Dear John,
It is week 296 and we are thinking about the backlash to the backlash on standardized testing.
It wasn’t that long ago that it looked like standardized testing was on the ropes. It started 10 years ago with the “opt out” movement, which urged parents to keep their children home on test days to disrupt the collection of achievement data. According to Scott Levy, writing for Ed Next, “20 percent of all eligible grade 3–8 students refused to participate in the 2015 state assessments” in the Empire State. Then in the wake of the pandemic school shutdowns, these state assessments of K-12 schools were canceled and colleges announced that they would not be requiring the submission of SAT and ACT tests in applications.
These decisions to pause testing in Spring and Summer 2020 at the K-12 and college level were described as temporary measures, but a number of advocates were busy working to make them permanent. In Fall 2020, Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” was at the height of his political and cultural influence and made eliminating standardized testing his top educational policy goal. At a Boston School Committee meeting he argued, “Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.” It was a quote the NEA picked up and ran with in making their case against testing. As we explore below in this Roundup, this kind of heated and misleading rhetoric was effective and the cost of losing these objective measures of learning is now becoming painfully clear.
At the same time that Kendi was pushing for the elimination of testing, Derrell Bradford and I made the opposite case in our policy brief Measure Everything: “losing our measurement tools would mean giving up on any understanding of what is working” and protecting our existing summative assessments while measuring more of what matters will give parents, schools and policymakers the full picture on the state of learning in our country.
This case against the elimination of testing was made particularly well last year in the New York Times by David Leonhardt in his article “The Misguided War on the SAT.” Leonhardt carefully reviews the research and demonstrates that not only do standardized tests enjoy broad support from the American public but they are the most accurate measure of how students will actually perform after high school. This is particularly true in our age of grade inflation where parents and colleges can never be sure if an A grade really means mastery of the content. Reviewing the research, Leonhardt concludes “test scores were better than high school grades at predicting student success” and the “relative advantage of test scores has grown over time.”
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Further, while some people “have worried that SAT scores are merely a proxy for income or race … Within every racial group, students with higher scores do better in college. The same is true among poor students and among richer students.”
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It is a good reminder that in an era where it seems that the loudest and most extreme voices dominate, we benefit from pausing and reflecting on what the data actually tells us. And then we need to have the courage to stand up for the truth.
Last time in the New Reality Roundup, we reflected on 20 years of ConnCAN, looked at new national polling on education policy popularity and examined inequitable access to afterschool programs. This week, we dive into the University of California San Diego’s admissions report and tag along as Liz Cohen sparks tutoring conversations across the country.
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Last week, the University of California San Diego released the final report from their Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions. The results sent shock waves through education policy circles. At one of the most prestigious public universities in the country, the number of freshmen who did not meet minimum standards in math grew 30-fold over the past five years, according to a university placement test. Even more alarming: one in four of the students required to attend a remedial math class had been admitted to the university with a 4.0 GPA in math.
To fully understand the depth of the problem, we need to turn to the assessment that was utilized by UCSD to identify students for remediation. Here’s a sampling of questions along with the grade level of the assessed standard and the percentage of college students in UCSD's Math 2 course who got the correct score.
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Less than 40% of Math 2 students met the third grade mathematics standard of being able to round numbers to the nearest hundred and more than half could not handle the fourth grade standard of adding fractions.
How did this happen?
The pressure from anti-test activists had been building for years in California. In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have allowed school districts to use the SAT or ACT as a college pathways test, arguing that the use of these tests “exacerbates the inequities for underrepresented students.” That same year, University of California President Janet Napolitano and the UC Board of Regents, who are appointed by the governor, asked the University of California’s Academic Senate to explore the “current use of standardized testing for admission and consider whether the University and its students are best served by UC’s current testing practices, a modification of current practices, another testing approach, or the elimination of testing.”
A year later the Academic Senate released a comprehensive 228-page report that concluded the university should continue to use standardized tests in admissions because “standardized test scores aid in predicting important aspects of student success, including undergraduate grade point average (UGPA), retention, and completion. At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA).”
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The UC Board of Regents eliminated testing anyways, adopting a “test blind” approach to admissions. That meant that even if you voluntarily took the SAT or ACT, university officials would not be allowed to review the results.
That left admissions officers throughout UC campuses with high-school GPA as the primary measure of college readiness. But as education reformers have noted for years, K-12 grade inflation has been a consistent and growing problem, as data from UCLA’s American Freshman survey shows.
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The result is a broken admissions system, where talented students ready to do college-level work on day one are turned away while students who need intensive remediation are admitted to campuses that aren’t staffed up to provide it. Even worse, the turn away from testing at the K-12 level means that these problems aren’t being caught in the grades where it would be easiest to fix them. That means students develop a false sense of confidence in their mastery of elementary and middle school material and then pay the debt far into the future, in tuition dollars, time and self-confidence. We must do better.
- The task this week is to circulate the UCSD report and start a conversation about how we can recenter objective measures of student achievement in our education systems.
