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David Coleman is the former Rhodes Scholar and former McKinsey consultant who sold the Common Core idea to Bill Gates, who controls the direction of education reform in this country by having his Gates Foundation buy off most potential respectable critics.
Like I’ve said, it’s kind of absurd that two guys get to decide on school policy for about 250 million people without any testing to see if what sounds like a good idea to them in theory actually works.
On the other hand, if two guys are going to be allowed to wing it like these two are doing, Coleman and Gates at least aren’t idiots, which can’t be said of everybody in the ed racket.
Coleman won’t say so in public, but a lot of evidence suggests that he’s more or less implementing the old ideas of E.D. Hirsch, who argued in the 1980s for teaching Core Knowledge.
Hirsch came out of the liberal Jewish mainstream of, say, 1960, so by the late 1980s poor Hirsch was denounced as a flaming rightwing advocate of Dead White European Males. (Here’s a 1990 Christopher Hitchens article on Hirsch.)
Coleman was then hired by the College Board to shake up up the SAT college admissions test, which has been losing market share to the rival ACT.
The first Coleman Era practice test for the PSAT (Preliminary SAT), the junior varsity SAT that most high school students take, has now been released.
Education Realist has an assessment here from the perspective of a test tutor: just like New Coke in 1984 was, as Dave Barry said, new Pepsi-flavored Coke, this is new ACT-flavored PSAT-SAT.
I haven’t looked at the questions, but I have looked at the reading passages. The SAT used to have a bunch of passages mostly from works of fiction, typically with a heavy Diversity slant of the eye-glazing “Yesenia and N!Xiao Celebrate Diwali” variety.
Coleman’s PSAT is, as promised, much more non-fiction oriented. More strikingly, it throws Diversity right out the window. Here are the first paragraphs of the nine reading sections on the sample PSAT (the total number of words is a formidable 3,200):
2015 Practice Test #1
Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test
1. This passage is adapted from Jane Austen, Emma, originally published in 1815.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Okay, we start off with a novel by a female authoress, but she’s only the most canonical (not to mention Tory) Dead White European Female of them all.
2. This passage is adapted from Marina Gorbis, The Nature of
the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World. ©2013 by Marina Gorbis.Visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s always marveled at the gap between what they saw in state stores—shelves empty or filled with things no one wanted—and what they saw in people’s homes: nice furnishings and tables filled
with food. What filled the gap? A vast informal economy driven by human relationships, dense networks of social connections through which people
traded resources and created value. The Soviet people didn’t plot how they would build these networks. No one was teaching them how to maximize their connections the way social marketers eagerly teach us today. Their networks evolved naturally, out of necessity; that was the only way to survive.
I don’t actually recall any visitors marveling at the standard of living of Russians’ private lives. I can recall a lot of reporters (e.g., Hedrick Smith) recounting how friendly and caring the Russians were to visitors in their apartments, the sacrifices they’d make to scrape together a nice meal for their guests, but that’s not quite the same thing.
3. This passage is adapted from Tina Hesman Saey, “Lessons from the Torpid.” ©2012 by Society for Science & the Public.
Understanding how hibernators, including ground squirrels, marmots and bears, survive their long winter’s naps may one day offer solutions for problems such as heart disease, osteoporosis and muscular dystrophy.
4. This passage is from Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” originally published in 1889. Arriving penniless in Pennsylvania from Scotland in 1848, Carnegie became one of the richest people in the United States through the manufacture of steel.
The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. The conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionized,
within the past few hundred years. In former days there was little difference between the dwelling, dress, food, and environment of the chief and those
of his retainers. . . . The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us to-day measures the change which has come with
civilization. This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial. It is well, nay, essential, for the progress of the race that the houses of some should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the refinements of civilization, rather than that none should be so. Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor.
Did you know that Bill Gates has a $44 million house?
5. Passage 1 is adapted from Stewart Brand, “The Case for Reviving Extinct Species.” ©2013 by the National Geographic Society. Passage 2 is adapted from the editors at Scientific American, “Why Efforts to Bring Extinct Species Back from the Dead Miss the Point.” ©2013 by Nature America, Inc.
Passage 1
Many extinct species—from the passenger pigeon to the woolly mammoth—might now be reclassified as “bodily, but not genetically, extinct.” They’re dead, but their DNA is recoverable from museum specimens and fossils, even those up to 200,000 years old.
Stewart Brand, editor of the once famous Whole Earth Catalog, is an elderly WASP hippie.
So, not exactly a lot of racial Diversity in the authors chosen for this first trial run of the U.S.S. Coleman. Did they get Christian Lander of Stuff White People Like to consult on the reading samples?
No author is given for the next three passages:
6. A Nod to Nodding Off
With 30 percent of United States workers not getting enough sleep at night, according to the Wall Street Journal, US companies 1 lose a yearly sum of $63.2 billion annually due to the drop in employee productivity resulting from sleep deprivation. Sleep-deprived workers generally have lower morale and are less able to retain information than their better-rested colleagues.
7. Vanishing Honeybees: A Threat to Global Agriculture
Honeybees play an important role in the agriculture industry by pollinating crops. An October 2006 study found that as much as one-third of global agriculture depends on animal pollination, including honeybee pollination—to increase crop output. The importance of bees highlights the potentially disastrous affects of an emerging, unexplained crisis: entire colonies of honeybees are dying off without warning.
8. Lunar Farming
Late last autumn, Giuseppe Ferrua stood, on the hillside he farms overlooking Italy’s Serchio River valley, a landscape of low mountains dotted with vineyards. Ferrua grows grapes and olives, and he does so according to the phases of the Moon. He didn’t always farm this way. When he began, he exercised modern, one-size-fits-all farming methods but says he soon became convinced that “plants are completely prone to elements in the cosmos, the rhythms of day and night.”
9. Recipes for History: The Szathmary Cookbook Collection
In 1990, chef Louis Szathmary, a voracious collector of cookbooks, donated approximately 20,000 culinary artifacts to the University of Iowa library. The gift included more than 100 manuscript recipe books —collections of recipes handwritten by the people who used them. The manuscripts, some of which date back to the seventeenth century, are an invaluable resource for food historians as well as the general public.
These reading passages from the sample PSAT read like a late 1990s issue of Slate. To my taste, that’s an improvement over the sludge you used to see on the PSAT/SAT, but then I’m biased.
Now that I think about it, that’s not too surprising because, first, Bill Gates, who gave Coleman his big break, was the founder of Slate in the 1990s. And, a friend of mine told me a couple of years ago that he went 0-8 in high school debate against Coleman and his partner, Hanna Rosin, the wife of long-time Slate editor David Plotz.
But has anybody bothered testing this new test for disparate impact?
My impression from reading about Coleman is that he’s naive about the world of hurt he’ll likely eventually run into over charges of racism. He figures that since he’s a nice Jewish liberal boy from New York, so he couldn’t possibly be racist or insensitive. No “regatta” questions on his test! Heck, maybe he called up his old debate partner Hanna and had her try this new PSAT out on Troy Patterson, and he aced it. (I wonder, though why she didn’t have Jamelle Bouie take it … )
By the way, did I mention it’s time for my Spring Panhandling Drive? I’m done working on my taxes (until about October 14, 2015), so I made seven posts today.
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Steve, I don’t know about you, but the fact that the new PSAT includes a reading section on book collecting featuring Chef Szathmary, a late member of the Grolier Club no less, makes me a convert. All hail Gates and Coleman!
That was pretty funny. And reminiscent of Mickey Kaus — you and he have similar senses of snark.
