New York Times Article about the Redesigned SAT

I guess I am late to the party, but I finally figured out that the force behind Common Core is Bill Gates:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulled-off-the-swift-common-core-revolution/2014/06/07/a830e32e-ec34-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html

A few excerpts:

"On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.

Coleman and Wilhoit told the Gateses that academic standards varied so wildly between states that high school diplomas had lost all meaning, that as many as 40 percent of college freshmen needed remedial classes and that U.S. students were falling behind their foreign competitors.

The pair also argued that a fragmented education system stifled innovation because textbook publishers and software developers were catering to a large number of small markets instead of exploring breakthrough products. That seemed to resonate with the man who led the creation of the world’s dominant computer operating system."

“The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.”

“The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum, to entities including the big teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — groups that have clashed in the past but became vocal backers of the standards.”

Several top players in Obama’s Education Department who shaped the administration’s policies came either straight from the Gates Foundation in 2009 or from organizations that received heavy funding from the foundation.

Before becoming education secretary in 2009, Arne Duncan was chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, which received $20 million from Gates to break up several large high schools and create smaller versions, a move aimed at stemming the dropout rate.

As secretary, Duncan named as his chief of staff Margot Rogers, a top Gates official he got to know through that grant. He also hired James Shelton, a program officer at the foundation, to serve first as his head of innovation and most recently as the deputy secretary, responsible for a wide array of federal policy decisions.

Duncan and his team leveraged stimulus money to reward states that adopted common standards.

They created Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion contest for education grants. Under the contest rules, states that adopted high standards stood the best chance of winning. It was a clever way around federal laws that prohibit Washington from interfering in what takes place in classrooms. It was also a tantalizing incentive for cash-strapped states.

Heading the effort for Duncan was Joanne Weiss, previously the chief operating officer of the Gates-backed NewSchools Venture Fund."

Gates has said that one of the benefits of common standards would be to open the classroom to digital learning, making it easier for software developers — including Microsoft — to develop new products for the country’s 15,000 school districts.

In February, Microsoft announced that it was joining Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, to load Pearson’s Common Core classroom materials on Microsoft’s tablet, the Surface. That product allows Microsoft to compete for school district spending with Apple, whose iPad is the dominant tablet in classrooms."

It all makes sense now:

  1. David Coleman, a person who knows nothing about education, who could not even get a job as a high school teacher, heading education reform;

  2. Common Core: a curriculum that needs great teachers to succeed. But if there are great teachers, the teachers don’t need a curriculum. If there aren’t good teachers, the Common Core will be a disaster.
    A curriculum that turns away from literature, narrative, and challenging vocabulary.
    A curriculum years behind other countries in math.

  3. David Coleman as head of CB, revising the SAT to align with Common Core: encourage states to adopt Common Core so that Microsoft can provide states with Surface tablets with Common Core incorporated…

  4. The partnership between CB and Khan Academy (funded by … the Gates Foundation et al.)

Look forward to the end of the paper SAT. It is going to be coming to you on Windows-based tablet.

There is growing evidence that computer use in school has a deleterious effect on student performance.

A recent OECD study found that countries that used computers in school more did WORSE on PISA tests in reading, math, and science, whereas countries that used computers in school less did BETTER.

http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/education/students-computers-and-learning_9789264239555-en#page1

See for example the graph on page 151 of the study above. This plots the number of computers per student to the change in PISA score in math from 2003 to 2012. Countries like Mexico and Italy that have fewer computers per student went up 20-30 points; the US went down a couple of points, and countries that have the most computers per student, Australia and New Zealand, went down over 20 points. The overall correlation was strongly negative.

See also

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2672001

The above recent review paper by Bulman and Fairlie concludes that using technology in schools improves performance only in developing countries in which teaching quality is very poor. In developed countries, expenditures on technology have no or a negative impact on student achievement, and constitute even more of a “lost opportunity” because funds wasted on computers take away from expenditures on teachers, books, etc.

The most important element in education is the quality of the teacher. To improve teacher quality, teachers’ salaries have to be raised significantly. That is going to be a much better investment in our children than are new standards, redesigned tests, or tablets with built in lessons and automatic assessments.

THIS:

And I don’t register agreement out of self-interest, but out of lifelong experience as both student and teacher. The ancients understood how dialogic teaching is. I am fortunate to have grown up in an era when teachers were still truly respected, non-unionized, and the entire process was so much less “systematized.”

