Tuesday, April 12, 2016

The Benefits of Career and Tech Education

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has released a study on the benefits of Career and Technical Education, and it is both terribly wrong and beautifully right.

"Career and Technical Education in High School: Does It Improve Student Outcomes?" was produced by Shaun Dougherty at the University of Connecticut, and it asks exactly that question-- which is kind of the wrong question unless we take a generously broad view of what "student outcomes" means.

The study is based on data from Arkansas, a state that has both pushed CTE and collected a bunch of data on its students over the years-- which in and of itself might give us pause, but let's move on for the moment.

The study opens with a look at what has become of CTE studies over the years, noting that the emphasis on college-for-all and the narrowing of focus to math and English (because Big Standardized Tests with high stakes attached) have put the crunch on CTE studies. But Arkansas has come up with what, on paper at least, is an organized approach, starting with broad industry clusters that narrow all the way down through career pathways to specific courses of study. The three most popular areas of concentration in Arkansas are business, family & consumer sciences, and agriculture.

Daugherty found that students who took more CTE coursework were more likely to graduate, more likely to attend a two-year college, and more likely to be employed after high school. He also found they made more money, but more money here seems to mean either $28 to $45 per quarter which is not peanuts but not enough to write home about.

The report is confused about causation versus correlation. This comes through in headlines like "The more CTE courses students take, the better their education and labor market outcomes" which is meticulously correct while being simultaneously misleading. The most obvious explanation (particularly to those of us who teach career and tech students) is that students who are motivated to follow a CTE path in high school will continue to be motivated to follow that path after high school. Success is self-selecting. There's no reason to believe that slapping the aimless, unmotivated challenge children of a high school into CTE courses would suddenly produce success. Nevertheless, the recommendations of the report are A) that Arkansas stay the course and B) other states pursue CTE education more aggressively and widely.

However, here's the thing-- the study is asking the absolutely wrong question, but arriving at what I believe is the correct answer.



The question is not, "Do career and tech course improve student outcomes?" The question is, "Do career and tech courses meet student needs."

The relationship between a student's course of study and their goals, dreams and eventual place in the world is complicated and subtle. Slamming every student into an Honors English course will not make every one of those students suddenly dream of going to college as an English major, though it may inspire and nudge a few in that direction. But my goal as an English teacher has never been to create an army of English majors, but to help foster students who are headed at a wide variety of destinations and who are all a little better at reading, writing, speaking and listening than when they arrived in my classroom.

Likewise, making every single student sign up for welding will not automatically result in an army of welders.

Any educational plan that does not factor in the hopes, dreams, goals, talents and abilities of the students involved is a stupid, worthless, and probably unethical plan.

It is the privilege and right of every individual human being to choose a destination on the other side of the education forest. It is the privilege and duty of the education system to provide an assortment of paths that will aid the student in getting to their chosen destination (or, in many cases, help the student figure out what destination they would prefer and allow them to change paths without having to backtrack). The metaphorical problem with the college-for-all emphasis is that we then make some students try to get to the Meadow of Welding by way of College Prep Lane, which is way out of their way.

My school district is a part of a county-wide co-op of districts that together have run a career and tech school for over forty years. It started as a standard vocational-technical school and has evolved with the times, and many of my students attend. I am always surprised when I discover a school district doesn't have such a program-- why would you not?

I know part of the answer. Vocational, technical, and career education suffer from a deficit model-- studying welding is for students who aren't smart enough, focused enough, good enough to take honors courses. That's dead wrong. CTE education may serve students with different interests and skill sets, but "different from" is NOT the same as "less than." Imagine a world where a guidance counselor shakes her head sadly and says, "Well, Chris just can't handle working with power tools, so we'll stick Chris in AP Calculus and hope for the best."For my students, the career path is not their Plan B because they can't hack academically focused classes, but their Plan A because it takes them where they want to go.

And I suspect that some defenders of public ed will be put off by this report, thinking that it sounds like a method of grooming more drones for the corporate mill. It certainly has the potential to be abused that way, but I believe providing this sort of path for the students who set these sort of vocational and career goals is absolutely the right thing to do.

