Second Semester Crunch Time

21 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Academic Preparation, Affirmative Action, Challenge Scholarship, College Board, College Retention, Coursework, ETS, Friendships, Internalized Racism, Internalized Sexism, Perseverance, Pitt, Predictability, Righteous Indignation, SAT, Self-Determination, Self-Discovery, Single-Minded

Maybe not a HOF, but a great crunch time catch (literal and figurative) by Terrell Owens, San Francisco 49ers vs. Green Bay Packers, Wildcard Game, Candlestick Park, January 3, 1999. (http://sfgate.com).

As this spring semester begins for me at UMUC — a cruel euphemism in January with a windchill around -10°C and a major winter storm approaching the Mid-Atlantic — I’ve reminded myself of the same calendar twenty-eight years ago. As I’ve already noted through my blog and through Boy @ The Window, this was to be a make-or-break semester for me. I had to step up my game at the University of Pittsburgh or go home. And by home, I mean to 616, a place in Mount Vernon, New York that might as well been my burial plot if I had managed to lose my Challenge Scholarship after that Winter Term 1988.

As I wrote in my book

Despite my advisor, I decided to take a full load of classes, balancing two math courses with two history ones, with “rocks for jocks” Geology being the fifth one. The others were Western Civ II, Roman History, Calculus II (the regular one, not Honors), and Logic.

It was to be a sixteen-credit semester. My advisor, a one-time PhD candidate in the History Department at Pitt (talk about life have no coincidences, past, present or future), thought that after my 2.63 first semester, that I had no business making my college schedule more difficult. But after four years of Sylvia Fasulo at Mount Vernon High School, I decided I was through taking advice about taking it easy. I might’ve not known much about my inner self in January ’88, but I knew this much. I was never the guy to take the easy, path-of-least-resistance road in my education. Fact is, I never had the choice of an easy road at any point in my life.

The only obviously easy course of the five I took was Geology 89, and it was only easy because it was a lecture hall course with three multiple choice exams and one textbook. Calc II — with its focus on integrals, volumes, spheres, and other pre-differential calculations — I figured would be easier than Honors Calc I, partly because I excelled on this part of the AP Calculus course the year before (I probably earned my 3 on the AP Calc BC exam on the strength of that work), and partly because this wasn’t an Honors course.

Advanced logic equations, January 20, 2016. (http://www.galilean-library.org).

Then there was Logic. An ironic choice of a title, since the course didn’t make sense to me from day one. Inductive and deductive reasoning, so the British-born professor told us the first day. With so many symbols and few numbers, how could I consistently deduce an answer to any logic equation? And, what the heck did any of this have to do with being a Computer Science major, anyway?

As for Western Civ II and Roman History, I was surprised how easy I found both courses by the third week, especially after my debacle in East Asian History the month before. But then again, I didn’t miss a single class, I stayed ahead on my readings — and though I knew nearly half of the material going in — and studied as if I’d never been an A student in a history course before.

I had taken the shame of the first semester, the embarrassment of my internalized -isms and imperfections, the anger I directed toward myself, my family, and my idiot dorm mates and let it fuel me. I was on a righteous path of academic vengeance. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

A Planters Peanut Bar, April 25, 2011. (Evan-Amos via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

That sober, almost single-minded focus got me noticed, even though it was my attempt at trying to lay low. I made quite a few friends that semester, most of whom I still call friend today. All of them anywhere between one and twenty years older than me. Call it a sense of maturity, my angered march toward my future, or the sense that I needed to be around folks whose lives had taken at least half as many twists and turns as my own. Whatever it was, I ended up on a path where having a social life would play as much a role in saving my educational future as showing up to all but four lectures in a sixteen-week semester.

I finished that second semester on the Dean’s List with a 3.33 GPA, and a first-year GPA of 3.02. Two A’s (my history classes), an A- in Geology, a B in Calc II, and a C+ in Logic (I did learn a few things even in that course). By the end of April, I was already thinking about switching majors to History. Of more immediate importance was my saving my scholarship for year number two. Not to mention, having friends of any significance for the first time since elementary school.

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Affirmative action opponents from Supreme Court Justices Antonio Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts — as well as Allan Bakke, Jennifer Gratz, Barbara Gruttinger, and Abigail Fisher — all claim that efforts to use the admissions process to bring racial (and gender and socioeconomic) diversity to college campuses is discriminatory. The College Board and ETS cite their statistics to show that the SAT is especially predictive of a student’s performance in the first semester or first year. Anyone working on college retention — especially for underrepresented students — recognizes that nearly half of all students who drop out of college do so after the first two semesters.

Orange Crush can crushed, June 8, 2012. (Susan Murtaugh via Flickr.com).