I think you summed up the situation in your post 121, @Plotinus

It’s going to be interesting to see if there is any narrowing of the gap between mean scores of different ethnic groups, or an increase in minority representation in the upper percentiles. Maybe the only movement will be of taxpayer money into the pockets of Bill Gates and CB.

Thanks @Plotinus for the investigative report. As they say, follow the money, or, more precisely, cui bono, and you’ll get to the root. No matter what and how much the Gates family does for charity, Bill Gates still owns millions and millions of the MS shares worth billions of dollars and cares dearly about the MS’s wellbeing.
Coleman’s meager teaching qualities notwithstanding, you gotta give it to the man for his shrewdness in pushing his agenda.

Idk looks like what is pushing the agenda is the money from Bill Gates, the Obama administration, and various other forces that have been bought off. Coleman is just a facade. From what I read, he didn’t even have anything to do with writing the Common Core standards – they just put his name on it. I tried hard to find a cv for him and instead found several sources claiming that he has no public cv and that his post-graduate years in the UK are in “a haze”. He’s a front man.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/16/opinion/flaws-in-the-new-sat.html

Bob Schaeffer of Fairtest has given the thumbs-down to the revised SAT, despite CB SJ claims:

“None of the coming changes to the SAT address the test’s historic flaws. Some, like increasing the verbal complexity of math problems, may make it worse.”

“The revised exam is just as susceptible to high-priced , test-prep “steroids” as its predecessor, according to SAT coaching companies. That will reinforce its existing biases.”

However, Schaeffer seems to assume that what creates the ethnic and gender gaps in test scores, and what weakens the correlation with college grades, is the fact that people can be coached to higher scores.

The most obvious way to make a less coachable test is to make a harder test. But a harder test might also widen the gaps. Would that mean a less coachable test is more biased?

I’m pretty darned sure that increasing the verbal complexity of math problems will make it worse – and a lot more unfair. As a verbal person, I’ve liked the samples I’ve seen; they seemed more interesting and even kind of fun. But I showed them to S, who has dyscalculia, and DH, who is a non-native speaker, and they REALLY hated the redesign.

S pointed out that having dyscalculia means it’s very hard for him to visualize the Math problem anyway, and it’s worse when it’s jumbled into a lot of words. He’s intensely verbal and tests well on verbal measures, but that doesn’t somehow mean he’s better at Math when it’s wordy – just the opposite. He needs the problem laid out clearly and straight-forwardly so he can just take a deep breath, plunge ahead and do his best to solve it as he’s learned.

And then think of kids who also struggle with dyslexia. Accommodations aren’t magic, and over-emphasizing words in Math – in an attempt to do what? make it somehow more “relevant”? – just adds an extra weight on top of already existing weights. Hard to see how that decreases bias.

Meanwhile, non-native speakers, such as relatively recent immigrants to the US (not getting into the int’l student issue), often excel in Math precisely because they’re not handicapped by the extra time it invariably takes a non-native speaker to wade through the verbiage. It’s not about knowing words or not, so it can’t be solved with something simple like a dictionary. It’s more about grammatical complexity, decoding meaning, and just plain speed. Non-native speakers, even when fluent, are slower readers. Very few really get to skimming level – so yeah, they have to work harder in college, although obviously can do really well. And there aren’t any time accommodations for non-native speakers, as far as I know. So wordiness will handicap them even in a section that they might otherwise do better in.

Seems like one more example of too many consultants and too much stuff that looks good in a PowerPoint hitting reality with a big old thud …

@MomOnALaptop
For a wordy math problem with a formula in it, first draw a box around the formula. Then look for definitions of the variables in the formula and draw a box around each of those. Then read the last line (the sentence with the question mark). Ignore everything else. Note or underline the units of the variables.

For example, non calc question 12 on 10/14 PSAT becomes
t=0.06(a-m)
income tax, t dollars
a dollars, amount of income
m dollars, maximum income
If there is a tax of 300 dollars on 30k income, what is the maximum income?

Calc question 13 becomes
y=600-25x
x is number of minutes since pump started
y is volume in gallons of water remaining in tank
What is meaning of 25 and 600?

You won’t be able to reduce the word count of all word problems this way, but it might help with some.

@Plotinus Think of how many different brain functions are going on in your suggestion – how many steps and changes in gears have to happen. Obviously it’s what teachers will try to coach. But frankly, it doesn’t work very well for kids with LDs or people who read more slowly for any reason (second language speakers, dyslexia, etc.) Thank goodness S is done with his SATs (and before the redesign).