The Fordham is correct-- every student in America should have access to these programs, because not every student in America wants, needs or is inclined toward a bachelor's degree. The built in pro-college bias in public ed is certainly not new, but the college ready (with "and career" added as a quick afterthought) push of reform has not helped. We need a clear and deliberate path available for all those students who would prefer to pursue, as Mike Rowe put it, the work that makes civilized life possible for the rest of us.

The Fordham is confused, in that the Common Core, test-driven policies that they so love work directly against CTE. The Core was absolutely designed as a let's-get-everyone-ready-for-college, and the last minute attempt to tack on "career ready" to plug the gaping PR hole didn't change the fact that the Core-flavored Big Standardized Tests are absolutely useless in determining whether a student is successful on a CTE track. Worse, as widely and repeatedly noted, the BS Tests have created pressure to squeeze out everything that's not test prep math and English-- and that includes CTE. When it comes to CTE, Fordham is literally one of its own worst enemies.

The Fordham is incorrect in asserting that the value of CTE can be measured by looking for improved student outcomes. This suggests that CTE (or any other program) needs to be justified and sold based on its utility in improving some sort of metric for some sort of report for some sort of overseers of public ed. That approach simply repeats the common reformsters mistake of turning education on its head and requiring students to serve the institution.

No-- career and tech education is valuable because it serves the needs of a large sector of the student population, and does so in the setting of public schools where students can easily exercise choices when it comes to switching or blending the many kinds of tracks available to them. There's more to say for extending that thought, but let's not go there now, because the most important part is the first part-- career and tech education is valuable because it serves the needs of many students. Period.


Monday, April 11, 2016

PA: Budget Pain Continues

You may recall that in the previous episode of Keystone Budgetary Follies, the Pennsylvania GOP-controlled legislature passed an not-too-delightful budget which Governor Tom Wolf neither signed nor vetoed, resulting in a budget adopted by default. Not very pretty, and lots of losers, but at least the long nightmare is over, right?

Well, no.

Governor Wolf did veto the fiscal code, which is basically the instructions for how to divvy up the giant pile of money dedicated to particular sectors. So there is an increase in spending on Pennsylvania education-- there just isn't any agreement on exactly who is going to be on the receiving end.

The GOP has staked out their rhetorical point, which is that by throwing out their spiffy formula, Wolf is creating winners and losers in the budget game.

This is both true and not true.

Pennsylvania's funding inequality is the worst. The. Worst. Google "Pennsylvania school funding worst" to see the many people who have said so. Or if you're a chart fan, there's this:











We have the mess that is Philadelphia. We have Chester Uplands, a district that has been bled so dry by charter schools that teachers worked without pay for a while. And we have almost a decade's history of cutting school funding. That funding slash is often laid at GOP Governor Tom Corbett's, but it's not that simple-- Corbett's predecessor Dem Ed Rendell used stimulus money to replace pubic ed tax dollars, creating a funding bomb that went off as soon as the stimulus money ended, and that bomb went off under Corbett's, whose response was to try Funny Accounting Tricks (let's count teacher pension payments as education funding) to cover up the fact that he was trying to fix a hole by shoveling deeper. On top of all that, the state government has a teacher pension balloon payment coming due, and our charter funding system only makes sense if you are a charter operator trying to get rich.

So, yes. We have issues.

Wolf's proposal is to attempt restorative funding. Here's how Newsworks reported it:

Wolf argues that districts disproportionately hurt by cuts that occurred under former Gov. Tom Corbett should be made whole before adopting the new formula.

"Right now, only 4 percent of districts across the state have seen their funding restored to 2010-11 levels, and we're over $370 million short of fully restoring the cuts," said Wolf spokesman Jeff Sheridan.

So we'd like to get everybody caught up before we start moving everybody forward. Except that everybody is behind, and some are more behinder than others, and we don't have enough money budgeted to catch everyone up.

The new budget gives the governor about $200 million to work with. A little over a third of that ($76.8 million) is going to Philadelphia. Pittsburgh, Wilkinsburg and Chester-Uplands also get a big boost. On the one hand, this makes sense because those are the big marquee Districts In Trouble in PA. On the other hand, there are a whole lot of other districts (including Wolf's hometown of York) that are also in a mess, and would have done better under the GOP plan.