I knew none of this my second semester at Pitt. No one could’ve predicted my first semester’s depression or the single-minded channeling of anger and intellectual resources my second, least of all me. And no, Justice Scalia, college at a school of the stature of the University of Pittsburgh wasn’t too hard for me. It wouldn’t have been too hard for me at any other university for that matter. Life was. And yes, Ms. Gratz and Ms. Fisher, race played a significant role in where I was, where I wanted to be, and how I got there. Just not to your entitled, narcissistic disadvantage.

As for ETS and the College Board, your predictions of my struggles and triumphs based on my 65th percentile 1120 score from October ’86 were more than a bit premature. And not just mine. Fact is, the vast majority of people like me attending predominantly White institutions graduate, whether the campus climate is welcoming or not. However, having a welcoming climate, just as the one I began to discover my second semester, really helps. I guess you couldn’t predict that.

ETS Using Test Results To Justify Its Test-Filled Vision

04 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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"America's Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future", Closing the Achievement Gap, Common Core State Standards, ETS, High-Stakes Testing, Income Inequality, Meritocracy, Millennials, OECD, PARCC, PIAAC, SAT, STEM Fields, Testing

America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future (cover), February 17, 2015. (ETS).

I actually like the Educational Testing Service (ETS). I’ve done work for them as a consultant and as an AP Reader over the years. I enjoyed most of my testing experiences with them, especially the AP US History Exam of 1986. I like many of the conferences that they host and sponsor, and they beat almost all with the spreads of food that they provide at their events. Yet even with all that, ETS’ agenda is one of promoting the ideal of a meritocratic society with a repressive regime of testing that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt the socioeconomic determinism of standardized assessments. Or, in plain English, tests that favor the life advantages of the middle class and affluent over the poor, Whites and assimilated East Asians over Blacks, Latinos, and only partially assimilated immigrants of color.

Such is the case with a nearly unreported new report from ETS. They had scheduled a press release for the “America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future” on Tuesday, February 17th at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The organizers postponed the event, though, because of the phantom snow storm that was really a typical snow shower. So I didn’t get to ask my preliminary questions about the findings of researchers Madeline J. Goodman, Anita M. Sands, and Richard J. Coley, that despite the educational gains of the generation born after 1980, they sorely lack the skills they need for life and work in the twenty-first century. My questions? How could anyone have expected millennials to develop independent thinking, critical thinking, innovative thinking, writing and other analytical skills if they spend precious little time in their education actually doing any of these things? How would the constant barrage of high-stakes tests from kindergarten to twelfth grade have been able to instill in students ways to think outside the box, to look at issues with more than one perspective, to stand in opposition to policies based on evidence, and not just based on their gut or something they picked up from a test?

Mass of students taking high-stakes test, September 4, 2014. (http://newrepublic.com via Shutterstock).

Well, the report is worse than I thought. Goodman, Sands and Coley put together an argument that makes circular reasoning look like a Thomas the Tank Engine episode. The authors produced this first in a series of reports for ETS, relying solely on “data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).” The PIAAC, developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is a survey that assesses the skill levels of a broad spectrum of people between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five, the primary working population in most developed countries (meaning the US and Canada, the EU, the Baltic states, Australia, Japan and South Korea). ETS and the authors claim that this survey instrument is better at assessing how far behind millennials in particular are when compared to “their international peers in literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments (PS-TRE)” than the international testing of high school students alone. And as such, the authors concluded that

PIAAC results for the United States depict a nation burdened by contradictions. While the U.S. is the wealthiest nation among the OECD countries, it is also among the most economically unequal. A nation that spends more per student on primary through tertiary education than any other OECD nation systematically scores low on domestic and international assessments of skills. A nation ostensibly based on the principles of meritocracy ranks among the highest in terms of the link between social background and skill level. And a nation with some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world houses a college-educated population that scores among the lowest of the participating OECD nations in literacy and numeracy.

I don’t about anyone who reads my blog, but I find these conclusions smack of so much hypocrisy that they’re stomach-ache-inducing. Really? Years of promoting testing at every level of K-12 education, everything from state and district-level assessments to PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessments, and it’s only because of growing economic inequality that US students-turned-adults don’t score well in the super-advanced, highly skilled categories? Not to mention, the SAT, AP exams, GREs, LSATs, GMATs, MCATs, Praxis I, Praxis II, and so many other ETS exams that it would cause the average psychometrician’s head to explode? Seriously?

Terrier dog chasing its own tail, March 3, 2015. (http://webmd.com).

This is yet another case of the dog chasing its own tail. A case where the $3-billion-per-year nonprofit just outside Princeton, New Jersey is sounding a clarion call for a crisis that it helped create. Not the one on the rapid rise of inequality, though its promoting of a false meritocracy through constant testing has served to lull affluent America into an intellectual coma. But in the cutting of history and social studies, literature and art, theater and music classes, from kindergarten really all the way through a bachelor’s degree program.