It’s ridiculous that kids who want to study English, History, Theater, Ceramics, etc have to go through it … but, well, way back when, young men who wanted to join the East India Company had to demonstrate their capacity to translate from the Latin and Greek. I’m sure those test designers had what they felt was a good rationale for it, too. If they’d had consultants, maybe they’d have made it less “biased” by, um, putting the Latin and Greek into a crossword puzzle format. With puns.

I know the SAT can be really frustrating for kids with LD, bilinguals, artists, etc. etc. I think the main problem is that it’s one size fits all. It won’t fit everyone well, and it doesn’t fit people who are atypical at all. We need different tests for different people and different aims. But Bill Gates Big Data and left-wing SJ people won’t allow that. Its a bad blend of money and politics. Our kids pay the price.

I don’t think that Bill Gates deserves the above tar and feathers treatment. Why elevate his role in trying to make a dysfunctional system of education better to an attempt to sell tablets? How about blaming Apple for its role in placing computers in many schools at a time they could not sell their wares to anyone outside the graphic industry?

The reality is that Gates has spent a large fortune but is facing an industry that is dominated by insiders and political forces. Nothing will happen until we accept the fact that voters have contributed to the development of a system that rewards mediocrity. The SAT will never be able to mask the fact that most students are challenged by problems they should have been taught to solve easily. While most can solve the most basic equations and are experts in Facebook or Snapchat prose, they find it hard to rely on a reasonable college level vocabulary and, especially think critically.

Attracting better teachers with a higher salary is a good idea in theory, but the practice might be harder when such educator is hardly produced by our universities. A better start would be to expect a higher performance and eliminate all the ones who are unable or unwilling to deliver such performance. Unfortunately, the same barriers that confuse the work of the Gates Foundation exist in every school and those are the same that a certain Friedrichs is hoping to undo. The biggest handicap to a better education is known but we prefer to ignore it.

@Zeldie

Thanks for sharing your contrasting views. I completely respect your right to disagree with what I have written, and to correct any mistakes I have made.

Please note that I am a former university professor with over 35 years of teaching experience, so while my opinions are of course just personal opinions, at least they are based on completed undergraduate and graduate university degrees and many years of actual classroom experience.

Bill Gates is a college drop-out who has not the smallest qualification in the field of education.

I saw the video of the Gates interview with the Washington Post about Common Core. I was appalled. He compared Common Core and its testing to a cure for malaria. He talked about R & D in the field of education, trying various approaches to see what works, as though children and teachers were lab rats.

Cures for malaria are developed by experts in the field of medicine.
Common Core was developed by people with no experience in teaching.

Cures for malaria are tested first on lab animals and then, if they are safe and effective, on very small human samples.
Gates is testing Common Core on the whole country as a form of first-run R & D.

I never said Apple was a good guy in the field of education. Apple is not a good guy in education. But I went after Gates because he is connected to CB and Common Core.

I completely disagree. I know many, many people who are or would be excellent teachers and who are products of universities in the US and elsewhere. They do not go into teaching or leave it because the pay is way too low for their qualifications and the amount of dedication and effort it takes to do a good job.

Gate wouldn’t expect to find qualified workers for a very demanding position at Microsoft unless he offered a competitive salary, would he?

You can’t make underpaid, under-qualified teachers better by subjecting them to performance standards. You make them even more unhappy. And who will fill the spots of the people who quit or are fired? What makes you think the new teachers will be any better?

Moreover, studies going back to the Coleman report have shown that by far the most important factor in student performance is the family environment of the students. Teachers in schools with underprivileged children are facing enormous obstacles. Even the best teachers are going to have trouble getting performance improvements where the family environments are very negative. Standards have to be set that take the role of family background into account. It’s unethical to hold teachers accountable for pre-existing conditions over which they have no control.

Another thing that really upset me about the Gates interview was that he gave not the slightest importance to the human dimension of teaching, the bond between student and teacher, the emotional connection, the caring, nurturing and happiness that children have when the teacher takes an interest in them, and that teachers have when children try to do better.

This human relationship is a very, very valuable part of teaching, even if the students fail to improve on performance standards. Performance is not the most important part of education. Students may succeed or fail on a test, but they know that the teacher is on their side in any case, and this is the most important lesson of all.


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I completely disagree. I know many, many people who are or would be excellent teachers and who are products of universities in the US and elsewhere. They do not go into teaching or leave it because the pay is way too low for their qualifications and the amount of dedication and effort it takes to do a good job.