So let the fighting over the pie begin. Or rather, continue.

School funding in PA runs across one of our touchiest nerves. The commonwealth is split between rural and urban, and that split is reflected in just about every aspect of Pennsylvania life, specifically in the way that rural and small town Pennsylvanians feel rolled over, used, and ignored by the big cities. On most days, it can seem as if every organization that has a state level presence, from athletic conferences to churches to the various state departments to the state teachers union-- everyone of them can seem heavily tilted toward the urban centers. Just take a look at our (heavily gerrymandred) Congressional districts


So yes-- rural Pennsylvanians are lumped in with people who are a three-hour drive away, while Philly gets a Congressman on every block. Yes. Population numbers. We know. We know. Like residents of rural western states we've heard it a hundred times-- because we don't live tightly packed together, we are entitled to less.

Rural Pennsylvania is highly attuned to the sound of someone saying, "Hey, we're going to need some of your money to go provide [fill in the blank] for Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or Harrisburg." And our sensitivity to that runs beyond financial issues. In my neighborhood, we are used to having companies market to us as if we're a suburb of Pittsburgh, even though it is 80ish miles and 90+ driving minutes away. It is further annoying that so many people act not as if we are in Pittsburgh, but as if we want to be, and should. Of course everyone wants to live in the big beautiful city. But no-- if we had wanted to pay the price in cost and trouble and expense of living in the Big City, we would have moved there.

You see where this is headed. "We want to raise your taxes so we can fix the schools in Philadelphia," is not going to be an easy sell anywhere in the state. Yes, under the new budget-ish spending kind-of-a-plan, every district gets some sort of increase. With any luck, it might be enough to offset the costs of riding out the 9-month budget impasse.

But by lowballing the costs of fixing education funding in PA, the legislature has guaranteed and ugly fight and a solution-- no matter whose it is-- that will be unfair to someone. Meanwhile, as always, because the state funds schools so inadequately, the slack will be picked up (or not) by the local taxpayers. The one thing Harrisburg has always done well is pushing the hard work of tax collecting and weathering the public discontent that goes with it out to the local school officials.

The legislature could have found some more money by addressing its charter problems. Specifically, they could have cut the cyber charter industry without a dime, which would be an appropriate response for a business that has failed at providing academic achievement or fiduciary responsibility. Instead, it's Christmas time in charter land.

And if this isn't all messy enough, remember that alllllllll of this mess is about the budget year that we are months away from completing. We still have to fix next year's budget, and since nobody anywhere in Harrisburg appears to have learned anything from last/this year's budget fiasco, I am not hopeful.

So how will the $200 million pie be cut, and who will be left with just a bit of crust? What sorts of maneuvers will be attempted at the state capital to spin all of this into more political gold (or at least gold-painted road apples). I don't claim to know the best path through all of this morass, which would not bother me quite so much (there are plenty of things I don't know) if I thought someone in Harrisburg was trying to find the answer. But I'm not sure anyone there even understands the question yet, which is, "How do you fix one of the most broken school funding systems in the USA?"



Sunday, April 10, 2016

HYH: Kindergarten Suspensions

The third installment of Jennifer Berkshire and Aaron French's podcast Have You Heard is out, and it is again must-listen journalism.

Kindergarten suspensions are a thing. Sending five year olds home because they won't behave "properly" is a thing. In fact, the numbers are shocking. In this episode, Berkshire talks to a woman whose five year old child was suspended from school fifteen times. Fifteen. Times. The story is heart-breaking, because the school seemingly did everything possible to make things worse. Out-of-classroom suspension into a room much like a cell. A child with big feelings made to feel like the worst thing imaginable was happening to him-- yet still expected to keep himself under control and well-behaved.

I feel the impact of this issue personally. My son was a young five when his mother and I sent him off to kindergarten, and he ended up with a teacher who thought that five year olds who got to school before the opening bell should sit silently in their seats with hands folded while she finished getting ready for the day. He attended in the same district where I work, so I was inside the system, and it was still hard to get answers and find solutions, and to this day I regret that I did not trust the school less and stamp my feet more. I should have fought harder for him. Suggestions were made that maybe he was ADHD or otherwise messed up, and I kick myself that I seriously considered any of it for five minutes. I should have gotten him to safety sooner, out of a place where all he was learning was that school was terrible and that he was a bad boy. It is one of the biggest failures in my life.

