“The actual purpose of much that is called education is not to teach a trade, or take you stumbling to the limits of the undiscovered but to put you in a position to laugh at people.”
2) From Thomas Sowell’s Ever Wonder Why?
Anyone who is serious about wanting to help minority young people must know that the place to start is at precisely the other end of the educational process. That means beginning in the earliest grades teaching reading, math and other mental skills on which their future depends. But that would mean clashing with the teachers’ unions and their own busybody agenda of propaganda and psychological manipulation in the classrooms.
“The path of least resistance is to give minority youngsters a lousy education and then admit them to college by quotas. With a decent education, they wouldn’t need the quotas.”
3) From the Brookings Institution’s SAT Math Scores Mirror and Maintain Racial Inequity
“Relying on a three-digit number to assess a student’s math ability clouds their drive, their resilience, and may impact their confidence in pursuing postsecondary education…
…..In 2019, the SAT developed an adversity score to contextualize students’ scores to their school and neighborhood. Under pressure, the College Board then abandoned the single statistic in favor of an Environmental Context Dashboard, which provides information like the portion of students at a high school receiving free and reduced lunch, median family income, and advanced-placement enrollment.
Colleges are starting to consider socioeconomic status in a more systematic way, and the College Board is too. This is vitally important, given how far achievement has already splintered along racial and class lines by the time students are about to graduate high school.”
I will add that at the end of the Brookings article the authors do detail ways of boosting disadvantaged students’ actual pre-college performance. That’s what is called in the trade as CYA, but ask yourself which is more likely to happen in the post-Fair Admissions v. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard world? Hiding affirmative action programs under some version of an “Environmental Context Dashboard” or actually breaking the rice bowls of the K-12 establishment?
More vouchers please.
When I was in high school in 1955, we were told we were to take a test and herded into a study hall and that was it. No pre-tests or prep schools. It was a Catholic school in a blue collar neighborhood in Chicago. It is now an all-black school that has a higher percentage of graduates go to college than when I attended. I have no idea what my score was but it was good enough that I was admitted to CalTech. The SAT has changed a lot since those days but I wonder how well it predictes college success.
The point of all the Brooking’s hand waving is precisely that that three digit number does predict success in college. That those below various thresholds will, in general, not be able to both make up the deficit and advance their studies simultaneously. If they could convincingly dispute that fact, there would be no reason for all the blather about “context”.
I worked in a materials testing lab for about eleven years. As luck would have it, I was just talking with some friends about a particular customer that had hired us to do a particularly long, complex and need I add, costly set of tests to qualify a material for sale to the Navy. It’s hard to describe just how comprehensively it failed the first of five increasingly rigorous stages. We abandoned further testing and informed the customer. We were informed, by the by, that said customer was threatening legal action. We sort of shrugged our shoulders and went on with our day that routinely included very consequential tests for clients ranging from Fortune 5 companies to local gas stations. Personally, I was curious just what his case was going to be. He wasn’t going to change the results. Nothing further came of it.
Imagine the next bridge you drive over was designed by someone with a really compelling life story who never quite mastered strength of materials or reinforced concrete design. Using concrete that is below design strength but supplied by a women owned company. Reinforced with steel that repeatedly failed testing but the producer was able to show in court that those standards adversely affected minority owned producers. Good luck.
Building on that example of materials testing, test score are basically an information signal not only for a college admissions officer but to the student and his family as well as the K-12 he came from. Unlike a business where you can only run for so long before God will cut you down, nobody in education is really interested in an education. High ed just wants the revenue from student s and the prestige from being selective not to mention a home for otherwise unemployable non-STEM PhDs. Governments either want to cater to their constituencies in K-12 and higher ed administration or their supporters in college-degree voters, Republicans see education basically as a cross between a pinata and the proverbial third rail – a punching bag for show.
