their better-performing products onto the flailing and failing SAT, which is now the nation's number TWO college entrance exam (though you would not know that from any of the "coverage" we're seeing).

This fits the CB overall plan, which has featured ideas like using PSATs to generate AP "recommendations" sent directly to parents to try to create some market pressure. Coleman repeats his mantra that we don't need more tests-- we need more opportunities. And by "opportunities" we mean "opportunities to give the College Board money."

It reminds me that David Coleman's College Board career is an odd second act, his previous work writ small. Pretend to be trying to launch a movement rooted in social justice and educational opportunity when you're really just a corporate marketer, shilling for a product and a profit.


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Friday, July 18, 2014

David Coleman To Fix Inequality in America

David Coleman is here (well, not here here-- he's actually in Aspen) to explain how the College Board is going to recapture market share by synergistically monetizing its products break down the walls of inequality in education.

David Coleman (Common Core writer and current president of the College Board) is deeply concerned with fairness. Huffington Post has a report from the Aspen Institute (because "let's solve America's social problems" is so often associated with "let's go to Aspen") on Coleman's "conversation" with Jane Stoddard Williams of Bloomberg EDU, and the excerpts presented give us a picture of how Coleman plans to boost the College Board's bottom line bring educational equality to the US.

He is sure to tout his free test prep deal with Kahn Academy, by which the College Board will get a foot firmly in every door of the market make test preparation available to every student in America. (Perhaps the new SAT will include references to pieces of 21st Century wisdom such as the new idea that when it comes to websites, if you're not paying for it, the product is you.)

But Coleman's not here primarily to tout the new means of amassing data on every college-bound student in America free SAT prep, though he says it's an example of how the College Board is "leaning into" challenges. There's also a hefty chunk of conversation where Coleman artfully inserts himself in an imaginary conversation between imaginary test critics and imaginary test proponents; it's a pretty clever way to position himself as a perfectly reasonable guy trying to find a middle way in the midst of this contentious and imaginary debate. But that's not why he's here. He's here to talk about AP.


When we worry, perhaps rightly, that assessment can discriminate, let's remember that there's another thing that we know ... that can discriminate more, which is adults.

Yup. That's the problem. Because Coleman says he has learned from "my work in K-12" that we've got to change our game. And that test anxiety is bad. And, using one of his new marketing slogans educational insights, American students don't need more tests, they need more opportunities.

And let's give Coleman credit-- he hasn't said anything that's particularly wrong. What the most capable of reformsters understand is this simple process:

       1) Say something true as a premise
       2) Do something awful that does not actually follow from #1 at all

Coleman's genius marketing idea solution to educational inequality is to take human bias out of the equation and replace it with hidden human bias and testing.

See, he's worried that African-Americans and women and Latinos are missing out on the chance to give College Board their money the opportunity to take AP courses. But it turns out that a great predictor of AP success is the PSAT!! So let's use the previously maligned and increasingly skipped-over PSAT as a marketing booster for AP a means of finding worthy students. AP, we are to understand, is a massive cash cow for the College Board a doorway to opportunity, and if we get more students into AP courses it will be a great payday for the College Board step forward for America.

So let's use the PSAT to generate sales leads AP course recommendations. Let's send letters to parents and lists to guidance departments and let's get students moved into those courses by the carload.

Look, the lack of minorities and women in certain fields is a legitimate problem, and it's a problem the education world should be addressing, and addressing aggressively. But the fact that Coleman can correctly diagnose the disease does not mean we should keep listening when he says, "So you should buy a bottle of Dr. Coleman's Miracle Cure, made of oil squeezed from the finest snakes in Arabia."

 We knew this was coming. The Coleman College Board is a business that has leveraged some genius marketing strategies; who else has found the giant brass balls to get their product made part of state policy (well, other than Common Core-- one more reason Coleman's new job makes sense). And if AP were as great as it says, or at least benign, that would be swell. But even as the College Board struggles to regain market share, they are also working feverishly to mess with their products. The SAT has been redesigned to match the Core, and AP courses have begun a transition from loosely structured high-quality courses to CCSS-aligned tightly structured products in a box.

But Coleman's recasting of the College Board quest for new markets as a drive for social justice is the work of a master salesman. Coleman may not know jack about education, but he can sling bullshit like a pro probably change the world with his audacious plan to sell the solution to reviving College Board's revenue stream social and economic justice.
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Saturday, May 24, 2014

Will "AP" Stand for "Assessment Prep"?