And I repeat-- I'm an educated teacher, and I was inside the system, with all the privilege and connection that goes with that. And even I was slow to realize was that what this teacher was telling me, without realizing it, was not that my son had a problem, but that she didn't know how to work with five year olds.

So I cannot imagine how hard, how challenging, how heartbreaking it is to hear over and over that allegedly professional educators, people you believe you can trust, think there might be something wrong with your kid, to watch the bubbling and energetic spirit crushed, to see a gigantic and full heart somehow turned into a liability instead of an asset. And my son was never actually suspended; I just can't imagine. Fifteen times. I can't even. I would like to send the mother in this podcast the biggest hug in the world.

Listen to this story-- it's not long, but it's necessary to understand how this phenomenon, which seems merely remarkable as a statistical data point, plays out for real live humans on the ground.

Naked Education Profiteering

Do you like your education reform stripped of its tiniest figleafs, thrusting its ample and unrestrained flesh into the light in hopes of getting just one more dollar tossed at its feet? Well, then, meet the Education Industry Association.










The EIA has simple goals. From their website:

Since 1990, the EIA has worked to expand business opportunities for education entrepreneurs of all sizes in pre K-12 markets. Benefits include federal-state-local advocacy, public relations support, professional development, peer-to-peer networking and much more.

EIA is led by "a talented and diverse group of member-entrepreneurs," with a board headed up by Robert Lytle of the Parthenon Group, and including representatives of MaverixLab, Schnabel Learning Center, SABIS Education Systems, GEMS Education, and SmartStart Education, to name a few. Oh, and the Dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, which might explain this ad currently on their front page:

Yes, getting your educational enterprise certified as okee-dokee by Johns-Hopkins is a "marketing opportunity." Which is pretty much how these folks think.







Who belongs to a group like this? Oddly, the membership listing page is empty. Though plenty of organization names are sprinkled around the site, tending to be a consulting outfit like Parthenon or some sort of edu-service provider. National Heritage Academies and Charter Schools USA are on the leadership board. Scholastic Traits Writing is a sponsor.

But we know what membership costs and what the benefits are.  Dues are tuned to your edu-business's revenues, so an "emerging" business doing under $50K can join for $495 a year, while the platinum members with revenues of more than $7 million join for $6,300. These dues get them such goodies as "government relations support" and "public relations/communications support" as well as other networking bonuses.

Perhaps best of all, though, is that membership at any level at all gets you a spot at EIA's annual festival of education profiteering, EDVentures. We can still take a look at the 2015 schedule and line-up, and boy does it sound... inspirational. Let's skim some highlights.

Pre-conference, on Wednesday morning, there was an Innovation Lab Competition, where edupreneurs could network and compete for backing for their latest bright idea, with entrepreneurial feedback-- so kind of like a science fair and an episode of Shark Tank combined.

Then the sessions began. Here are some of the most promising:

John Stuppy (MBA, PhD, CEO) of EDUMETRIX  on "Grow Your Business and Prepare To Sell." I'm going to quote liberally form the preview, because it's a good preview of where this convention's heart and head are located:

Attend this session and learn how your business can hit aggressive sales and profit goals and increase your customer base fast with RFP's, large district sales, business development and strategic partnerships. These strategies have helped EIA members grow, add new revenue sources and dominate their market. John will introduce a powerful process to identify your highest return on investment (ROI) opportunities and achieve maximum results with minimum cost and risk. You'll also learn invaluable tips on how to prepare your company for the best exit, maximum sale price and best package.

There is just no portion of that which does not sound awesome, though it is extra-special that the idea is to have an exit strategy before you even begin.

Four PhD's from Johns Hopkins were there to explain what a benefit it is for your business to get third-party evaluators to "produce evidence" that your product is awesome, which will help "differentiate" it in the marketplace. JHU and its Center for Research and Reform in Education covered their many services.

That day ended with Game Night, which seemed to include drinking, networking, and winning at some games, though it's not clear if they were playing Gin Rummy or Monopoly or Pin the ROI on the Taxpayer.

