Watch David Coleman, SAT CEO, Slither

After David Coleman served the Gates Foundation's most effective Common Core flunky-developer-and-promo-man, he was given a most cushy gig as head the College Board, a "non-profit" corporation with a billion "non-profit" dollars in the bank and generosity to its CEO, who is paid more than $700,000 a year. Not bad work if you can get it. (Besides, Coleman's annual 700K plus perks is a bargain compared to the former College Board CEO's $1.3 million.)

While the College Board does a lot of testing, its meat and potatoes is the SAT. Without the SAT, the College Board that we have come to know and hate would disappear and, as E.M. Forster remarked when fantasizing about the death of standardized testing, "no one would be a penny the stupider." 

Today the SAT follows its racist and classist trajectory that its been on from its inception, when eugenicists got together in the mid-1920s to rework the flawed IQ tests first given to GIs during WWI to determine which ones were the most fit to be gassed in the trenches of France.  

Today the College Board claims to have eliminated the early SAT's class and race biases, even though all the evidence points to the SAT's continuing perfect record in identifying those unfit, by family income, for attending the nation's best colleges.  See below:

Besides the near-perfect correlation between family income and SAT scores, family income also has other benefits for SAT test takers.  

Most recently, we've learned that middle children in middle class schools are much more likely to receive a 504S disability designation that allows them more time to take the SAT. In the interview below, you will see Coleman starring in his current role as the College Board's staunch advocate for the disenfranchised:



In case you missed that chart showing the 504S disparity between rich and poor schools, here is a capture:

NYC Keeps Access to Top High Schools Away from Black Kids

Ten years ago Catherine Rampell published a piece in the NYTimes that showed ever so clearly how standardized tests continue to protect the privileged and to punish the poor.  This chart sums up the connection between standardized test scores and family income.  The same correlations will be found, regardless of the standardized test used:

In 2019, the same standardized exclusion instruments are still used, even as the use of a single high stakes test to seat students in the best public high schools of New York is getting new scrutiny.  Politicians of all stripes continue their silence on the issue:

. . . Mr. de Blasio’s proposal to scrap the entrance exam for the schools and overhaul the admissions process has proved so divisive that the state’s most prominent politicians, from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have mostly avoided taking a definitive position — even as black and Hispanic students are grappling with increasingly steep odds of admission into the city’s eight most selective public schools.

Meanwhile, 7 out of 895 students at Stuyvesant High School are black.

Students gain entry into the specialized schools by acing a single high-stakes exam that tests their mastery of math and English. Some students spend months or even years preparing for the exam. Stuyvesant, the most selective of the schools, has the highest cutoff score for admission, and now has the lowest percentage of black and Hispanic students of any of New York City’s roughly 600 public high schools.

How to Get A Higher SAT Score: Get Wealthier Parents

From WaPo.   Also see Valerie Strauss's blog post here.

Difference in School Test Scores Based on Social Background, Duh

Dr. Barry McGraw is formerly Deputy Director of Education for OECD. From The Australian:

NATIONAL Curriculum Board head Barry McGaw yesterday called on Canberra to release suppressed international test data comparing the performance of Australian public and private schools.

Australia is one of only three countries that suppress the results of OECD tests believed to show that a student's social background rather than their school is a better indicator of academic performance.

Professor McGaw believes the results are likely to bear out the crucial role of social background, such as parental education and occupation.

Of the 30 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, Australia, Belgium and France are the only members that don't reveal the breakdown of public and private school results in the OECD's regular testing of 15-year-olds.

"Australia shouldn't be suppressing that piece of information," Professor McGaw, a former head of education at the Paris-based OECD, told The Australian.

"The Government obviously know which are the government schools and which are the private schools in the data set, but that information is removed from the file sent to Paris."

He said analysis of OECD test results internationally showed private schools tended to outperform state schools. However, he said that in all countries that outperformance directly reflected social background.

"How much of the difference between the schools is due to that and not due to what the school does but just due to whom they enrol? The answer is, in all countries, all of it," Professor McGaw said.

The ban on the release of the information has been in place since the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment test started in 2000. The PISA test compares achievement in reading, mathematics and science across 57 countries.

About 14,000 Australian students from randomly selected schools are set to take this year's test between July and September.

Based on the raw PISA data from Australian schools, Professor McGaw said it was already clear that 70 per cent of school performance is dependent on the background of the students. . . .