Unfortunately students and their families don’t want the education as much as the prestige of the degree and the supposed financial benefits from holding it. It’s a cargo cult because it’s no longer a certification of skills gained to get the financial benefits, but rather a rite of passage that confers financial benefits merely from holding a piece of paper. A proper information signal of standardized testing, as opposed to “whole spectrum” admissions or other nonsense, ruins the party for everyone.
The problem is the 5 years or so has been a disaster for the cargo cult of education. K-12 now has a terrible reputation between abysmal test score that do exist and the fact that most people are realizing it’s am indoctrination center. The student debt cancellations have convinced people not only is college education a bad bet (afterall why does the debt need to be canceled in the first place) and the pro-Hamas demonstrations are the catalyzing moment for people to see what an ideological cesspool higher ed is.
Now education at all levels has not only and openly picked sides but it has forced a showdown. That’s a bad thing to do when your revenue streams are basically dependent on government support and your main product (prestige) has lost its mojo.
Back in the 1990s when Arizona started to implement statewide K-12 standards testing (AIMS) I heard a lot of complaints from teachers and K-12 administrators that now “they would have to teach to the test” My answer to them was that AIMS represented a failure on their part to deliver a quality product without the need for the State of AZ to get involved. Legislators often say that they hope a given group of people work things out among themselves, especially in the public sector, because those people don’t want the Legislature (the money) to get involved.
FAFO
My other reply to those K-12ers was that if they were truly committed to excellence they won’t have to worry about teaching to the test because they would out-temp the standards. Sadly the movies back then that everyone admired, “Stand and Deliver” and such, were honored mostly in the breach,
The support of the Democrat Party is the one unforgivable. By their acquiescence, the signify that the support of the NEA is more important than the education of their constituents children. By their action/inaction they sentence multitudes to a life of penury and government dependence.
They. Do. Not. Care.
That alone should disqualify them from the support of ANY who have children, not just those in the non-effective inner city failing institutes. It doesn’t.
Even if there was NEA support for improving schools, the conflict with teacher restriction on student behavior control and legal culpability for in-classroom actions gives the Democrat Party some indigestion as both groups are strong supporters.
IOW, lawsuits against teachers… when both groups are Dem supporters.
If ‘teaching to the test’ seems improper, then perhaps the test should be customized to what is the desired curriculum to be taught. One would think effective and caring teachers would want their students to exceed the bare minimum such a test would imply.
The NEA supports retaining ineffective teachers, misbehaving teachers(NYC’s famous room for un-fireables where they spend their workday) and works to increase cost of education by pushing for reduced class sizes.
As a second grader in a Chicago area parochial in the mid-1950’s, we had 70-something students in the classroom. The desks were pretty small, and were also pretty close together… Class size did not seem to matter then, and there’s no reason it should be of consequence today, except lobbying by the teachers union.
My personal opinion is that student tuition should follow the student to the school of choice. Schools that have no students select them should be allowed to close as they serve no purpose. Good teachers should have no problem finding jobs where they will be supported in their efforts.
Locally the Board spends around $28,000 annually per student. I certainly could successfully educate ten students for over a quarter million…
School quality and didactics matter very little. It is important to be safe enough at school to not be distracted, and a curriculum approximately like the standard version helps, but the general intelligence horsepower of the student matters much more.
@ Mike K – The SAT has changed some, but is much the same. It still predicts college success better than any other single measure. But like IQ, it is more useful as group measurement: 100 kids with SAT 1400 will do better than 100 kids with SAT 1300 – but there will be a lot of individual variation.
If we were talking about the difference between exceptional and very good, we wouldn’t be talking. By the way, if I’m reading this right, the top score for both reading and math is now 800.
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/k12-educators/about/understand-scores-benchmarks/benchmarks
A minimum score of 530 is supposed to indicate a 75% probability that the student can get at least a C on freshman lit/history/English or math. What’s more to the point is that schools have years and years of statistics that correlate SAT with graduation, or not. This is information that should be vital to any prospective student/debtor. How likely is it that they’ll have a degree to show for that six figure debt?
If those admitted via special “social” considerations were graduating and entering the work force at the same rate as those more “privileged”, there would be no controversy.