These passages are snowblindingly white. Stewart Brand and Jane Austin? You could imagine the test bank having passages from James Thurber or Marshall McLuhan. It reminds me of when this Southern boy started noticing around the age of 11 how Yankee/East Coast a lot of textbooks and packaged worksheet material my class had seemed. The topics discussed, the way characters would interact, and so forth. Thinking about it now, Steve’s California, which at the time was at the pinnacle of its influence, was hardly referenced at all. Strange. Maybe it had to do with the provenance of the publishers, but there also was almost certainly cultural topography going on: Northeast as “standard”, thus appropriate for textbooks, elsewhere “colloquial”.
So many of these tests are designed to test for – willingness to submit to the process of being tested.
They are looking for people willing and able to put up with this tester/test taker, employer/employee, commander/follower relationship.
That’s what all the institutions are based on – government, military, economy…
Tedious.
I don’t see what’s wrong with this. They’re reading actual science, and you’ve even got a (justified) dig at Communism.
Also, what was so bad about Hirsch? He actually wanted us to teach people the Western Canon!
If you’re going to have national standards (which would do a lot to improve the poor teaching in many parts of the country, particularly among rural whites), these seem pretty good.
My suspicion is Coleman either believes ghetto kids are an untapped resource who need rigor, or knows about HBD but uses Diversity as a cloak to sneak in superior standards across the country so we can catch up with China academically. Nothing wrong with that from a conservative point of view.
You have a point about the “lack of cultural diversity” of the new test.
But the larger point is that the Common Core tests are designed to be more buzzword, buzzwordier and generally buzzphrase, which all translate basically to “more highly g-loaded.”
More g-loaded means more Disparate Impact. Teachers and education systems have gotten reasonably good at pounding information into 90-105 IQ brains–scores always go up after the first few years of a test, after teachers have seen what (out of the 3-inch binder of The Curriculum) is on the actual (maybe 100 question) test.
The most effective* teaching of the last generation has been in low-middle performing schools, focusing the curriculum fairly narrowly and drill-and-kill because by God or by Ganesh, they may not know how to tie their shoes or their times tables or how to spell their names (granted, their names are pretty tough spells) going to finish this year knowing (X).
(Effective defined as “test-score value added”)
“Teaching reasoning”, etc tends to be code for “raising IQs”, and we don’t know how to do that.
–Discordiax
Yet, I'm pretty good at critical thinking, but for some reason, I'm never invited out to Aspen conferences of the great and good to explain how I do it.
Have you or other HBD writers commented on the conviction and sentencing of the Atlanta teachers? If so I’ve missed it.
Steve I think I’ve mentioned that I told my Japanese wife the story about the “biased” regatta question And she nearly choked to death laughing.
I really enjoyed Hitchens’s writing, even when I didn’t agree with him (which wasn’t very often).
My 2 cents is that Hirsch’s efforts are very welcome. I don’t see how a National standard of minimum knowledge can offend anyone’s sensibility (you can always pile on the local specifics), but the US has always done things in a way that doesn’t jibe with a more European mindset.
When I have children (1.4 of them according to my national statistics), and if I remember Hirsch, I’ll probably buy his book “Cultural Literacy”, among others, to give them some general knowledge and a jump-start on their English proficiency. I even found an article on Marginal Revolution recommending that children be taught the basics of statistics, to give them tools for reasoning on their own (correlation, causation, averages, outliers), which seemed a very good idea and paralleled my remembered attempts to make sense of the world.
I think some of the problem boils down to the cliched soft bigotry of low expectations. My experience with pre-university schooling in my country was that the curriculum was incredibly rigorous, but what you were left with or how well you did depended on the student. The teachers varied in quality and the students varied in ability, but they mainly focused on trying to slog through everything and doing remedial work with those who needed and wanted it. If you were bright and motivated enough to learn, but not enough to surpass the curriculum on your own, then you would be left with a good amount of everything anyway. From anecdotal information from people who move to the US, it’s almost cliched for them to find out that US high school information intake is waaaaay behind what is thought of as normal and proper in the former communist countries.
Since we have no pre-university college, your high school was supposed to leave you with the basics to pass the entrance exams into Med School (biology and genetics), Polytechnics (derivatives, integrals, probabilities, trig, various fields of physics like fluids, mechanics etc), Law or Letters (language and literature) etc.
I studied Economics and University was a cakewalk compared to high school, even though the entrance exams were pretty tough (you’d have to be pretty daft to outright fail, since there are no elite universities, but there still weren’t enough seats for all applicants and, once among the in-crowd, the difference was in whether you paid the tuition, got a scholarship, got a place in the best dorms etc).
Then again, what are most people left with after high school? Cognitive development, even if the information has drained away? I’m much more knowledgeable now in more fields than I ever was before, but my math and physics knowledge (which were quite good, good enough for a top engineering school spot) have trickled away to almost nothing. I can follow the nextbigfuture.com people well enough, but that’s it. I imagine other people really have reverted to almost blank slates.
But the larger point is that the Common Core tests are designed to be more buzzword, buzzwordier and generally buzzphrase, which all translate basically to "more highly g-loaded."
More g-loaded means more Disparate Impact. Teachers and education systems have gotten reasonably good at pounding information into 90-105 IQ brains--scores always go up after the first few years of a test, after teachers have seen what (out of the 3-inch binder of The Curriculum) is on the actual (maybe 100 question) test.
The most effective* teaching of the last generation has been in low-middle performing schools, focusing the curriculum fairly narrowly and drill-and-kill because by God or by Ganesh, they may not know how to tie their shoes or their times tables or how to spell their names (granted, their names are pretty tough spells) going to finish this year knowing (X).
(Effective defined as "test-score value added")
"Teaching reasoning", etc tends to be code for "raising IQs", and we don't know how to do that.
--Discordiax
“Teaching reasoning” ~ “critical thinking,” which is what schools are supposed to be teaching.
Yet, I’m pretty good at critical thinking, but for some reason, I’m never invited out to Aspen conferences of the great and good to explain how I do it.
"noticing" is bad.
I can’t get to my blog from home, which means I eventually need to howl at my internet service. Anyway, I’m shocked that no one seems to be noticing that the SAT has utterly ripped off the ACT’s English section. It’s blatant test plagiarism. Surely the American College Test company has thoughts?
While you focus on the diversity issue, which is huge (and subject for a later post of mine), the real question I have is why would the CB make the test more like the ACT when Asians don’t take it? I read recently of these two Asian boys who had to prep from childhood to get a perfect ACT composite, something that Asian kids do with a few years practice with the SAT if American and even less if they’re international (just get a copy of the answers!). The Asian preference for the SAT is 3:1.
Also, the test scores are going to be delayed for 6-8 weeks, rumor has it. Why would anyone take this test when the ACT is unchanged? Will colleges even accept the SAT at this point?
I wonder if Coleman is shooting for the state market and deciding to abandon the college admissions market altogether. Maybe he wants to replace PARCC and Smarter Balance. But ACT already has the advantage in that, too. And if the test is too hard, then colleges won’t use it for remediation placement, which means there’s no reason at all for non-selective colleges to use it.
So I can’t figure out what the hell he’s doing, unless the CB has already bribed colleges to continue accepting the test, and is actually the source of the prior knowledge cheating that Asians do.
Which means there must be something I’m missing, but most of the people speculating on this aspect don’t understand the market, so I can’t find any decent information.
BTW: My math assessment will be up later this morning. The math is much more shocking than the verbal, except for the whole plagiarism thing.
Not clear, who is the source?
