Education Policy -- Made Secretly

A great story in The Washington Post about how education policy is made in secret.  This particular reporter, Valerie Strauss, is one of the best around.  She's worked on a number of different stories but, lately, has been full time on education.

The URL below is well worth your time.  It'll take you to her story in The Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/12/secret-policymaking-on-school-reform-is-on-the-rise/

Common Core: The Industrial Tool

The only thing more disappointing than the changes to the Scholastic Aptitude Test is the reporting by the news media on the event, including by yours truly. 

There’s more to this story than meets the eye:  It’s not just a simple case of vertical integration – which, with rare exception, most of the news media missed – it also comes with an added twist, coercion.

The SAT gives every impression of losing ground to its only competitor, the ACT test, another barometer for measuring college-level academic performance and part of many college applications.

The most recent numbers, as provided by The New York Times, show ACT test takers edging out SAT test takers by about 2,000 students, 1.666 million compared to 1.664 million.[i]

As The Times shows, however, this doesn’t necessarily mean the SAT is on the decline.  At least 12 states, the paper says, “now require, and pay for, all public high school juniors to take” the ACT.[ii]

If you’re David Coleman, president of The College Board, which writes, publishes and owns the SAT, this isn’t good news.

The College Board should flat out own the market – not have to share half of it with its upstart competitor.

So what do you do to increase market share?

Answer:  You adopt tactics and strategies to dominate the market and shape the industry’s standards, similar to what Starbucks and McDonald’s do so well in their industries.

Coleman, a former McKinsey & Co., consultant, studied the trends The College Board was experiencing, seeing that the SAT was under fire as being a meaningless test and the ACT was gaining ground.

As Coleman likely saw it, if ever there was a turnaround situation, this was it.

It’s very likely, during his consulting career, Coleman discussed vertical integration with his former employer’s clients.

Vertical integration, in case you don’t know, is a business practice that makes sense if it’s cheaper for a company to own their supplier instead of just buying its goods.  It can also be sound judgment to vertically integrate if it provides an advantage over competitors in the marketplace.

To turn around The College Board’s fortunes, Coleman teamed up experts in education with ones from American industry and created a curriculum that could be adopted in the nation’s public school system, grades K – 12.

In other words, long before the current crop of elementary school kids even think about college, they’re prepping for the SAT because they’re exposed to Common Core.

In time, if those five states holding off on adopting Coleman’s new-fangled curriculum continue doing so, he’ll say their students didn’t do well on the SAT because Common Core was missing from their education.

Common Core is the means by which Coleman has assured the fortunes of The College Board.  The fact that it comes at the expense of an outstanding K- 12 education, especially in Massachusetts, is no matter.  He’s served his master.

The only thing to worry about now is when the ACT will wake up, realizing it, too, needs to develop its own K – 12 curriculum.

And the only question the journalism world needs to answer -- including me -- is why no one saw this story sooner.  I offer no excuses.

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[i] “Testing, Testing:  More Students are Taking Both the ACT and SAT,” The New York Times, August 2, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/more-students-are-taking-both-the-act-and-sat.html?_r=0

[ii] Ibid.

Common Core & the SAT

The most surprising news about the changes in the Scholastic Aptitude Test is that some leading media outlets failed to link the reforms to the one man working hard to prop up revisions he’s already made to American education.

Neither The New York Times nor Time magazine, in their main stories announcing the reforms to the SAT, mentioned that the changes were coming from Common Core’s leading advocate, David Coleman, who runs the College Board, which owns, produces, writes and publishes the SAT test, taken by nearly 2 million high school students annually.

In other words, the question that remains unanswered is the combined commercial interests of Common Core and the College Board; if they're both linked -- and they give every appearance they will be soon -- what sort of money is at stake?

Common Core, nothing more than an all-out assault to dumb down American education, is Coleman’s baby.  He’s successfully pushed it – or, as he likes to say, it was “voluntarily accepted” – by 45 states, some of which are now pushing back against this latest reform effort.

Coleman is a former McKinsey & Company consultant.  His educational background is impressive, including a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yale University, and he was a Rhodes Scholar, earning another bachelor’s degree from Oxford, in English Literature, and a master’s in ancient philosophy from Cambridge.[i]

Coleman never spent a day teaching kids.  He may have made appearances here and there in a classroom but he’s never been held accountable, professionally, to make sure (the proverbial) Johnny can read, do math or understand science.

In other words, when it comes to day-to-day instruction and how kids go about learning in a classroom setting, he’s clueless.

For that matter, from what I can gather on the College Board’s website and others discussing his background, he doesn’t appear to be a father.

I’m not going to go off on a tangent that one needs to be a parent to fully understand public school education or what it’s like to teach kids; but as a dad closely involved in his kids’ education, I’m here to say it helps – big time!

Yet Coleman’s gained the ear of the high and mighty interested in education, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, President Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the National Governor’s Association as he’s peddled Common Core.

The whole basis of Common Core, from key critics at places like Harvard and Stanford universities, is that it slows math education, putting American kids further behind their peers overseas, and it spends far too much time on “informational texts” rather than literature and, as a result, logical thinking skills are diminished. 

Coleman is all about evidence-based education.  In other words, he wants American kids to consider, when it comes to literature, whether or not an author proved their point.  What evidence did they provide, in other words.

Ask yourself, did Harper Lee, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, and the many other leading authors in American literature, ever prove a point? 

Of course they didn’t.  They weren’t supposed to!

Their job was to tell a story rich in detail that captivated readers’ imaginations, making them stop and think about their own lives as well as the lives of the characters. 

Since Coleman is such an advocate for evidence-based education, we should wonder why he never proposed so much as a modest test, in some community somewhere, where Common Core could be assessed and compared to another community not using this latest reform effort. 

Probably that’s due to his ego or he feared the worse – his baby would fail.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/education/major-changes-in-sat-announced-by-college-board.html

http://time.com/12985/sat-college-board-test-prep/

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[i] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/the-story-behind-the-sat-overhaul.html