A month or so ago, when I first became aware of the questions surrounding ETS’s involvement (or lack thereof) in the new SAT, I wrote to several people who had been vocal about criticizing Common Core and the slapdash manner in which it was thrown together by Coleman et. al. One of the people I contacted was Jim Milgram, whose response I cited in an earlier post; the other was his colleague Sandra Stotsky, the other member of the validation committee who refused to sign off on the Standards.
Unfortunately, neither of them was able to offer any insight into the authorship of the SAT; however, Sandra did suggest that I write to Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post and alert her to the College Board’s deliberate and persistent evasiveness regarding that question. (The Post’s Education section, unlike that of the Los Angeles Times, hasn’t been bought out by one of the billionaires funding the reform movement… at least not yet.) Valerie promptly responded to let me know that she found the issue “fascinating” and would do some investigation of her own.
So stay tuned. If enough people start asking questions, perhaps the powers that be at the College Board will finally be forced into providing some answers — no doubt heaping on scads of reformster gibberish in an attempt evade the issue at every step. (Transparency? What transparency?). But at least that would be a step in the right direction.