They’re slowly boiling the frog. The threat to Common Core comes from the Right, so Coleman is pacifying conservatives by making the PSAT test sound friendly to white conservatives. Once opposition has melted away the test will become more openly leftist. It happens all the time in business: corporations wait to strengthen their grasp on a market, THEN they alter the terms of the arrangement to favor themselves. You think Bill Gates doesn’t know how to behave like a monopolist?
Another weird idea I have, is that the ACT was the test of choice for decades outside of the mid to north east region, and, now these students know they may have better chances leaving their home states: they represent regional diversity for a western/midwestern/southern college. One third of our local HS seniors are leaving the region to colleges thousands of miles away, for instance.
The mood here in the east coast is uncertainty, and people who have always been liberal are changing their minds about the future prospects for their family. It is a subtle undertow of gloom that the elite liberals in government and industry have become increasingly concerned with.
I even think that Hilary's folksy method of chatting up "average" (is that her unfortunate term?) Americans in Iowa just seems so phony. People in the vast middle class and those earning up to $250K are very confused these days, and this scares people in power.
Netflix.
While the Communist shadow economy certainly did not produce abundance, it did produce more than you would expect. For instance, holiday houses were often built using supplies acquired at building sites of official projects, and not just by those who were well-connected. People traded favors to get things, rather than money. So that nice cut of steak that the butcher did not have might suddenly appear if you could tip him off on where and when he would be able to buy a television. So while the author may have made an overstatement, it is certainly an interesting question of how this system developed organically to distribute goods outside of the official money economy.
Yet, I'm pretty good at critical thinking, but for some reason, I'm never invited out to Aspen conferences of the great and good to explain how I do it.
“critical thinking” is good.
“noticing” is bad.
I think it is even more complicated than that. Liberals are also opposed to the CC and, they are turning to the ACT in droves come college app time. ACT has been the test of choice for both camps of political thought these past 3 years…and the Independents are growing larger, and also have been preferring to pay for the ACT only. The elite U’s claim to ignore the SAT, but they are fixated on the ACT since it is harder to game. Also, URM’s and 1st Gens seem to do better on the ACT.
Another weird idea I have, is that the ACT was the test of choice for decades outside of the mid to north east region, and, now these students know they may have better chances leaving their home states: they represent regional diversity for a western/midwestern/southern college. One third of our local HS seniors are leaving the region to colleges thousands of miles away, for instance.
The mood here in the east coast is uncertainty, and people who have always been liberal are changing their minds about the future prospects for their family. It is a subtle undertow of gloom that the elite liberals in government and industry have become increasingly concerned with.
I even think that Hilary’s folksy method of chatting up “average” (is that her unfortunate term?) Americans in Iowa just seems so phony. People in the vast middle class and those earning up to $250K are very confused these days, and this scares people in power.
That's very interesting. I haven't really heard about this.
“And, a friend of mine told me a couple of years ago that he went 0-8 in high school debate against Coleman and his partner, Hanna Rosin, the wife of long-time Slate editor David Plotz.”
I sense a new twist on a (somewhat) older game: 6 degrees of Hanna Rosin.
“It happens all the time in business: corporations wait to strengthen their grasp on a market, THEN they alter the terms of the arrangement to favor themselves.”
Netflix.
Another weird idea I have, is that the ACT was the test of choice for decades outside of the mid to north east region, and, now these students know they may have better chances leaving their home states: they represent regional diversity for a western/midwestern/southern college. One third of our local HS seniors are leaving the region to colleges thousands of miles away, for instance.
The mood here in the east coast is uncertainty, and people who have always been liberal are changing their minds about the future prospects for their family. It is a subtle undertow of gloom that the elite liberals in government and industry have become increasingly concerned with.
I even think that Hilary's folksy method of chatting up "average" (is that her unfortunate term?) Americans in Iowa just seems so phony. People in the vast middle class and those earning up to $250K are very confused these days, and this scares people in power.
“The mood here in the east coast is uncertainty, and people who have always been liberal are changing their minds about the future prospects for their family. It is a subtle undertow of gloom that the elite liberals in government and industry have become increasingly concerned with.”
That’s very interesting. I haven’t really heard about this.
I can tell you, I do have friends who are millionaire entrepreneurs in cs, and I have widows and divorced friends living just above the poverty line in my town. So, there is a wide variety of professions and incomes here...with newcomers and generational Yankees.
We are lucky to have such an excellent HS that is comprehensive (has the ole' shop classes, vocational lines like Culinary, PLTW, as well as college prep including AP track). Our students get into a wide variety of schools, but very few deserving kids are getting into the elite u's in our part of the country these past few years. Once again, there are constant reminders of our privileged existence also coming from the universities and colleges in our region.
As a younger Baby Boomer, I have heard many acquaintances who are pulling up stakes as soon as the last kid is through HS or college, and, they are taking their lives to new, less tax burdensome states. New England, particularly CT is losing young people (that is in the news) by the thousands. And, their parents are selling and moving to: FL, NC, SC, TX, CO, AZ, NH (snow lovers,) even RI. Everyone is worried that taxes will go up, and our governor is constantly guilting anyone in the 90K-300K bracket...which are most of the people in the state who are working in the insurance/defense/aeronautical/financial services (not Wall St,) industries.
CT & MA pay the most amount of federal taxes; state taxes are huge; and the tuition at flagship state u's is higher than state u's in most other states. This region has been generous in the huge safety net we have, and it is impossible to eliminate these programs. Middle to upper middle class people sense that their property taxes (cars, motorcycles and boats are taxed, too) will go up along with state taxes. All this talk about taxing inheritances and college savings plans is causing unease. At least Obama sensed his mistake with the 529plan.
The roads are in very poor condition, and bridges have fallen down...not to mention the problems with Metro North train tracks. Today, the casinos just announced that they are having a tough time.
So, with the constant harping about how privileged out kids are (or we are) and how "the playing field must be leveled," or some other platitude about inequality, people are feeling that things are just gonna get worse. Did I mention that we live in one of the most expensive parts of the country? Cost of living is VERY high, as is real estate.
And, every time DeBlassio condescends to suburban dwellers in the Tri-State area, people silently get the message: sell your house, pack up and retire or move to lower tax state...and, many of these people are liberals, voted for O. Even my own university goes on and on about the privilege of current white students...and that basically, we suburban dwellers bring no diversity to their business model with our children's applications.
A weird trend: many of the students here are going to Scotland, Ireland, Canada and England to university. And, in my neighborhood, people are moving or planning to move to: FL, NC, TX and UT...just this past year.
Another weird idea I have, is that the ACT was the test of choice for decades outside of the mid to north east region, and, now these students know they may have better chances leaving their home states: they represent regional diversity for a western/midwestern/southern college. One third of our local HS seniors are leaving the region to colleges thousands of miles away, for instance.
The mood here in the east coast is uncertainty, and people who have always been liberal are changing their minds about the future prospects for their family. It is a subtle undertow of gloom that the elite liberals in government and industry have become increasingly concerned with.
I even think that Hilary's folksy method of chatting up "average" (is that her unfortunate term?) Americans in Iowa just seems so phony. People in the vast middle class and those earning up to $250K are very confused these days, and this scares people in power.
No, her term is “everyday” Americans-much worse than average.
Can somebody kindly explain to me, what is the advantage of
[ SAT (and/or) ACT ]
in comparison with the results of AP exams (I mean the federal ones, not in local School.)
With gratitude for future answer, F.r.
I’ve posted my thoughts on the new PSAT math.
They are looking for people willing and able to put up with this tester/test taker, employer/employee, commander/follower relationship.
That's what all the institutions are based on - government, military, economy...