Thursday AM started with a motivational session with Olympian Ryan Millar (volleyball-- I had to look it up) who now runs some sort of consulting biz and will teach folks how to "create a culture of accountability to achieve individual and organizational results."

Then a session on "The Art and Science of Selling Professional Development Services" which emphasized how to create relationships and the "key component" of selling your PD, which is not, as you might have imagined, how good the PD is, but is "understanding funding sources."

Former CNN Executive Producer for Education Donna Krache was there. Now head of the MindRocket Media Group, she was there to give attendees "practical tips for enlisting media to promote your business."

Thursday afternoon also included a session on how to scale up your business and how to find the real decision-makers in a district and target them for best sales impact. Thursday afternoon also included a session that actually talked about students, focusing on how academic coaching could used as a tool "both for supporting students and as a business growth opportunity."

But perhaps the most astonishing session of the day, if not the convention, was "Evaluating K-12 Resources to Serve the Underserved." The blurb for this starts with a... well, let's say "bracingly honest" sentence. "Socio-economic changes in student populations are redefining our possibilities for market share." More poor non-white children in school means more money-making possibilities for us. Way to be warriors for social justice, guys.

Friday, to wrap things up, Anthony Crosby, Coordinator of Prince William County Schools in Virginia was there to make sure we "know how to leverage procurement strategies for opportunity and success."

The group also sponsors EI Days, a more politically oriented conference that happens in DC (they've been doing that one for only fifteen years). This year's EDVenture conference will be on July 27-29th at the Liason Hotel in DC, and I fully expect to miss it.

I concede that the education world cannot simply be fluffy bunnies carried to happy clouds by friendly unicorns, divorced from any understanding of How Business Gets Done in the world. But it's one thing to be aware of the realities of business and another thing to have reality bumping and grinding its pasty naked flesh under harsh fluorescent lights while you are trying to eat lunch. And I give the EIA people points for honesty-- at least they're not trying to pretend that they're interested in education for any reason other than to make a buck.

But this is still part of the disease, a symptom of the creeping malady that causes far too many people to look at students and see nothing but stacks of dollars. If your primary concern is not student needs or actual educational quality, then maybe you'd better just put on your clothes, go home, and let the rest of us get back to work.




ICYMI: Selected Reading from the Interwebs

 Somehow the snow is piled up outside my door, so it seems like a good day to do some reading.

I Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump

One of the better entries in the burgeoning "why the hell is this Trump thing happening" genre.

Stick a Fork in Common Core-- It's Done

From Joy Pullman at the Federalist, a rather feisty but very thorough case for the claim that Common Core is now toast. Don't always agree with Pullman's politics, but I have to respect the snark.


North Carolina: Seeming Rather Than Being

On the Baptist News Global site, a well-reasoned and thoughtful look at the big pile of Wrong that is North Carolina's LGBT law.

A Disturbing Trend in School Integration Programs

One more piece taking note that when it comes to integration, we have sailed off the rails and into the weeds.


High Stakes Testing Holds the Most Powerful the Least Accountable 

Steven Singer has repeatedly and eloquently made the point that test-driven accountability has actually narrowed the accountability focus and taken it away from some people who should be shouldering that burden.

Our Voices Were Heard, But They Were Ignored 

A Boston student guest posts at Edushyster and delivers some hard truth about the recent Boston student protests and the budget cuts that prompted them. 


A Field Guide To Testing Advocates

Now that we have entered testing season, it's time to track the annual explosion of testing advocates as they spread far and wide in their attempt to stem the opt out tide and support the test manufacturing industry. While testocrats and test advocates may all seem indistinguishable, they actually come in many shapes and forms. Here's your guide to identifying the particular brand of test pushers in your neighborhood.













The Tests See All. The new standardized tests can measure deep insight, critical thinking, broad understanding, blood sugar, and future happiness. It may seem that the test reports just a give a number that's just a digital letter grade, with prescriptions like "The student should read better," but if you stare at these reports very hard, you can see every drop and detail of the students' mind.