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Spark more conversations to bring tutoring to all
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In October, 50CAN VP of Policy Liz Cohen launched The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 Schools Districts. Since then, she’s been on a whirlwind tour of interviews and podcast appearances and, now that the reviews are pouring in, it’s clear that many want to make tutoring a permanent fixture of American education.
Here’s Michael Thomas Duffy, reviewing at Education Next: “In her new book, The Future of Tutoring, author Liz Cohen offers a grounded, practitioner-oriented roadmap for school leaders who want to understand exactly how schools have been incorporating tutoring into their schedule … Cohen’s timing is perfect. The past five years have seen what feels like a tectonic policy shift: Tutoring has moved from the sidelines to center stage in conversations about post-pandemic recovery and what school can look like moving forward.”
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Podcaster Cal Newport praised the book and its vision “the thing that works best when students are struggling is high-impact tutoring… this book is exhaustively researched. Liz makes sense of all these programs and what worked and didn’t work. This is the definitive book on what we learned during the Covid years.”
Holly Korbey at The Bell Ringer wrote, “Cohen’s new book, The Future of Tutoring, brings fresh eyes to the “second oldest profession,” and how a new kind of tutoring is being used in schools. While there seem to be few education reforms that are scalable and workable, Cohen thinks that the past few post-Covid years gives us a hint at how tutoring might completely change learning at scale.” Be sure to check out Holly’s full interview on the book, which she called, “one of my best interviews ever.”
Liz also sat down for a podcast with Nat Malkus on the AEI podcast, where they talked about how tutoring may not be the easiest intervention in education, but that it’s likely the most effective. The pair also talked about the genesis of scaling tutoring as a policy idea and the implications for school schedules and staffing.
And keep your eyes peeled on 50CAN’s social media channels, for a podcast dropping tomorrow from Jeremy Singer, president of College Board.
Taken together, we’re seeing immense interest among advocates, practitioners, thought leaders and policymakers to get their heads around tutoring, the implementation choices states have made and what they can learn about establishing and scaling programs over the coming years.
- The task this week is to grab a copy of Liz’s new book to secure your own front-row seat to the tutoring revolution.
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In advance of a special legislative session in Connecticut, ConnCAN Executive Director Steven Hernández penned an op-ed for the CT Mirror, where he implores state policymakers to take up critical issues of advancing opportunity across the state and to address longstanding inequitable access to a quality education. “While we understand that a special session is a limited opportunity to find consensus and pass legislation, we know that Connecticut students, families, and educators should not be moved off the agenda once again,” Steven wrote.
For those who were unable to attend, we’re also excited to share a video of the ConnCAN 20th Anniversary celebration.
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ConnCAN's 20th Anniversary
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50CAN William E. Simon Policy Fellow Danyela Souza-Egorov joined the Bigger Apple podcast to talk about the crises facing the nation’s largest school system, including ballooning per-pupil expenditures.
GeorgiaCAN parent advocates Ashley Johnson and Phalyicia Murphy are voicing the need to hold the local school board accountable after the superintendent of DeKalb County schools was indicted on federal charges. The local station WSB Atlanta has the story.
50CAN President Derrell Bradford will join a panel at ExcelinEd to explore funding formulas that will support a student’s access to the education that’s right for them.
At EducationNext, 50CAN’s Liz Cohen took a break from spreading the word on tutoring to propose a framework for evaluating choice no matter how public or private the governance model.
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Education Next reveals that Florida’s school-choice policies have spawned dozens of charter schools exclusively for students with disabilities, with the schools delivering intensive supports and often beyond what traditional schools offer.
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Brookings warns that many high-achieving students are left unchallenged and bored in class and calls for state policies to ensure advanced learners receive appropriate challenges.
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Kathleen Porter Magee reviews Timothy Shanahan’s new book at Education Next, where she investigates the claim that leveled-reading programs trap kids in a neverending cycle of low-rigor instruction.
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Fordham Institute urges schools to set AI guidelines that prioritize genuine learning and critical thinking over artificial shortcuts, which create an illusion of learning that requires vigilance from educators.
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Traditional machine learning outpaces ChatGPT when it comes to quality grading and feedback of student writing, according to new research at EdWorkingPapers.
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Fordham Institute reports that Ohio’s high-achieving low-income students are far less likely than affluent peers to take advanced courses or attend college.
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Urban Institute finds that targeted, online career and technical instruction helped community colleges narrow achievement gaps for low-income students.
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Franklin High School sophomore Chase Hatcher wears beaded necklaces gifted from second-graders in his New Hampshire classroom, where once a week he and his fellow high-schoolers serve as “teachers” for elementary students as part of Franklin High’s transition to embrace a world of open and connected learning. Two days a week, classes are shortened to give high-school students access to projects that have them learning outside the classroom, attending community college classes, internships or projects like Chase’s. The highly popular program has curbed chronic absenteeism and discipline issues.
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