Tedious.
Noam Chomsky made the point many years ago that his Ivy League audiences were the most submissive (and least intellectually curious) bunch he spoke to because they were (he surmised) the group most heavily conditioned to jumping through the series of requisite hoops presented to them to acquire their education.
[ SAT (and/or) ACT ]
in comparison with the results of AP exams (I mean the federal ones, not in local School.)
With gratitude for future answer, F.r.
AP tests have a lot going for them as a college admissions measure, but they are tied to AP classes (although both my sons passed AP tests in fields they didn’t take by swotting). So, they are seen as giving too big of an advantage to students from high schools with lots of AP tests. Also, timing is a big problem in using them since students tend to take the largest number of tests in May of their senior year, after acceptances have already been sent out.
"high schools with lots of AP tests. " A few years ago Newsweek (when it still existed) decided to go into the high school ranking business to compete with US News. The guy they hired decided that the best way to rank high schools was according to the # of AP courses offered. So a lot of city high schools started offering tons of AP courses. Very few if any of their students got 4s or 5s on them, but this guy's thesis was that just offering the courses would make minorities smarter, ala Stand and Deliver, so the scores achieved had no weight in his ranking system.
I sense a new twist on a (somewhat) older game: 6 degrees of Hanna Rosin.
Seven degrees of Stephen Glass …
Seriously — the Haven Monahan hoax was fought out among people with pretty close contact to Glass back in the day.
If there is more nonfiction, I’d wager a large amount of money that male verbal rises relative to female, particularly in the top tenth. A real original observation, I know.
The fiction involves so much narrative tracing– subtle social exchanges, dialogue, nuanced descriptions of emotions, keeping track of names, etc. A bunch of stuff that’s a female predilection.
By the same token, an excerpt describing a scientific concept one is familiar with, is infinitely easier to confront than tackling complexity on first impression. Really magnifies the significance of the time factor.
The latest thing in upper end private schools is to drop AP classes and substitute honors classes because they feel that they are too rigidly tied to the test and limit their ability to teach what they want to teach. I haven’t figured out whether this is really a valid critique or just an excuse not to have to teach a rigorous curriculum.
“high schools with lots of AP tests. ” A few years ago Newsweek (when it still existed) decided to go into the high school ranking business to compete with US News. The guy they hired decided that the best way to rank high schools was according to the # of AP courses offered. So a lot of city high schools started offering tons of AP courses. Very few if any of their students got 4s or 5s on them, but this guy’s thesis was that just offering the courses would make minorities smarter, ala Stand and Deliver, so the scores achieved had no weight in his ranking system.
your truly F.r.
Yes, I remember you’ve said that before, and it’s pretty amazing. But Hannah also seems to be somehow involved in much of what’s going on these days. A little unrelated, but IIRC, I think Noah Millman has mentioned that he debated with (or against) her in high school.
"high schools with lots of AP tests. " A few years ago Newsweek (when it still existed) decided to go into the high school ranking business to compete with US News. The guy they hired decided that the best way to rank high schools was according to the # of AP courses offered. So a lot of city high schools started offering tons of AP courses. Very few if any of their students got 4s or 5s on them, but this guy's thesis was that just offering the courses would make minorities smarter, ala Stand and Deliver, so the scores achieved had no weight in his ranking system.
With gratitude for clarifications to Jack D and to Mr. Sailer,
your truly F.r.
The fiction involves so much narrative tracing-- subtle social exchanges, dialogue, nuanced descriptions of emotions, keeping track of names, etc. A bunch of stuff that's a female predilection.
By the same token, an excerpt describing a scientific concept one is familiar with, is infinitely easier to confront than tackling complexity on first impression. Really magnifies the significance of the time factor.
Using the opening of a very famous novel, Emma, gives a huge advantage to test-takers who have read the book or watched the Gwyneth Paltrow movie, or, to a lesser extent have read another Jane Austen novel (e.g., I haven’t read Emma but I’ve read Pride and Prejudice and seen several movie versions, so Austen’s world and style aren’t all that alien too me). The beneficiaries will overwhelmingly be girls from affluent white backgrounds.
My guess is that Coleman picked out Emma to make a political statement (woman author but a conservative, whose choice has absolutely no affirmative action involved).
But it seems like extremely bad practice from a psychometric standpoint.
I never have seen any of the movie versions, but I have to say that Kate Beckinsale (from a TV version of the same era) looks a lot more like my mental idea of Emma Woodhouse than Gwyneth Paltrow would. I had a college professor who was a Gwyneth-hater before Gwyneth-hating was cool, mostly on the grounds of how much he hated Emma the movie and thought it ruined the book.
Having met E.D. Hirsch, Jr. several times, and having communicated with him extensively for several years in the early 1990s when the “Core Knowledge Curriculum” was developed and then taught in several hundred schools, including that of my own children, I offer a few clarifications.
The “Core Knowledge Curriculum” promulgated by a foundation which Hirsch founded bears little resemblance to the Common Core. Most importantly, the concepts and texts taught in the Core Knowledge Curriculum were discovered, not prescribed. That is, they were, factually, the concepts and texts (at least vaguely) already familiar to actual adult literate Americans.
Thus, the Core Knowledge Curriculum’s founding impulse was not at all bringing a Year Zero revolution to the masses. Rather, the curriculum arose out of an effort to create a kind of basic dictionary of concepts whose possession was the fundamental link to literacy for American children — the concepts and texts that linked the children’s understanding to a literate American past, and also to adult literate Americans of the present.
And that was the project that guided the formation of the Core Knowledge curriculum. Hirsch and his team consulted not only experts in relevant academic domains, but also ordinary elementary school teachers — and very few “educational experts”. And the impulse guiding their recommendations was to describe, not prescribe.
Greek gods, Biblical sayings, the story of Johnny Appleseed, entered the curriculum not from arbitrary power, but because those were the concepts and texts that had been important to, and were already known by, literate adult Americans. These things, the curriculum implicity argued, should be taught to children, precisely because there was nothing new about them — nothing new, that is, to already literate adults, both now, and in previous generations.
Yes, Hirsch, now in his 90s, appears to have endorsed the Common Core. But the generating impulse of the Core Knowledge Curriculum, let alone its actual content, appears much different from the Common Core, and I should like more people to know that.
Emma may have been chosen along the lines of the thought behind any bachelor is obviously in need of a wife
The "Core Knowledge Curriculum" promulgated by a foundation which Hirsch founded bears little resemblance to the Common Core. Most importantly, the concepts and texts taught in the Core Knowledge Curriculum were discovered, not prescribed. That is, they were, factually, the concepts and texts (at least vaguely) already familiar to actual adult literate Americans.
Thus, the Core Knowledge Curriculum's founding impulse was not at all bringing a Year Zero revolution to the masses. Rather, the curriculum arose out of an effort to create a kind of basic dictionary of concepts whose possession was the fundamental link to literacy for American children -- the concepts and texts that linked the children's understanding to a literate American past, and also to adult literate Americans of the present.
And that was the project that guided the formation of the Core Knowledge curriculum. Hirsch and his team consulted not only experts in relevant academic domains, but also ordinary elementary school teachers -- and very few "educational experts". And the impulse guiding their recommendations was to describe, not prescribe.
Greek gods, Biblical sayings, the story of Johnny Appleseed, entered the curriculum not from arbitrary power, but because those were the concepts and texts that had been important to, and were already known by, literate adult Americans. These things, the curriculum implicity argued, should be taught to children, precisely because there was nothing new about them -- nothing new, that is, to already literate adults, both now, and in previous generations.