In Which I Have To Take Back Some of the Nice Things I Said About AP Courses

When I last wrote about the AP courses, I praised the looseness of the course design. I should have known better. Alert readers pointed me at the news from AP-land; apparently the looseness is now seen as a design flaw to be fixed.

Some courses, like the Literature and Composition, still sum up the basics in a half-dozen pages. But courses are being redesigned. AP US History is due to roll out new and shiny next fall, and its course summary is now close to 100 pages. Why the added detail?

 The redesign of the AP U.S. History course and exam accomplishes two major goals: it maintains AP U.S. History's strong alignment with the knowledge and skills taught in introductory courses at the college level, and also offers teachers the flexibility to focus on specific historical topics, events, and issues in depth.

Yes, by providing a more specific and detailed course outline, the College Board folks will be giving teachers more flexibility, much like a straightjacket provides more freedom and ignorance is strength. In fact, "the lack of specificity put pressure on many teachers: uncertain about what the AP Exam would assess, they attempted to cover every detail of American history."

The AP folks have been working to erase some of that uncertainty for a while now. If you haven't looked under the AP hood in a while, you may not know that for the past five years or so, the College Board has required that all wannabe AP teachers must submit their syllabus for an audit annually. If that seems like a great deal of work, the College Board offers sample annotated syllabi-- in other words, you can now get AP courses in a can. In the case of AP History, it's a nineteen page can.

But if we look under the new extended course framework hood, what do we find? Some conservatives, like the folks at the Heartland Institute, a righty thinky tanky, think we find a newly biased version of history. The framework breaks the course into four areas. Let's look at each:

I. Historical Thinking Skills

These are just what the title implies-- various skills useful in organizing and interpreting historical information, like being able to determine plausible cause and effect linkage. I would be happy to teach this stuff. No problems here.

II. Thematic Learning Objectives

Now it gets dicey. Whether we're talking about the history of the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire or the history of Bob and Ethel's tempestuous dating relationship, we're going to make some judgments about what themes/factors drive the narrative. My college history professor said 19th century European history was all about war, nationalism, class, and...um, something else. (What do you want from me? It was a long time ago!) And that in itself was a judgment.

I was going to get specific here, but there are seven large thematic objectives and each is broken down into several more for a grand total of  fifty specific learning objectives, for example:

Analyze how changing religious ideals, Enlightenment beliefs, and republican thought shaped the politics, culture, and society of the colonial era through the early Republic

Fifty of those, so basically one a week. Holy smokes.

III. The Concept Outline

Uh-oh. Here's the part that's going to start to piss people off.

This breaks down the historical periods that teachers are supposed to use, and provides the conclusions that the students are supposed to reach. For instance:

Reinforced by a strong belief in British racial and cultural superiority, the British system enslaved black people in perpetuity, altered African gender and kinship relationships in the colonies, and was one factor that led the British colonists into violent confrontations with native peoples. 

This outline is exceptionally specific, and notable for what it does and doesn't include. It favors economic factors, and is not very interested in social or cultural matters. It isn't interested in military history at all-- wars appear briefly but little is said about how they are fought and won. The outline was also clearly not the product of any historians who believe in the Great Man theory of history-- very few individuals appear at all. Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan are barely seen in relation to the historic moments associated with them. The closer we get to modern times, the more evident are the attempts to touch all the properly balanced or politically correct, depending on how you feel about such things. We cover Japanese-American internment camps, but not the national collective actions to support the fight against the Nazis. And if you think God helped make America great, you will not love the new AP version.

I'm not prepared to argue that any of these things absolutely need to be included in a summary of US history. It's very much open to debate, or at least it's open to debate any place other than in an AP History class. In this large section, the AP folks have imposed one specific reading of American history. Here comes the straightjacket of flexibility for AP History teachers.

Speaking of which, the section begins with a nice outline that tells us how much instructional time to devote to each period, and how much of the test will cover the indicated span.

 IV. An intro to the test itself. Let's let that be.

 This is going to anger some folks on the right (and it should anger the left as well). The same people who think creationism should be taught in science class will object to this outline's omission of America's exceptional God-given role in the world, or the implicit criticism of America in some of the goals. They are wrong. Some things just have no basis in fact and there's no reason for us to teach them in school.