In the promotion of testing as the way to address achievement gaps, to deal with the so-called education crisis, so much of what was good about K-12 and even higher education has fallen away. Reading for the sake of reading and learning has drifted away, with more English and less literature in schools and at many colleges and universities than ever. Want to teach someone how to express themselves in writing, to express their numeracy in proofs? That thinking runs counter to what goes on in the Common Core school systems of 2015, meaning most people will either never develop these skills, or, if lucky, might develop them somewhere between their junior year of college and in finishing a master’s degree or doctorate. We emphasize STEM fields with billions of STEM dollars without realizing that great STEM is much more than equations and formulas. It’s also imagination, applying the ability to break down pictures, ideas, words and sentences contextually to the world of numbers and algorithms.

And don’t give me this whole “the SAT now has an essay section on it” spiel! Fact is, everyone knows that expressing their words on paper, on a screen or in speech is critical in modern societies. After almost seven decades of testing, ETS figured this out, too? What they haven’t figure out yet, though, is how to make standardized high-stakes testing a necessary for the entire working adult population in the US. Believe me, that’s where they want to head next.

Education, A Numbers Game Love Story

22 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race

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Accountability, Craps, Crunching Numbers, ETS, High-Stakes Testing, K-12 Education, K-16 Education, NCLB, P-20 Education, Politicians, Politics of Education, Psychometricians, Psychometrics, Qualitative Research, Quantitative Analysis, SAT, Statistics, Student Success, Teaching Effectiveness, The Education Trust, US Department of Education

Craps dice, like the state of education reform via numbers crunching these days, August 6, 2006. (Source/Roland Scheicher via Wikipedia). In public domain.

This could just as easily be titled, “Why your multivariate regression analysis isn’t better than my chi-square test,” because that is the state of mainstream education research these days. I find it stifling, like being wrapped in Saran Wrap covered by a condom lined in sheep’s intestines.

Numbers have their place, but the field’s obsession with crunching numbers for trends that defy quantification has increased as a result of federal mandates like NCLB and philanthropy’s accountability movement over the past fifteen years. What’s the long-term impact of the thousands of studies and the deployment of thousands of psychometricians and research analysts in P-20 education reform (that’s early childhood education, K-12, undergraduate and graduate education combined)? Not much, because our politicians and philanthropists are staking themselves to trends almost regardless of numbers.

It all started for me about this time twenty years ago. I did an independent study with Bruce Anthony Jones,

Linear regression graph with over 200 data points, February 22, 2009. (Source/Michael Hardy via Wikipedia). In public domain.

then an assistant professor in the University of Pittsburgh School of Education’s ed policy and administration department. In that one semester, I quickly learned that folks in the education field defined research in only two ways: quantitative and qualitative. And by qualitative, they meant soft research, like Carvel’s soft-serve ice cream. What I didn’t know was that many in the field were working to make the qualitative — surveys, focus groups, oral interviews/transcripts — quantifiable.

Today, everything that can be tracked in American education usually has a number attached to it. It’s hardly grades and standardized test scores anymore. Homework hours, time to task on lesson plans to work on a single problem that may be part of a high-stakes state exam, teacher effectiveness, suspensions and disciplinary reports disaggregated by race and gender. It drives me nuts, and I’ve used SAS and SPSS before, during my grad school days. I can only imagine how a teacher who just wants their students to learn and do well must feel about this numbers game.

But if education has become a number game, it most resembles the game of craps. Take the issue of teacher

Michelle Rhee, former DCPS Chancellor, one of many who've taken advantage of education as craps game, Washington, DC, February 19, 2008. (Source/US Department of Labor). In public domain.

effectiveness, often tied to state-mandates around test scores and students meeting or exceeding a percentile at a given school on these tests. Let’s say if a school as a whole actually exceeds the proficiency percentile. They may well receive more money, and teachers may well get a bonus (depending on the state and school district and union contracts, which by the way, may also be part of a statistical formula). None of this actually proves that these students are better prepared for, say, thinking independently or critically, because critical reasoning isn’t tested by most of the high-stakes state tests.

Nor can they show the writing skills necessary for student success later on in their education, as most of these tests don’t test writing comprehension skills either. Most importantly, where does teacher effectiveness come in as a factor? Do we have to account for time to task in comparison to each exam item, like a psychometrician at the Educational Testing Service (ETS) would? Do we factor out home studying/ homework time, parents’ education, income and race, or whether they eat a hearty breakfast the morning of the exam? Or do we continue to simply say, if Teacher X gets Class A to raise its state test score by 25 percent, they get a raise and a pat on the head? Really?

What’s more, whether teacher effectiveness, student success, or free and reduced lunch programs, politicians, parents and pundits hardly look at any numbers beyond any report’s executive summary. We all insist that our school and community colleges and universities get better at graduating students ready for the real world of work. Fine. Then we insist on lower taxes, blaming teachers, destroying unions, complaining about the state of things but not doing anything to make education work for all of our students. Not fine.