Yes, Hirsch, now in his 90s, appears to have endorsed the Common Core. But the generating impulse of the Core Knowledge Curriculum, let alone its actual content, appears much different from the Common Core, and I should like more people to know that.
Thanks.
I was thinking the same thing. You can’t trust a guy with a poster of beloved leader MLK hanging in his office. Once they’ve got a grip they’ll start slipping in their narrative.
But the larger point is that the Common Core tests are designed to be more buzzword, buzzwordier and generally buzzphrase, which all translate basically to "more highly g-loaded."
More g-loaded means more Disparate Impact. Teachers and education systems have gotten reasonably good at pounding information into 90-105 IQ brains--scores always go up after the first few years of a test, after teachers have seen what (out of the 3-inch binder of The Curriculum) is on the actual (maybe 100 question) test.
The most effective* teaching of the last generation has been in low-middle performing schools, focusing the curriculum fairly narrowly and drill-and-kill because by God or by Ganesh, they may not know how to tie their shoes or their times tables or how to spell their names (granted, their names are pretty tough spells) going to finish this year knowing (X).
(Effective defined as "test-score value added")
"Teaching reasoning", etc tends to be code for "raising IQs", and we don't know how to do that.
--Discordiax
I thought it was code for “don’t bore the smart kids.”
My guess is that Coleman picked out Emma to make a political statement (woman author but a conservative, whose choice has absolutely no affirmative action involved).
Actually, I suspect Emma was chosen because it’s a passage that was once used on an ACT test, and because a lot of ACT prep books use that passage or something near it.
The ACT fiction passages are often very dense and difficult–one ACT test used this excerpt from Tess d’Urbervilles. I’ve also seen the first half of this chapter of Howard’s End used.
The "Core Knowledge Curriculum" promulgated by a foundation which Hirsch founded bears little resemblance to the Common Core. Most importantly, the concepts and texts taught in the Core Knowledge Curriculum were discovered, not prescribed. That is, they were, factually, the concepts and texts (at least vaguely) already familiar to actual adult literate Americans.
Thus, the Core Knowledge Curriculum's founding impulse was not at all bringing a Year Zero revolution to the masses. Rather, the curriculum arose out of an effort to create a kind of basic dictionary of concepts whose possession was the fundamental link to literacy for American children -- the concepts and texts that linked the children's understanding to a literate American past, and also to adult literate Americans of the present.
And that was the project that guided the formation of the Core Knowledge curriculum. Hirsch and his team consulted not only experts in relevant academic domains, but also ordinary elementary school teachers -- and very few "educational experts". And the impulse guiding their recommendations was to describe, not prescribe.
Greek gods, Biblical sayings, the story of Johnny Appleseed, entered the curriculum not from arbitrary power, but because those were the concepts and texts that had been important to, and were already known by, literate adult Americans. These things, the curriculum implicity argued, should be taught to children, precisely because there was nothing new about them -- nothing new, that is, to already literate adults, both now, and in previous generations.
Yes, Hirsch, now in his 90s, appears to have endorsed the Common Core. But the generating impulse of the Core Knowledge Curriculum, let alone its actual content, appears much different from the Common Core, and I should like more people to know that.
Who said Common Core was about Year Zero revolutions? Seems to me they just wanted to make minimum standards for everyone, and unconsciously dropped their liberal biases into the material without too much thought.
Mr. Coleman is blessed with such happy manners as may ensure his making friends — whether he may be equally capable of retaining them, is less certain.
“A vast informal economy driven by human relationships, dense networks of social connections through which people traded resources and created value. The Soviet people didn’t plot how they would build these networks. No one was teaching them how to maximize their connections the way social marketers eagerly teach us today. Their networks evolved naturally, out of necessity; that was the only way to survive.”
Gorbis is involved with Jewish ethnic activist organizations:
http://www.jhtc.org/from-odessa-to-the-future/#.VTA83JTF-vU
http://odessatothefuture.com/marinas-story/
What Gorbis is talking about in the above passage is Jewish ethnic networking in the Soviet Union. I’ve been told first hand and read many accounts of how Jews and other middle-easternish ethnic groups in the USSR formed mafia like networks to advance their interests at the expense of the more atomized Russians. It is accepted by everyone who lived in the USSR that members some ethnic groups were more successful than others in acquiring resources and influence outside of official channels. When the Soviet Union collapsed, these networks aided ethnic Jews and to a lesser but still wildly disproportionate extant, Azeris, Armenians and Georgians to seize Russia’s wealth with devastating consequences for the Russian majority(and other north eurasian people like the Tatars and Siberian peoples who have a more European like psychology and social/family structure).
The Occidental Observer had a series of article that described how ethnic networking among young elite Soviet Jews appeared to the author during the 1980′s.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/03/falling-down-the-memory-hole-reflections-on-the-1980s-soviet-counterculture-part-1/
The author’s description of upper class Jews in Moscow reminds me of many of the people I grew up with in NYC, especially the children of Soviet Jewish immigrants.
Hence, calling them " middle-easternish" is quite problematic.
Armenians and Georgians are from the Caucasus. Assigning the Caucasus region to the Middle East is also quite problematic:
That's very interesting. I haven't really heard about this.
I have 3 sons under the age of 21, so I have been immersed in the anxiety of the changing world in college apps for east coast young people who can only mark the “white” box on the college app. And, even if we live in a semi-rural area (not a “gold coast” suburban, high real estate town) in southern New England, there is constantly something in the media, or through our state government about our “privileged kids.” The Democrat party wants to regionalize now, since over time, several towns (like the baseball piece of Steve’s about Darien) have evolved to be “richer” than others, or the cities. But, people feel that all the state taxes that have been increased, just gets thrown down a well anyway…and nothing improves.
I can tell you, I do have friends who are millionaire entrepreneurs in cs, and I have widows and divorced friends living just above the poverty line in my town. So, there is a wide variety of professions and incomes here…with newcomers and generational Yankees.
We are lucky to have such an excellent HS that is comprehensive (has the ole’ shop classes, vocational lines like Culinary, PLTW, as well as college prep including AP track). Our students get into a wide variety of schools, but very few deserving kids are getting into the elite u’s in our part of the country these past few years. Once again, there are constant reminders of our privileged existence also coming from the universities and colleges in our region.
As a younger Baby Boomer, I have heard many acquaintances who are pulling up stakes as soon as the last kid is through HS or college, and, they are taking their lives to new, less tax burdensome states. New England, particularly CT is losing young people (that is in the news) by the thousands. And, their parents are selling and moving to: FL, NC, SC, TX, CO, AZ, NH (snow lovers,) even RI. Everyone is worried that taxes will go up, and our governor is constantly guilting anyone in the 90K-300K bracket…which are most of the people in the state who are working in the insurance/defense/aeronautical/financial services (not Wall St,) industries.
CT & MA pay the most amount of federal taxes; state taxes are huge; and the tuition at flagship state u’s is higher than state u’s in most other states. This region has been generous in the huge safety net we have, and it is impossible to eliminate these programs. Middle to upper middle class people sense that their property taxes (cars, motorcycles and boats are taxed, too) will go up along with state taxes. All this talk about taxing inheritances and college savings plans is causing unease. At least Obama sensed his mistake with the 529plan.
The roads are in very poor condition, and bridges have fallen down…not to mention the problems with Metro North train tracks. Today, the casinos just announced that they are having a tough time.
So, with the constant harping about how privileged out kids are (or we are) and how “the playing field must be leveled,” or some other platitude about inequality, people are feeling that things are just gonna get worse. Did I mention that we live in one of the most expensive parts of the country? Cost of living is VERY high, as is real estate.