The Tests Will Reveal What Was Previously Unknowable. Teachers, parents and students would never have the slightest idea how the students were doing in school if not for the Big Standardized Test. Parents and teachers are dopes who think that spending time with the students actually gives them some special information, when of course only a test manufactured and scored by people who have never laid eyes on the students could possibly reveal what those students know or can do.

The Tests Bring Social Justice. By giving non-wealthy non-white students the same test as wealthy white students, we will erase the achievement gap, because testing teaches students to do better. Once the achievement gap is erased, poor students will attend college and from there they will all become VP's of major corporations, minimum wages will rise, systemic racism will disappear, and social justice will rule the land. None of this can happen if you don't take the test.

The Tests Force Politicians To Solve Problems. Once we have actual data showing that this poor school in a poor neighborhood gets poor test results, politicians will have no choice but to get the school the support it needs. Or they could take support away from it and give that support to some charter school that works with a few of the original students. Or they could close it. So by taking the test, your community's school definitely gets a chance to get the help it needs to face its problems, unless it just gets kicked in the teeth instead.

The Tests Will Shape Up These Lazy Kids. Kids these days are slackers and weaklings and have been protected by their mommies. Not taking the test is just more coddling; they need to suck it up and learn about the part of life that involves pointless bureaucratic tasks. These kids whine too much about everything. Not only should they go ahead and take the damn test, but we should probably punch each one in the mouth while the test is going on.

The Tests Will Root Out Those Awful Teachers. Look, the only reason there is an opt out movement is because teachers hate education and students and don't want to get caught sucking, so they have suckered hundreds of thousands of parents who are now just acting as the union's puppets. Anyone who opts out is just protecting a crappy teacher. So your kid suffers a little and wastes some of her time. It's worth it to find proof that teachers are awful and need to be fired and the union broken and all of them just put in their place.


The Tests Are Preparation for the Real World. Hey, life is all about tests. Remember that standardized test you had to take before you could start dating your current spouse? Or how at your workplace you stop working every week or two to take a standardized test that shows how well you're doing your job? Remember how your mom used to make you pass a standardized test before she would feed you, read you a bed time story, or give you a hug? Life is all about the standardized testing.

The Tests Are Just Like Doctors' Tests. When you go to the doctor's office, she gives you a test. She uses her knowledge of your history to choose from among the thousand of tests developed and tested by other trained physicians to develop a picture of exactly what issues you are facing and how to treat them. This is exactly like that, except instead of thousands of tests, there''s just one test used for everything from heart disease to knee injuries to cancer, and instead of that test having been extensively tested, it's just experimental, and instead of coming up with a treatment plan, the authorities close your doctor's office and replace it with a doctor's office filled with healthier patients. So, basically the same exact thing.

The Test Is Required By Law and Everyone Must Take It or Else and I'm Not Kidding Young Lady-- You Get Started Right Now Or I Will Turn This Car Around, and Don't Think I Won't. The law says everyone must take the test or else the school will lose all funding and the school will be shut down and locusts will rain down from the heavens, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. How many schools have been punished for low test participation, you ask? Never you mind that. This is serious, I tell you. Serious.

The Test Is Really Important, Isn't It? I mean, it's a standardized test, so it must be legit. Surely they wouldn't put it out there unless it was legit. And if my child doesn't take it, won't that go on their permanent record?


You will find many of these species more often out in the wild during this season. Keep your eyes open and your field guide ready, though you will generally be able to find them if you just follow the sound of their outrage. 





Saturday, April 9, 2016

SAT & ACT Go for the Gold

Well, the New York Times wrote about it this week, so it's now officially a thing-- the SAT and ACT are mounting what Scott Marion, the executive director of the Center for Assessment, calls a "land grab."

The ACT and SAT, America's long-standing "you have to take that if you want to get into college" tests have been sliding steadily over the past few decades. Fairtest lists over 850 colleges and universities that no longer require the tests, and research has repeatedly shown that high school grades-- not the venerable tests-- are the best predictors of college success. SAT and ACT scores correlate best to family income, not academic skill or achievement.

The College Board, under new jefe and Common Core architect David Coleman, has aggressively remarketed itself as more student-friendly, more real-worldy, and packed with more free (in exchange for all your marketing and tracking data) test prep. Well, not test prep, exactly, because the New! Improved! SAT is also supposed to be impervious to the kind of coaching that is historically part of SAT success (and if you believe that, keep your eyes peeled for Coleman's announcement that the College Board will soon be selling the Brooklyn Bridge). 

