by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 13, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education
About a week ago, I was wasting time browsing articles on aldaily.com, and I happened to stumble across a link to Hannah Arendt’s 1954 article “The Crisis in Education.” I’ve had a minor a fascination with Arendt since finally getting around to reading Eichmann in Jerusalem a couple of years ago (and discovering that “the banality of evil” doesn’t quite mean what it’s usually understood to mean), and I had no idea that she had ever written about education in the United States. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 5, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education
A couple of days ago, I came across this article from Boston WBUR, courtesy of Diane Ravitch’s blog. It tells the story of David Weinstein, who has taught first grade at the Pierce School in Brookline, MA, for 29 years but is retiring because he can no longer tolerate being a data-collector for six year-olds.
As Weinstein explains:
[Retirement is] something I’ve been thinking about for a long time now, just in terms of how the profession has changed and what we’re asking of kids. It’s a much more pressure-packed kind of job than it used to be. And it’s challenging. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 2, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education
This is the second post of a two-part series written by a friend and colleague who teaches at large public school in New York City. Part one described some of the changes brought about by the introduction of the evaluation system known as the Danielson Framework as well as the continuing pressure to involve technology in every aspect of the learning and teaching process. Here, the writer discusses some of the effects of those changes, on both a small and a large scale.
The abandonment of chalk and talk for the Smartboard has had some strange consequences. Screens have a passive, television-like feel to them, which is reflected in students’ reactions. Often, when I write something on a Smartboard, it does not occur to students to take notes from it (why take notes from a TV?), and I have to force them to write it down. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 29, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education
The following guest post was written by a friend and colleague who teaches at a large, selective New York City public high school. Over the last several years, her descriptions of the changes wrought by various new technologies, the imposition of Common Core, and an increasingly byzantine evaluation system that effectively punishes teachers for teaching, have provided me with an illuminating glimpse into some of the more alarming changes the public school system has recently undergone (and continues to undergo), and piqued my interest in understanding how standardized testing fits into the secondary landscape as a whole. I have found her insights invaluable, and I invited her to write this two-part series because I thought that it was important that those insights be shared with a wider audience.
Twice a year, during parent/teacher conferences, I get to meet you. I get a fascinating snapshot of your families, and what my students convey to you about my particular classroom. During these brief moments, I often wonder how much you really understand about how differently your children’s educational experience is from your own. Today, I would like to clarify how profoundly different it is.
Perhaps you read the educational pages of national newspapers. There you will find desperate appeals to revamp education. Some of the themes you see are as follows: (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 28, 2016 | Blog
All of the major grammar concepts tested on the Sentence Correction portion of the GMAT, complete with examples: https://thecriticalreader.com/complete-gmat-sentence-correction-rules/
They are also available for download as a pdf.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 24, 2016 | Blog, The New SAT
In my last post, I took the College Board to task for its boast that its partnership with Khan Academy has led to a 19% decrease in the use of paid prep, presumably defined as classes or tutoring, although the College Board fails to specify. Aside from the questionable basis for that statistic (exactly how was it obtained? what were the characteristics of the groups surveyed? how were the demographic changes incurred by the adoption of the SAT as a state test taken into account?), I do think it’s worth exploring the question of just how the new SAT might affect the tutoring industry.
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard from a number of tutors that their business is actually up this year, although those tutors tend to work with students for whom free, online prep is borderline irrelevant anyway.
I’m also aware that most experienced tutors are pushing their students toward the ACT for the foreseeable future. If there was indeed a drop in paid SAT preparation, it was almost certainly in some part due to students paying for ACT preparation instead.
What interests me here, however, is the assumption that students will be the ones driving the changes.
But what if it goes the other way as well? What if it turns out that tutors don’t want to prepare students for the new SAT? (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 20, 2016 | Blog, The New SAT
The following passage is excerpted from a recent College Board press release: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/one-year-since-launch-official-sat-practice-on-khan-academy-is-leveling-the-playing-field-for-students-300278934.html.