And, every time DeBlassio condescends to suburban dwellers in the Tri-State area, people silently get the message: sell your house, pack up and retire or move to lower tax state…and, many of these people are liberals, voted for O. Even my own university goes on and on about the privilege of current white students…and that basically, we suburban dwellers bring no diversity to their business model with our children’s applications.
A weird trend: many of the students here are going to Scotland, Ireland, Canada and England to university. And, in my neighborhood, people are moving or planning to move to: FL, NC, TX and UT…just this past year.
The defense industry and aeronautical are going through painful adjustments, and lay-offs seem inevitable. Many engineers have taken other jobs in other areas - a sort of preemptive strike. And, unlike Boston, the epi-center of the bio sciences industry, the other southern New England cities just do not have that luck, history (all the Btown research u's,) and concentration of that growing industry. Pfizer left several years ago, and many big pharma co's now want huge tax cuts to come to high tax states in the northeast. Politicians are starting to notice that a steady population of "everyday" Americans who have paid taxes methodically, are not a sure bet from now on. And, as I said, the cost of living is high and jobs are not safe like they used to be.
What were they calling Cary, NC? Central Area for Relocated Yankees?
Are you absolutely sure you don't have some "Hispanic" in you or your husband? Check the box anyway make them prove you aren't.
Then the libs start demanding in their new low tax state the nice things they had in the state they left. They never seem to make the connection between those nice things and high taxes. It got so bad when I lived in Houston in the 80s that the locals had bumper stickers that said, "I don't give a damn how you did it up North".
“…and is actually the source of the prior knowledge cheating”.
Not clear, who is the source?
I can tell you, I do have friends who are millionaire entrepreneurs in cs, and I have widows and divorced friends living just above the poverty line in my town. So, there is a wide variety of professions and incomes here...with newcomers and generational Yankees.
We are lucky to have such an excellent HS that is comprehensive (has the ole' shop classes, vocational lines like Culinary, PLTW, as well as college prep including AP track). Our students get into a wide variety of schools, but very few deserving kids are getting into the elite u's in our part of the country these past few years. Once again, there are constant reminders of our privileged existence also coming from the universities and colleges in our region.
As a younger Baby Boomer, I have heard many acquaintances who are pulling up stakes as soon as the last kid is through HS or college, and, they are taking their lives to new, less tax burdensome states. New England, particularly CT is losing young people (that is in the news) by the thousands. And, their parents are selling and moving to: FL, NC, SC, TX, CO, AZ, NH (snow lovers,) even RI. Everyone is worried that taxes will go up, and our governor is constantly guilting anyone in the 90K-300K bracket...which are most of the people in the state who are working in the insurance/defense/aeronautical/financial services (not Wall St,) industries.
CT & MA pay the most amount of federal taxes; state taxes are huge; and the tuition at flagship state u's is higher than state u's in most other states. This region has been generous in the huge safety net we have, and it is impossible to eliminate these programs. Middle to upper middle class people sense that their property taxes (cars, motorcycles and boats are taxed, too) will go up along with state taxes. All this talk about taxing inheritances and college savings plans is causing unease. At least Obama sensed his mistake with the 529plan.
The roads are in very poor condition, and bridges have fallen down...not to mention the problems with Metro North train tracks. Today, the casinos just announced that they are having a tough time.
So, with the constant harping about how privileged out kids are (or we are) and how "the playing field must be leveled," or some other platitude about inequality, people are feeling that things are just gonna get worse. Did I mention that we live in one of the most expensive parts of the country? Cost of living is VERY high, as is real estate.
And, every time DeBlassio condescends to suburban dwellers in the Tri-State area, people silently get the message: sell your house, pack up and retire or move to lower tax state...and, many of these people are liberals, voted for O. Even my own university goes on and on about the privilege of current white students...and that basically, we suburban dwellers bring no diversity to their business model with our children's applications.
A weird trend: many of the students here are going to Scotland, Ireland, Canada and England to university. And, in my neighborhood, people are moving or planning to move to: FL, NC, TX and UT...just this past year.
I forgot to add that the main problem in southern New England is that the large number of people who work in the financial services industry (including Wall St.,) pay federal taxes (as low as 11%) on just investment income…and, the majority of the worker bees ($90-350K/per family) pay the much higher taxes based on salary (28-36%). So, tuition, cost of living, real estate and retirement unease is creeping into the minds of the vast majority of people whose taxes support the state and all its social programs, etc.
The defense industry and aeronautical are going through painful adjustments, and lay-offs seem inevitable. Many engineers have taken other jobs in other areas – a sort of preemptive strike. And, unlike Boston, the epi-center of the bio sciences industry, the other southern New England cities just do not have that luck, history (all the Btown research u’s,) and concentration of that growing industry. Pfizer left several years ago, and many big pharma co’s now want huge tax cuts to come to high tax states in the northeast. Politicians are starting to notice that a steady population of “everyday” Americans who have paid taxes methodically, are not a sure bet from now on. And, as I said, the cost of living is high and jobs are not safe like they used to be.
I can tell you, I do have friends who are millionaire entrepreneurs in cs, and I have widows and divorced friends living just above the poverty line in my town. So, there is a wide variety of professions and incomes here...with newcomers and generational Yankees.
We are lucky to have such an excellent HS that is comprehensive (has the ole' shop classes, vocational lines like Culinary, PLTW, as well as college prep including AP track). Our students get into a wide variety of schools, but very few deserving kids are getting into the elite u's in our part of the country these past few years. Once again, there are constant reminders of our privileged existence also coming from the universities and colleges in our region.
As a younger Baby Boomer, I have heard many acquaintances who are pulling up stakes as soon as the last kid is through HS or college, and, they are taking their lives to new, less tax burdensome states. New England, particularly CT is losing young people (that is in the news) by the thousands. And, their parents are selling and moving to: FL, NC, SC, TX, CO, AZ, NH (snow lovers,) even RI. Everyone is worried that taxes will go up, and our governor is constantly guilting anyone in the 90K-300K bracket...which are most of the people in the state who are working in the insurance/defense/aeronautical/financial services (not Wall St,) industries.
CT & MA pay the most amount of federal taxes; state taxes are huge; and the tuition at flagship state u's is higher than state u's in most other states. This region has been generous in the huge safety net we have, and it is impossible to eliminate these programs. Middle to upper middle class people sense that their property taxes (cars, motorcycles and boats are taxed, too) will go up along with state taxes. All this talk about taxing inheritances and college savings plans is causing unease. At least Obama sensed his mistake with the 529plan.
The roads are in very poor condition, and bridges have fallen down...not to mention the problems with Metro North train tracks. Today, the casinos just announced that they are having a tough time.
So, with the constant harping about how privileged out kids are (or we are) and how "the playing field must be leveled," or some other platitude about inequality, people are feeling that things are just gonna get worse. Did I mention that we live in one of the most expensive parts of the country? Cost of living is VERY high, as is real estate.
And, every time DeBlassio condescends to suburban dwellers in the Tri-State area, people silently get the message: sell your house, pack up and retire or move to lower tax state...and, many of these people are liberals, voted for O. Even my own university goes on and on about the privilege of current white students...and that basically, we suburban dwellers bring no diversity to their business model with our children's applications.
A weird trend: many of the students here are going to Scotland, Ireland, Canada and England to university. And, in my neighborhood, people are moving or planning to move to: FL, NC, TX and UT...just this past year.
Which I understand FL, NC, TX, and UT aren’t too happy about.
