NYTimes article: SAT marketing new products in a push to the classroom

Parent Cafe
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<p>"For SAT Maker, a Broader Push to the Classroom"</p>

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The board is marketing new products, like English and math curriculums for grades 6 through 12. It has worked with New York City to start five College Board Schools, with plans to open 13 more in New York and other cities by 2007. It is also trying to improve existing schools, starting this fall with 11 public high schools outside New York State and adding 19 next year. In November, it will open an institute for principals.</p>

<p>The board says it is eager to bring new rigor to education. But these efforts are also being driven by the fact that the board, a nonprofit organization based in New York City, is no longer an unrivaled force. It faces strong competition from the ACT in college admissions testing, and some colleges are making the SAT optional. Recent gaffes in SAT scoring raised questions of confidence in the test and the organization.</p>

<p>Some critics say that as the board expands its reach, it is becoming too much of a business. And some educators and policy makers question whether its entry into middle and high schools will bring too much standardization of curriculum and further promote a culture of testing.</p>

<p>Mr. Caperton said his goal was “to make the College Board play a bigger role in American education, to be a force to make American education better.”</p>

<p>But after Mr. Caperton’s arrival, guidance counselors, college admissions officers and others complained that the board was becoming more market oriented and less service driven. The board also faced criticism when it used outside investors to help create a for-profit subsidiary, CollegeBoard.com.</p>

<p>“The organization has been heavily dependent for a long time on a single product, the SAT, a product that has lost favor, or lost market share, if you will,” Mr. Toch said, adding that “the A.P. program has saved the College Board.”</p>

<p>Mr. Caperton described the board’s expansion into middle and high school education as part of its mission “to connect students to access and opportunity, to prepare more and more students to be ready to go to college and succeed.”</p>

<p>The board has strong supporters in these efforts, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is helping underwrite the new school startups, the school improvement projects, and research and development for some of the new products.

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<p>The following article, also from the August 16 NYT online edition, certainly does drive home the point made in the above cited article that the SAT faces strong competition from the ACT.</p>

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More than 1.2 million of this year’s graduating seniors, about 40 percent of the graduating class, took the ACT.</p>

<p>At a time when there has been a growing national concern about low levels of literacy and writing skills, ACT said that 36 percent of the seniors who took the test also took the optional writing section that it introduced in February 2005. The average score was 7.7 on a scale of 2 to 12. Girls did slightly better, averaging a score of 7.9, while boys averaged 7.4.</p>

<p>The College Board also added a writing segment to the SAT last year, but it was mandatory. The College Board is scheduled to release its annual SAT results on Aug. 29.

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<p>The governance of the College Board seems to be something of a mystery bag. Although supposedly a membership organization for colleges and secondary schools, it is headed by a former politician and businessman who is its public face and certainly makes the organization seem more a profit-orientated corporate than a non-profit educational organization. The question of who, exactly, the College Board is becomes even more signficant given the spread of the AP regimen, which is becoming a de facto national standardized curriculum. Who are these people, who are they accountable to and should we be trusting them with this responsibility, especially since they now seem to be trying to extend their influence into the lower grades?</p>

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<p>If the College Board can help ensure that high school graduates are actually literate and numerate, more power to them.</p>

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<p>CB has been in the high schools, directly and indirectly, for years and doesn't seem to have made much difference. They seem eminently unqualified to be meddling in K-8 schools when compared to organizations like the Core Knowledge Foundation, which has a good track record of involvement in K-8 schools, improving curriculum, achievement and equity.</p>

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<p>Well, does Core Knowledge do anything to hurt one's SAT I scores? I have no reason to suppose that Core Knowledge and College Board would be working at cross purposes if both get involved in more K-8 school reform efforts.</p>

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<p>as a student whos taken the SAT numerous times over, i detest wat the CB stands for. i even sent a 12 page essay in as an application essay to harvard decrying what CB has come to represent in our society. i'm really alarmed at this latest venture into the middle school ground CB is taking. for far too long the CB has been more about profit then about helping students learn. the ap program they hail as a savior is little more than a money-making scheme that doesn't help students that much in getting college credit. </p>

<p>it's just disturbing that CB is now trying to corrupt oops i mean help middle schoolers now. god help us =/</p>

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<p>While the CB's venture into 6-12 education without a doubt does promote the AP/SAT culture of testing as the gold standard of secondary educational rigor, I agree with tokenadult that any effort at reform aimed to ensure that high school graduates are truly prepared to enter college (whether a CC or 4-yr IHE) and become part of an educated workforce is laudable. As to accountability and the question of just who is behind this initiative, well, the CB (in its capacity as a non-profit organization) received an initial grant of $4.4 million, in 2003, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create six small College Board Schools in New York City. So you have to look to the Gates Foundation, as well as other Foundations involved in the projects for more information. These model schools are designed to target urban, low SES and minority students so that they can benefit from the opportunity to take "challenging" college level AP level courses and exams. Since 2003, the program has expanded beyond the six New York City schools.</p>

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In venture-capitalist fashion, the Gates Foundation invests in a variety of promising models, including charter, private, and public schools. It's focusing grants on a limited number of sites, hoping for 10 to 15 districts that can show "significant improvement" in college-ready graduation rates--and provide the basis for wider reform. "We're pragmatic investors and attempt to support bold ideas that will serve as models as well as large-scale improvement efforts," says Tom Vander Ark, a former schools superintendent who now runs the Gates Foundation's education initiatives.