A year ago today, Official SAT® Practice for the new SAT went live on KhanAcademy.org, making free, world-class, personalized online practice available for all students. There are now more than 1.4 million unique users on Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy — this represents four times the total population of students who use all commercial test prep classes in a year combined. Data show that the practice platform is reaching students across race, ethnicities, and income levels — mirroring the percentage of SAT takers. Almost half of all SAT takers on March 5 used Official SAT Practice to prepare, causing a 19 percent drop in the number of students who paid for SAT prep resources.
Which of the following would most directly undermine the College Board’s assertion that the number of students using Official SAT Practice was responsible for the 19 percent decline in the number of students paying for SAT prep resources? (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 15, 2016 | Blog
Students on College Confidential are again reporting that they received recycled exams, but this time for the ACT. The entirety of the June 2016 test was originally administered in February 2015.
A colleague of mine has also confirmed that Form 72F was administered on both dates.
Apparently, there was a recent five-year period during which the ACT consistently recycled tests, but then the practice was halted. Obviously, it’s now been revived. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 7, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education, The New SAT
Manuel Alfaro, a former executive director at the College Board, has written a series of posts on LinkedIn detailing the myriad problems plaguing the development of the new exam.
According to Alfaro, not only were many of the items developed for the first administration of the test extraordinarily problematic (see below), but many of the items that appeared on the test were not actually reviewed by the Content Advisory Committee until after the test forms had been constructed.
Committee members repeatedly attempted to call David Coleman’s attention to the problem, but were ignored. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 5, 2016 | Blog, The New SAT
According to the chatter on College Confidential, some students are reporting that they received June SATs identical to their March tests.
At this point, it’s also common knowledge that Asian test-prep companies have been distributing the March test. Inevitably, then, some lucky students will have prepped for the June exam using…the June exam. (As if barring adults from non-released exams was ever going to prevent this sort of occurrence.)
This comes just as the College Board and Khan Academy announce that they have successfully leveled the playing field among test-takers.
The College Board has been in the habit of recycling tests for quite a while, but it would stand to reason that three months isn’t quite long enough to wait.
Somehow I don’t think this is what the College Board meant by “transparency.”
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 1, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education, The New SAT
In the spring of 2015, when the College Board was field testing questions for rSAT, a student made an offhand remark to me that didn’t seem like much at the time but that stuck in my mind. She was a new student who had already taken the SAT twice, and somehow the topic of the Experimental section came up. She’d gotten a Reading section, rSAT-style.
“Omigod,” she said. “It was, like, the hardest thing ever. They had all these questions that asked you for evidence. It was just like the state test. It was horrible.”
My student lived in New Jersey, so the state test she was referring to was the PARCC.
Even then, I had a pretty good inkling of where the College Board was going with the new test, but the significance of her comment didn’t really hit me until a couple of months ago, when states suddenly starting switching from ACT to the SAT. I was poking around the internet, trying to find out more about Colorado’s abrupt and surprising decision to drop the ACT after 15 years, and I came across a couple of sources reporting that not only would rSAT replace the ACT, but it would replace PARCC as well. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 6, 2016 | Blog, College Admissions, Issues in Education
If there’s one thing that everyone can agree on, it’s that college admissions is out of control. With schools posting new record-low acceptance rates each year, it’s hard not to wonder where things will end. Will Princeton soon have a 3% acceptance rate? Will Harvard dip below 2% Or, as Frank Bruni recently suggested in a satirical New York Times piece, will Stanford eventually boast that it did not accept a single student into its freshman class?
As long as students can apply to as many schools as they want with the click of a button, there’s nothing to suggest that the stampede for spots at a handful of elite schools will become any less intense; the fact that the vast majority of colleges in the United States accept over half of their applicants is no consolation to those seeking a spot at the top. With 40,000+ students clamoring for only a couple of thousands slots at places like Harvard and Stanford, and virtually no baseline criteria to deter weaker applicants, there’s no way for the process not to be stressful. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 1, 2016 | Blog, The New SAT
As predicted, the College Board’s decision to bar tutors from the first administration of the new SAT had little effect on the security of the test; questions from the March 5th administration of the new SAT quickly made an appearance on various Chinese websites as well as College Confidential.