But they will be right about one thing-- they will call this course outline biased, and in that they will be correct. And when studying history, I don't care whether your bias is widely accepted or Crazypants McFringebob-- part of the whole point of doing history is the give-and-take, back-and-forth, argue-and-support of differing viewpoints about exactly what happened, why it happened, why it mattered, and what happened next because of it. Real authentic history is about the never-ending wrestling matches over these questions-- not the learning to accept the answers that a current authority offers.

Beyond that-- remember back at the top when the College Board said that one benefit of this reboot would be more time to study pieces of history in greater depth? Can we talk about the history of coming up with that claim, because it had to have involved being on some historically strong drugs. Who knew that AP would turn into the class where teachers said, "Boy, I'd like to continue this discussion, but it's Tuesday and we have to move on the next unit right now."

Somehow the College Board (now run by our old buddy David Coleman) has taken AP US History from a loose framework for college-level inquiry and deep freewheeling study and exploration to a hog-tied tightly dictated connect-the-dots learn by numbers course.

But teachers can rest easy, knowing that they will now be able to do a better than ever job of prepping students to take the US History AP test.

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Sunday, February 9, 2014

The New CCSS SAT

I just got a peek at the new Colemanized CCSS-enriched SATs.

Not a precise peek. I am a member on several take-a-survey sites (for a little click and scroll, I earn us some magazine subscriptions), and because I'm registered as a high school teacher, I just got to take a market survey about the SAT tests.

Understand that what I saw were market research questions, and therefor may represent things which may or may not come to fruition. But these were not "is this a good idea" questions-- these were "what's the most appealing way to word this" questions. Here's what I saw.

After making sure I knew what the SAT was and what it stands for (there seems to be some question about whether to keep having the letters stand for something, kind of like KFC), the first round of questions asked me to consider some naming possibilities for two new tests-- 

·  Grade 8/9 - a low-stakes college and career readiness assessment for early high school planning

·  Grade 10/11 - a college and career readiness assessment for mid-high school planning

So, two new products to roll out.

Then we moved on to some new language to consider for the revised version of the SAT test. There were questions that involved the same boilerplate language we've seen with CCSS. Most of these were asked twice-- first to gauge whether a description of the new test items was appealing, and second to consider specific language. Here's one sample:


The revised SAT will be based on the skills and knowledge that research shows to be essential for students’ college and career readiness and success. These are the same skills and knowledge that teachers focus on today in __________ classrooms. The revised SAT will be more focused than ever and support teachers in their work by encouraging students’ daily practice of the work that matters most.

Your four fill-in-the-blank choices are:

*the best
*the most effective
*the most challenging
*the most rigorous 

Another fill-in-the-blank question included this language:

We revised the SAT using a robust research base and in partnership with high school teachers.

Their point-- the revised SAT will reflect the best instruction going on in classrooms, so taking the very best classes will be the very best preparation. Remember that point.

More language about the new test:

The {new/revised/etc} SAT will be based on the skills and knowledge that research shows to be essential for students' college and career readiness and success. These are the same skills and knowledge that teachers focus on today in the most effective classrooms.

David Coleman (architect of the language side of CCSS) is doing his best to lock down the very definition of what good teaching is. Good teaching is what the SAT measures, and the SAT measures good teaching. The word you're looking for is tautology.

All of this was pretty much expected, but there were two fun wrinkles additionally.

One is simply marketing. Language of another question indicates that the PSAT (which will "help students take advantage of the opportunities they have created through their hard work") will also now include access to APO Potential, a service that will tell students about the AP course "in which they would be likely to succeed." Yes, the PSAT (a College Board product) will now include marketing for AP courses (another College Board product).

The other surprise for me was in that 8th grade PPPPSAT. Language in a question described it as a tool for determining if your child is on track to be college-ready. 

Got that? Somebody thinks they have a test that can actually predict whether a thirteen year old is going to be successful in college or not. 

Remember how we always argue that comparing US education to other country's is unfair because other countries track their students into college and career paths from an early age? Apparently the College Board has figured out how to fix that.

The overall picture is the same one I've expected since Coleman moved to the College Board-- their testing programs will be one more attempt to lock all of US public education into the CCSS worldview. Do we need more tests, aligned in unproven ways to the unresearched standards? No, no we don't. But I don't think it will be too much longer before the College Board folks are doing their best to convince us otherwise. Given the growing blowback on CCSS in general and testing linked to it in particular, these could be interesting times. Get your seat early, because the emperor is about to bet the farm on a motorcycle ride in his new clothes.
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