What were they calling Cary, NC? Central Area for Relocated Yankees?
You’re way too hard on Jamelle Bouie, who’s actually really interesting when he’s not writing about politics & toeing the party line. He and Ta-Nehisi Coates spent most of yesterday talking about Heinlein on Twitter, mostly admiringly.
I think I wrote about the Atlanta cheating scandal when it first came up a couple of years ago.
All states like the wealthy retirees who often build or buy massive homes, and employ lots of people/become dependable consumers. TX is happy with any university educated people…most states are…especially since they will be nice tax payers whether they’re retired or not. And, snowbirds from the midwest have been coming for years to the southern states…and people on the coastal areas are very dependent on their dollars by now.
Having lived in the northeast for a long time, I can say that Yankees love privacy, so that is appealing to neighbors. And, FL, very few people are native Floridians…and, it is now really the retirement destination (esp. Miami) of the elite of South America, and an art and fashion center in winter for NYC & LA.
But, people in general everywhere, hate when more people move into their long-time home town, or if they push out (w/their buying power) lower income locals. Actually, when I think about it, poorer people are being pushed out of the old, lower middle class neighborhoods in Boston and NYC by newcomers from all over the world, working for the giant bioscience industrial complex. Unfortunately, no one wants to move to the cities of the northern midwest.
Gorbis is involved with Jewish ethnic activist organizations:
http://www.jhtc.org/from-odessa-to-the-future/#.VTA83JTF-vU
http://odessatothefuture.com/marinas-story/
What Gorbis is talking about in the above passage is Jewish ethnic networking in the Soviet Union. I've been told first hand and read many accounts of how Jews and other middle-easternish ethnic groups in the USSR formed mafia like networks to advance their interests at the expense of the more atomized Russians. It is accepted by everyone who lived in the USSR that members some ethnic groups were more successful than others in acquiring resources and influence outside of official channels. When the Soviet Union collapsed, these networks aided ethnic Jews and to a lesser but still wildly disproportionate extant, Azeris, Armenians and Georgians to seize Russia's wealth with devastating consequences for the Russian majority(and other north eurasian people like the Tatars and Siberian peoples who have a more European like psychology and social/family structure).
The Occidental Observer had a series of article that described how ethnic networking among young elite Soviet Jews appeared to the author during the 1980's.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/03/falling-down-the-memory-hole-reflections-on-the-1980s-soviet-counterculture-part-1/
The author's description of upper class Jews in Moscow reminds me of many of the people I grew up with in NYC, especially the children of Soviet Jewish immigrants.
Jews in the old USSR were largely of Ashkenazi descent. Ashkenazi Jews are roughly 50% European in ancestry:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/06/24/ashkenazi-ancestry/
Hence, calling them ” middle-easternish” is quite problematic.
Armenians and Georgians are from the Caucasus. Assigning the Caucasus region to the Middle East is also quite problematic:
The Harriet plot in Emma actually would be of interest to someone concerned about heredity vs. environment issues. And an Austen novel, unlike the works of her eighteenth-century predecessors or her Victorian successors, is always a short and quick read.
I never have seen any of the movie versions, but I have to say that Kate Beckinsale (from a TV version of the same era) looks a lot more like my mental idea of Emma Woodhouse than Gwyneth Paltrow would. I had a college professor who was a Gwyneth-hater before Gwyneth-hating was cool, mostly on the grounds of how much he hated Emma the movie and thought it ruined the book.
Not clear, who is the source?
He appears to be wondering if the College Board itself is the source of the systemic cheating on the part of Asians!?!
Actually, I suspect Emma was chosen because it's a passage that was once used on an ACT test, and because a lot of ACT prep books use that passage or something near it.
The ACT fiction passages are often very dense and difficult--one ACT test used this excerpt from Tess d'Urbervilles. I've also seen the first half of this chapter of Howard's End used.
Ah. Tess. The mention brings back memories of junior year in high school and a nun with a Hardy fetish teaching literature. Turgid doesn’t begin to describe Tess.
Right, but now there have been convictions and significant jail time. Newsworthy.
ETS may have been lusting after a billion or so test takers scattered across eastern and southern Asia. Combine a simple revenue growth model on the supply side with a proclivity for creative test procedures on the demand side and you have the current situation.
I wonder what percent of ETS revenue now comes from Asia
ETS may have been lusting after a billion or so test takers scattered across eastern and southern Asia.
It’s College Board, not ETS, and Asians are the only area in which the SAT leads the ACT. So if it was trying to lock up an even bigger share, making the test more like the ACT doesn’t seem like a winning strategy.
He appears to be wondering if the College Board itself is the source of the systemic cheating on the part of Asians!?!
The international SATs (which are taken almost exclusively by Asians) are reruns of earlier tests. The last three or four test scores have been cancelled in both China and Korea because of systematic acquisition of the correct copies of the test. The answers to that test are then sent to the tester’s phone. And yes, the test was so odd that I wondered if perhaps the CB was trying to flush out the source of the cheating within the College Board, which is certainly a possibility. I wondered because I had the test several days before it became public. But no, the test is real.
Actually, I suspect Emma was chosen because it's a passage that was once used on an ACT test, and because a lot of ACT prep books use that passage or something near it.
The ACT fiction passages are often very dense and difficult--one ACT test used this excerpt from Tess d'Urbervilles. I've also seen the first half of this chapter of Howard's End used.
In some respects, the Reading portion of the ACT is the most useful of its four. By pulling out uncontextualized passages from fairly difficult texts, the ACT in 35 minutes makes a quick separation of wheat from the chaff- it separates the real readers from nonreaders. One can have a solid IQ, do well in high school, study, etc. But that alone doesn’t build the skills that the Reading test calls for: quick recognition of genre, tone, the ability to contextualize. Only a childhood of reading a variety of modes and subjects prepares you for that. It reflects more of what a student has learned outside of class.
Dear Mr. Sailer :
I learn a lot reading your work, which has literally changed my life. So thanks for that.
Maybe though you can learn something from me (This gets a little personal, but…):
I remember a few months back, getting a T.M.I. overload from one of your articles.
Here’s why: in the article in question, you talked about a medical ailment you once had that resulted in severe halitosis.
That was way too much information for me, and, I propose, for your readership.
Whenever I now see a new I-Steve article, the first thing that pops into my mind -totally irrelevantly of course -was that thing about super bad breath.
(Kind of like how my attorney once confided to me and my girlfriend, while in his office, that he had had cancer… of the rectum ! )
TMI TMI TMI !!
Like 99% of the US population, I could never match your wordsmithing skills, but for the benefit of your readership and possibly yourself, I offer you this:
Your work is too important for it to be turn-off material for readers with a heightened disgust reflex like myself.
I urge you to take down the i-Steve post where you talk about your own experiences with extreme halitosis.
No person – especially a brilliant and influential conservative writer like yourself – should take away from the important points they make by giving Too Much Information about themselves.
Don’t be mad because I am ,
Very grateful to you for your insight,
And,
Sincerely,
Arturo de Geaube
crimesofthetimes.com
PS : the excellent M.S. over at Those Who Can See dot blogspot .com, posits in a recent posting that gag-reflexes differ depending on political orientation.
"noticing" is bad.
And “critical noticing” gets you Siberia. Which is why this post ends in an appeal.
Nowadays even the business section of the paper feels it necessary to emphasize that one man is another man’s business partner.
“Female authoress” would likewise once have been mocked as redundant. But in the era of Transitionist Occupied Government, one can no longer be sure.