But that is peanuts, because a much larger opportunity has presented itself. Thanks to ESSA (the new body of federal education law) every state must give a Big Standardized Test. And over the last few years, states have become disenchanted with the cost and quality of the PARCC and SBA tests (developed, it should be noted, with lots of tax dollars). So out with the old tests and in with the...?

"Hey," say the SAT and ACT folks. "You need a Big Standardized Test! We've got a Big Standardized Test. I'll bet we could help each other." And now, as chronicled by the NYT, the Big Two of the BS Test business are working their way into the state-level market. Hey, kids-- excited and relieved that the University of Delaware no longer requires you to take the SAT to get in? Bad news-- the state of Delaware is going to require you to take the SAT anyway.



It is impossible to overstate just how lucrative this is for the test manufacturing companies. Just imagine-- every high school student in the country forced to take the SAT and every taxpayer in the country forced to pay for it.

But it is also impossible to overstate just how large a multilayered dumb cake this is, complete with a big stupid cherry on top of big dope icing.

First-- understand what is happening. States have to give a BS Test because the feds want to know that every student is college and career ready. Colleges and universities are announcing one by one that the SAT/ACT cannot predict if a student is ready for college. So states will now adopt a test widely known to not measure college readiness in order to test all students for college readiness.

The SAT/ACT are designed to show if a student is ready for college level work. There is no reason in the world to believe that those exact same tests can determine if a low-functioning student with learning disabilities is reading, writing and mathing at grade level.

The SAT and ACT are norm-referenced tests. That means they do not measure students against some objective, pre-determined standard, but simply rank students from the highest to the lowest. That means that a certain percentage of students will always fail. Always, as in we know before the test is even given. (If that made a horrified light bulb go on for you, I have bad news-- the current crop of BS Tests do exactly the same thing).

And here's the second part of that stupid-- the SAT and ACT have always been given to students who considered themselves college bound. The SAT/ACT folks have never had to crunch numbers for the entire student population of a state. They have never had to build their grading scale with all of the non-college-bound student results folded in. Will that flooding of the bottom end of the bell curve create what amounts to score inflation on the top end? Does anybody at either company have any idea what effect the new score base will include?

Will states buy into the whole package? Will SAT states also buy up the PSAT and the new PPSAT, the 8th grade PSAT-- and if so, will they also buy into those pre-tests' prodigious data-collecting features. The PSAT starts with students volunteering a ton of data, and results have now been tweaked to include recommendations for AP courses (another product of the College Board). In short, will the state now be selling both the students' personal data as well as access to the students for marketing other products?

This is the kind of decision made by bureaucratic amateurs, people who still harbor the childlike belief that any standardized test is, you know, a standardized test, and the results can be used for any purpose because it's a standardized test, and standardized tests are like magical unicorns that can look into a student's soul to see whatever is hiding there. If they were mechanics or carpenters, they would be the ones who said, "Hand me a tool," on the theory that whether the tool is a hammer or a screwdriver or a drill, it's still, you know, a tool, and you can Do Stuff with it.

In the hands of these folks, a standardized test is just a blunt tool to club students over the heads. And there are salesmen just lined up to tout the magical properties of these testing unicorns because having to market to fifty state capitals for the entire possible market is a hell of a lot easier than having to market to every single set of parents, one by one-- particularly when the colleges that have always backed your play have finally decided to stop helping you run the con.

This sort of foolishness is going to keep happening, because there is no smart way to implement a stupid idea-- and the idea that we can give a single standardized tests to every student in the country and by its results know how the state education system is doing, how the school is doing, how the teacher is doing, and whether or not the student is ready for college and career-- that is a supremely stupid idea, and so every attempt to implement that idea is going to be stupid, too.

This particular stupid idea is just hugely profitable for the SAT and ACT folks. You would hope that somebody in power could hear the thudding sound of this big fat dope of an idea slamming into high school students across their state, but I'm afraid that sound is being drowned out by the sound of cash registers. Ka-ching.