[/QUOTE]

Gate wouldn’t expect to find qualified workers for a very demanding position at Microsoft unless he offered a competitive salary, would he?<<<

Assuming that we could agree that our universities are graduating students who have been or could be great teachers, should we be blind to the fact that the ones who are left do not fit that description? If money were the sole impetus, why is it that throwing ever increasing amounts of it has not made any positive change? Our country spends more per capita than about everyone else, safe and except for countries such as Luxemburg. Granted, a large share of the expenses has been directed to non-teaching items, but it remains that more money is not the sole solution. What we actually do with the money is paramount. Dedicating more to competent and well-trained and well-educated teachers is high on my list of good ideas.

So, why not stop hiring the underqualified that are long on pedagogy (a favorite of the abysmal colleges of education) but short on mastery of subjects? In the end, don’t our kids deserve teachers who actually understand the material they’re supposed to teach? Hard to teach something that was a bane in their own education!

PS There are educators who have been able to improve the education of the poorest in the most underprivileged environments. Unfortunately, the negative forces that have plagued education have made them a rarity as they were not part of the public juggernaut.

These tests are highly biased in favor of the smarter, better prepared students.

Nothing works much in inner city schools because the family situations of students are very bad and not conducive to learning. The school cannot replace the family or inculcate values completely at odds with the values of the family. WIth good teachers, there can be better discipline, more learning, and happier students, but you are not going to get these students functioning at the same level as kids from reasonable families. Holding students from completely different family backgrounds to the same set of standards is going to frustrate the underprivileged kids or dumb down the other kids or both.

I don’t see anyone throwing any money at teachers’ salaries. Common Core is throwing taxpayer billions at technology and testing, money that ends up back in the pockets of Bill Gates, Pearson, College Board, et al. There is a clear conflict of interest here. Aligning the SAT with Common Core looks like a further ploy to coerce/persuade states to adopt Common Core so the tech and testing industry can cash in.

Studies have shown that increased use of technology is HARMFUL to student performance. It is better to do nothing than to computerize education. Mexico is advancing on PISA tests by NOT spending on technology. Unless of course you think that inner city schools are part of the Third World. In that case, computerize inner city schools and don’t ruin all the others.

I think money thrown at teachers’ salaries is money well spent, even if it does not make much performance difference in inner city schools. Better paid teachers are likely to make a larger performance difference at schools where families support their children’s education.

Because all the people who are good in math and science go to work for Microsoft and Apple.

My father was the head of a math department and responsible for hiring the math and science teachers for a NYC public school. Even way back then in the 70s and 80s, he never could find anyone to hire who was certified in math. He used to have hire people on a temporary basis and then tutor them so they could pass the math certification test and become licensed. His favorite story was the one about the woman he tutored for months and months who had to take the test three times until she passed. She then worked as a good teacher for a couple of years. One day she resigned. She said she was leaving for a better paid, easier job: answering Heat Complaints at the NYC 311 complaint number.

I’m not saying I have the answer. I am not a specialist in education reform, just a teacher. In France students who are admitted to les Grandes Ecoles have to work in public service for a certain number of years after graduation. How about 100 free rides per university for students who are willing to teach for 5 years in public schools in their home states (at a good salary, of course). Teach for America doesn’t work so well because the fellows don’t stay on long enough to become experienced, and they all leave teaching for more money. If you require them to work more years and pay them more, maybe they will become more experienced and some of them will stay on.

Contrary to what most people think, it’s the student body (and their parents) that is the primary determinant of the quality of a school.

http://storiesfromschool.org/teaching-canned-curriculum/

This Common Core scripted/digital implementation is scary. This is not for high achievers.

In fact, during the Washington Post interview, the reporter asked Bill Gates whether he would want his children in a Common Core curriculum. He squirms and answers, “I would like them to know a superset of the Common Core standards.”

This is a geeky PR response. Translation into plain English: Are you kidding? Common Core is WAY too dumbed-down for MY kids.

Microsoft puts automated Common Core lessons on tablets for the taxpaying masses. But Silicon Valley executives send their kids to boutique private schools from which all electronics are banned.

Arguably, the best school in SV does not seem to ban technology. See https://www.harker.org/technology

The use of technology and tools will always be challenging. For instance, should students be encouraged to master a TI-89 in class or prohibited to use on the SAT? Is it a helpful tool or an abject crutch? Does technology hinder or help the development of critical thinking and reasoning?

In the end, everything reverts to the presence of competent educators, but that is where the US education is hopelessly lacking. The secret hope of many teachers is that parents and technology can continue to mask their ineptitude in teaching. The results of testing simply confirm that the antidote to poor teaching is none other than dumbing down the entire exercise.