I can tell you, I do have friends who are millionaire entrepreneurs in cs, and I have widows and divorced friends living just above the poverty line in my town. So, there is a wide variety of professions and incomes here...with newcomers and generational Yankees.
We are lucky to have such an excellent HS that is comprehensive (has the ole' shop classes, vocational lines like Culinary, PLTW, as well as college prep including AP track). Our students get into a wide variety of schools, but very few deserving kids are getting into the elite u's in our part of the country these past few years. Once again, there are constant reminders of our privileged existence also coming from the universities and colleges in our region.
As a younger Baby Boomer, I have heard many acquaintances who are pulling up stakes as soon as the last kid is through HS or college, and, they are taking their lives to new, less tax burdensome states. New England, particularly CT is losing young people (that is in the news) by the thousands. And, their parents are selling and moving to: FL, NC, SC, TX, CO, AZ, NH (snow lovers,) even RI. Everyone is worried that taxes will go up, and our governor is constantly guilting anyone in the 90K-300K bracket...which are most of the people in the state who are working in the insurance/defense/aeronautical/financial services (not Wall St,) industries.
CT & MA pay the most amount of federal taxes; state taxes are huge; and the tuition at flagship state u's is higher than state u's in most other states. This region has been generous in the huge safety net we have, and it is impossible to eliminate these programs. Middle to upper middle class people sense that their property taxes (cars, motorcycles and boats are taxed, too) will go up along with state taxes. All this talk about taxing inheritances and college savings plans is causing unease. At least Obama sensed his mistake with the 529plan.
The roads are in very poor condition, and bridges have fallen down...not to mention the problems with Metro North train tracks. Today, the casinos just announced that they are having a tough time.
So, with the constant harping about how privileged out kids are (or we are) and how "the playing field must be leveled," or some other platitude about inequality, people are feeling that things are just gonna get worse. Did I mention that we live in one of the most expensive parts of the country? Cost of living is VERY high, as is real estate.
And, every time DeBlassio condescends to suburban dwellers in the Tri-State area, people silently get the message: sell your house, pack up and retire or move to lower tax state...and, many of these people are liberals, voted for O. Even my own university goes on and on about the privilege of current white students...and that basically, we suburban dwellers bring no diversity to their business model with our children's applications.
A weird trend: many of the students here are going to Scotland, Ireland, Canada and England to university. And, in my neighborhood, people are moving or planning to move to: FL, NC, TX and UT...just this past year.
I have been immersed in the anxiety of the changing world in college apps for east coast young people who can only mark the “white” box on the college app.
Are you absolutely sure you don’t have some “Hispanic” in you or your husband? Check the box anyway make them prove you aren’t.
Through me, my sons have sent apps for Saga/Sons of Norway/Finnish Karelians ( too young
for casting in 'Vikings')...but we will wait for news if they are carrying on for the tribe!
Would you like some?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oShTJ90fC34
Are you absolutely sure you don't have some "Hispanic" in you or your husband? Check the box anyway make them prove you aren't.
So funny, my friend! My sons loved ‘checking’ for “Armenian” in that that is true, weirdly, – very good scholarships, btw. My life-long best friend lives in Yerevan. And we all know the Hollywood Armenian moguls. No big Nordic moguls……hmmm…Bergman (pronounced berry man) would have hated to be called a business guy in the Hollywood sense today!
Through me, my sons have sent apps for Saga/Sons of Norway/Finnish Karelians ( too young
for casting in ‘Vikings’)…but we will wait for news if they are carrying on for the tribe!
Yeah, yeah. You save all the good posts for your panhandling drives, which take up, what?, like 8 months of the year? Soon panhandling will have a different meaning from what it does today.
P.S. I gave what was to me a substantial sum to the Hoover Institution to underwrite the digital remastering of the Firing Line episodes featuring Bach scholar Rosalyn Tureck. (You can look them up on Amazon.) I would give to you, too, but now I am even more poor as I have moved to an ethnically homogenous country (relatively homogenous, that is–ask Jared about it). Sorry.
P.P.S. If anyone is interested in Buckley and Bach, there is one episode of Firing Line left that I don’t have the money to underwrite. It is the one that features Buckley’s harpsichord performance. I am literally scraping together money to eat and pay rent now, so if anyone else loves Western culture and the dream that used to be Buckley in the days NR was promoting The Superfluous Man, etc, you can contact the Hoover Institution, give money to have it remastered, and it will be sold on Amazon so I can watch it. The previous two episodes cost me hundreds of dollars each to watch. It was a little too expensive for a poor man.
I can tell you, I do have friends who are millionaire entrepreneurs in cs, and I have widows and divorced friends living just above the poverty line in my town. So, there is a wide variety of professions and incomes here...with newcomers and generational Yankees.
We are lucky to have such an excellent HS that is comprehensive (has the ole' shop classes, vocational lines like Culinary, PLTW, as well as college prep including AP track). Our students get into a wide variety of schools, but very few deserving kids are getting into the elite u's in our part of the country these past few years. Once again, there are constant reminders of our privileged existence also coming from the universities and colleges in our region.
As a younger Baby Boomer, I have heard many acquaintances who are pulling up stakes as soon as the last kid is through HS or college, and, they are taking their lives to new, less tax burdensome states. New England, particularly CT is losing young people (that is in the news) by the thousands. And, their parents are selling and moving to: FL, NC, SC, TX, CO, AZ, NH (snow lovers,) even RI. Everyone is worried that taxes will go up, and our governor is constantly guilting anyone in the 90K-300K bracket...which are most of the people in the state who are working in the insurance/defense/aeronautical/financial services (not Wall St,) industries.
CT & MA pay the most amount of federal taxes; state taxes are huge; and the tuition at flagship state u's is higher than state u's in most other states. This region has been generous in the huge safety net we have, and it is impossible to eliminate these programs. Middle to upper middle class people sense that their property taxes (cars, motorcycles and boats are taxed, too) will go up along with state taxes. All this talk about taxing inheritances and college savings plans is causing unease. At least Obama sensed his mistake with the 529plan.
The roads are in very poor condition, and bridges have fallen down...not to mention the problems with Metro North train tracks. Today, the casinos just announced that they are having a tough time.
So, with the constant harping about how privileged out kids are (or we are) and how "the playing field must be leveled," or some other platitude about inequality, people are feeling that things are just gonna get worse. Did I mention that we live in one of the most expensive parts of the country? Cost of living is VERY high, as is real estate.
And, every time DeBlassio condescends to suburban dwellers in the Tri-State area, people silently get the message: sell your house, pack up and retire or move to lower tax state...and, many of these people are liberals, voted for O. Even my own university goes on and on about the privilege of current white students...and that basically, we suburban dwellers bring no diversity to their business model with our children's applications.
A weird trend: many of the students here are going to Scotland, Ireland, Canada and England to university. And, in my neighborhood, people are moving or planning to move to: FL, NC, TX and UT...just this past year.
“And, every time DeBlassio condescends to suburban dwellers in the Tri-State area, people silently get the message: sell your house, pack up and retire or move to lower tax state…and, many of these people are liberals, voted for O.”
Then the libs start demanding in their new low tax state the nice things they had in the state they left. They never seem to make the connection between those nice things and high taxes. It got so bad when I lived in Houston in the 80s that the locals had bumper stickers that said, “I don’t give a damn how you did it up North”.
Are you absolutely sure you don't have some "Hispanic" in you or your husband? Check the box anyway make them prove you aren't.
Are you absolutely sure you don’t have some African in you?
Would you like some?
Would you like some?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oShTJ90fC34
Are you absolutely certain that you do not have some Neanderthal in you, Zippy? Yes, I suppose you are….
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