Reuters has now broken a major story detailing the SAT “cartels” that have sprung up in Asia, as well as the College Board’s inconsistent and lackluster response to what is clearly a serious and widespread problem.
It’s a two-part series, and it clearly takes the College Board to task for allowing the breaches. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 29, 2016 | Blog
While writing my previous post, I happened to grab an 11th grade Common Core ELA Standard in order to illustrate the fact that rSAT is not in fact perfectly aligned with Common Core.
The standard is worded as follows:
Determine two or more central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to provide a complex analysis.
I initially just glanced over the standard (I had selected it at random to make a point), but when I read it carefully, I noticed something interesting about its construction — namely, that it doesn’t really say what it intends to say. In fact, it falls prey to a very common error: the misplaced modifier. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 27, 2016 | Blog
As I’ve written about recently, the fact that the SAT has been altered from a predictive, college-aligned test to a test of skills associated with high school is one of the most overlooked changes in the discussion surrounding the new exam. Along with the elimination of ETS from the test-writing process, it signals just how radically the exam has been overhauled.
Although most discussions of the rSAT refer to the fact that the test is intended to be “more aligned with what students are doing in school,” the reality is that this alignment is an almost entirely new development rather than a “bringing back” of sorts. The implication — that the SAT was once intended to be aligned with a high school curriculum but has drifted away from that goal — is essentially false. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 24, 2016 | Blog
When discussing the redesigned SAT, one common response to the College Board’s attempts to market the redesigned test to students and families by focusing on the ways in which it will mitigate stress and reduce the need for paid test-preparation, is to insist that that those factors are actually beside the point; that the College Board can market itself to students and families all it wants, but that the test is about colleges’ needs rather than students’ needs.
That’s certainly a valid point, but I think that underlying these comments is the assumption is that colleges are primarily interested in identifying the strongest students when making admissions decisions. If that were true, a test that didn’t make sufficient distinctions between high-scoring applicants wouldn’t be useful to them. But that belief is based on a misunderstanding of how the American college admissions system works. So in order to talk about how the new SAT fits into the admissions landscape, and why colleges might be so receptive to an exam that produces higher scores, it’s helpful to start with a detour. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 22, 2016 | Blog, The New SAT
Apparently I’m not the only one who has noticed something very odd about PSAT score reports. California-based Compass Education has produced a report analyzing some of the inconsistencies in this year’s scores.
The report raises more questions than it answers, but the findings themselves are very interesting. For anyone who has the time and the inclination, it’s well worth reading.
Some of the highlights include:
- Test-takers are compared to students who didn’t even take the test and may never take the test.
- In calculating percentiles, the College Board relied on an undisclosed sample method when it could have relied on scores from students who actually took the exam.
- 3% of students scored in the 99th percentile.
- In some parts of the scale, scores were raised as much as 10 percentage points between 2014 and 2015.
- More sophomores than juniors obtained top scores.
- Reading/writing benchmarks for both sophomores and juniors have been lowered by over 100 points; at the same time, the elimination of the wrong-answer penalty would permit a student to approach the benchmark while guessing randomly on every single question.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 20, 2016 | Blog, The New SAT
Following the first administration of the new SAT, the College Board released a highly unscientific survey comparing 8,089 March 2016 test-takers to 6494 March 2015 test-takers.
You can read the whole thing here, but in case you don’t care to, here are some highlights:
- 75% of students said the Reading Test was the same as or easier than they expected.
- 80% of students said the vocabulary on the test would be useful to them later in life, compared with 55% in March 2015.
- 59% of students said the Math section tests the skills and knowledge needed for success in college and career.
Leaving aside the absence of some basic pieces of background information that would allow a reader to evaluate just how seriously to take this report (why were different numbers of test-takers surveyed in 2015 vs. 2016? who exactly were these students? how were they chosen for the survey? what were their socio-economic backgrounds? what sorts of high schools did they attend, and what sorts of classes did they take? what sorts of colleges did they intend to apply to? were the two groups demographically comparable? etc., etc.), this is quite a remarkable set of statements. (more…)