It doesn’t take a two-year study from The Education Trust to realize that there’s no one-to-one correlation

Taco Bell's Gordita Supreme, September 22, 2011. (Source/TacoBell.com).

between an effective teacher and higher student test scores. Or a report from the Institute of Education Sciences at the US Department of Education to know that a lunch of murder burgers and suicide fries with ketchup as a vegetable is about as nutritious as a Taco Bell gordita. School districts and many a college have gone without even adequate resources for years. But instead of providing them, we make them kneel in begging for them, and yet expect them to perform Lazarus-type miracles in the process.

We waste time with numbers and spend little time on causes and solutions that make sense in education. I think about that weak +0.4 correlation number that ETS has put out for years regarding the SAT. It’s the likelihood of someone who does well on the exam beginning their freshman year in college with a 3.0 GPA. I scored an 1120 on the SAT in October ’86, not exactly the greatest score. But I did manage a 3.02 average my first year (and a 2.63 my first semester, by the way), and still came within a few days of dropping out because I was homeless at the beginning of my sophomore year.

I dare say the numbers crunchers at ETS didn’t factor that in their multivariate analysis. Or my homesickness or obsession with a former high school crush. Mark Twain is right about statistics — they can “a good walk spoiled (or lies, I think).”

The Testing Season

12 Tuesday Oct 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race

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Academic Achievement, ACT, Anthony Carnevale, AP, Colleges & Universities, Educational Testing Service, ETS, GMAT, GRE, High-Stakes Testing, LSAT, MCAT, SAT, Standardized Testing, Strivers Research

Mock SAT Answer Sheet, October 12, 2010. Source: http://kellgradcoach.blogspot.com

This really is the testing season, isn’t it? In many more ways than one. For voters, the underemployed and the unemployed, the welfare poor, for undocumented workers, for the Obama Administration, for so many others. But the testing season I’m talking about is standardized testing. Between the SAT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, and ACT, high school students and college undergrads face incredible amounts of stress over a five-decade-long practice that, in the end, reveals more about the system of competition that technocratic university administrators and eugenics-type scientists have created than it actually does

ETS Logo, from http://www.ETS.org, October 12, 2010

about our own abilities.

My own standardized testing history includes the following (not counting the AP or New York State Regents exams, which occur in May and June, another testing season), starting with elementary school:

1. SRAs (1st through 6th grade – ironically, started by Lyle Spencer, who also founded the Spencer Foundation, which sponsored my doctoral dissertation research in 1995-96)

2. PSATs (10th grade)

3. SATs (11th and 12th grade)

4. GREs (junior and senior years, Pitt)

5. LSATs (senior year, Pitt)

My highest score on the SAT — 1120 (540 Verbal, 580 Math). My highest score on the GRE — 1730 (530 Verbal, 580 Math, 620 Analytical). On the LSAT, I scored in the 50th percentile, not bad for someone who studied for it for only two weeks. What does any of this prove in the whole scheme of things? Nothing, really. If these scores were truly great predictors of future academic performance, then Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Carnegie Mellon should have graduation rates approaching 100 percent. Which would explain why many elite institutions have either downgraded their use of these tests in their admissions formulas, or in the case of the big three and UC-Berkeley regarding the SAT, are barely using them at all.

My GRE Score, October 1990.

But for most colleges and universities, these tests are a critical factor in a student’s acceptance and enrollment. They are a necessary evil for figuring out who has academic potential and who doesn’t, at least according to ETS and admissions directors. Which is why I still don’t understand why educators and other folks haven’t taken former ETS vice-president Anthony Carnevale’s work around “strivers” seriously. Or, rather, I do understand. Why give someone like me a leg up because my SAT score was an 1120 — giving my score more weight than a 1280 score for a White kid from a middle class background? All scores are equal. That’s why we call them standardized tests, a standard that doesn’t measure up to the realities of earning a degree.

I guess for those I know who are rolling into these exams this fall (and in some cases, before March or April), the best advice I can give is to get the best score you can. But don’t despair if your scores are only in the 51th, 64th, or 74th percentile, like mine were on the different sections of the GRE. What will ultimately matter is how you perform after you’ve been accepted by and enrolled in that institution.

I’ve given some thought to going back to school in the next couple of years, possibly even law school. Not to become a lawyer, but to make myself more marketable outside of academia and within the philanthropic world. For some odd reason, there are lots of people with law degrees who are working in education reform, international development, and social justice. Go figure.

But even this professor will likely have to take the LSATs again in order to apply to a law program at Georgetown, UPenn or some other school. And that will mean trying to figure out why A and B won’t sit together at the same conference table, but B can sit next to E, except when meetings are held on Tuesdays.