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<p><a href="http://citymayors.com/news/nyc_schools_gates.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://citymayors.com/news/nyc_schools_gates.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The following is from the Gates Foundation web site:</p>

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Best known for administering the SAT and Advanced Placement (AP) programs, the College Board is a nonprofit, membership association composed of more than 4,700 schools, colleges, universities, and other educational organizations. College Board secondary schools, grades 6-12, the first two of which opened in the fall of 2004, is designed to prepare all students for access to and success in college through the implementation of College Board programs, coupled with an emphasis on educational leadership.</p>

<p>Approaches
• College Board schools will set high expectations and demand high achievement from all students.</p>

<p>• The College Board will provide teacher training throughout the year and create high-level course content, materials, and tests.
College Board schools is devoted to inquiry and the development of a culture of learning for faculty and students alike. The schools immerse students in a rigorous curriculum in literacy and mathematics, enhanced by College Board curricular and assessment programs, including SpringBoard, AP, Pre-AP, PSAT/NMSQT, as well as college preparatory programs such as SAT readiness, CollegeEd, and MyRoad.

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<p><a href="http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Education/TransformingHighSchools/Schools/ModelSchools/CollegeBoard.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Education/TransformingHighSchools/Schools/ModelSchools/CollegeBoard.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>If they help with more activities for classrooms and to enhance teacher training that would be a great thing and always welcome.</p>

<p>According to Harvard though science AP classes really don't do much to predict success in college and they don't give kids any real advantage over students in the regular track. I hope the CB will work with NSTA and other exisitng groups to enhance and help deliver those national standards and curriculums.</p>

<p>Link</p>

<p><a href="http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2006/02/17-ap.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2006/02/17-ap.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Given the fast pace of change in education reform and increased demands for accountability and academic excellence, the CB has a lot on its plate these days. While the controversy over whether or not the AP curricula and exam regimen give students an edge over comparable honors classes is open to debate, the issues here center on a new role for the CB that would make it a primary mover and shaker in educational reform because it is moving into a niche where there is a deficiency in precisely those high caliber honors courses noted in the Harvard Gazette article. </p>

<p>The CB model high schools, since it is bank rolled in large part by the Gates Foundation, can be seen as part of the larger Gates' project that aims to promote the reconfiguration of existing, under performing schools as well as the creation new, smaller high schools. The new CB model schools, and the 6-12 English and math curriculum products, will obviously rely on CB products to create the rigorous college-prep programs, and it is these higher level courses and products that educators involved in the project deem to be a key component to facilitate and engage teachers in their efforts to combat student apathy and improve academic achievement. </p>

<p>According to the Education Sector, the Gates Foundation is now keenly aware that teachers must be fully inolved and engaged in a viable teacher-student relationship if the reform process is to be successful. At this point it is also obvious that this is easier said than done. The Gates Foundation is pouring more money into studies to find out exactly in what ways the ideas of "rigor", "relevance" and "relationships" play out in the classroom because so far, the Gates experiment in high school reform has only yielded a slight increase in reading literacy but not much in math and science.</p>

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Reform, it is increasingly clear, depends on improving both school climate and the quality and rigor of classroom instruction. Mathematics presents a special challenge. Math teachers told the Gates-funded evaluators they had a very difficult time finding ways to make the subject more engaging and relevant for students while simultaneously covering all of the skills and concepts that states—and, for that matter, colleges—expect students to learn."

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<p><a href="http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:1kjLGVGkH_cJ:www.educationsector.org/usr_doc/Measured_Progress.pdf+EducationSector+model+schools&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&client=firefox-a%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:1kjLGVGkH_cJ:www.educationsector.org/usr_doc/Measured_Progress.pdf+EducationSector+model+schools&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&client=firefox-a&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>In the context of high school reform, math and science literacy and the role of the CB, it is worth noting that the CB also got a large chunk of change from the National Science Foundation to overhaul the AP program:</p>

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Improving Advanced Placement (AP) science classes and redesigning high school science curriculum to incorporate the latest developments in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and other fields were the focal points of a panel discussion hosted by the College Board and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Washington, D.C., last week.</p>

<p>The NSF has awarded a $1.8 million grant to the College Board to redesign AP courses in biology, chemistry, physics, and environmental science. The funds will be used to develop a process for making continual changes in the courses and exams to incorporate the latest scientific developments and to leverage best practices in the teaching of science.</p>

<p>Commissions appointed for each of the four AP science disciplines will carry out the redesign, which will commence this summer. The commissions are expected to finish their work in December 2007, allowing for several years of professional development prior to the launch of the new AP science courses in fall 2009.</p>

<p>These efforts come amid a chorus of calls to improve the nation's science and math instruction to strengthen America's global competitiveness.

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<p><a href="http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=6300%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=6300&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>