Google Master on the middle class & his niece

Catherine wrote: Then, when your child turns 17, you discover that virtually everyone you know with a child who is 18 is paying sticker price.

Google Master writes:

There might be a reason for that. You live in Irvington, where the median household income of about $105,000 puts you firmly in the upper quintile of all households. "Everyone you know" probably also lives in Irvington, or at least Westchester County, whose median income is somewhere between $80K and $100K, depending on the source you use. At a stretch, "everyone" is somewhere on the upper East Coast, which a map of household incomes shows has the highest incomes in the country.

... All of which is a long-winded way to say that you probably don't know the people who are receiving aid, but they're out there.

This reminds me of a discussion I was having with a fellow software engineer who probably grosses about $120K, and his wife, an SAP consultant, easily $200K. He was shocked when I told him his family was not middle class, but rather in the upper 2-5%.

When you live and work among five-percenters, sometimes you lose sight of the average family out there struggling to put a couple kids in college, feed the family, and pay the mortgage on $48K.

My brother does not have a four-year degree and has worked blue-collar jobs since he was 14. He lost his wife when their daughter, my niece, was in high school. That niece got a full ride her freshman year and tons of aid the remaining three years. She graduated a couple of years ago with honors in two departments.

Very good to hear! (And I love the story about the software engineer....I remember, years ago, reading that all Americans universally consider themselves to be "middle class." I hope it's true, because it's one of the things I cherish about this country.)

re: more people in Irvington paying full fare ---- I wonder --- ?

On the one hand, GM is right: many people here (by no means all) are better able to afford the sticker price.

On the other hand, many people here are also better able to afford high-end tutors, including SAT & ACT tutors.

Another factor: grade deflation in "star schools," which by my arithmetic a few years ago is occurring in my public high school (or was then).

C's impression, which I think is probably accurate, is that his peers who attended our public high school are far more likely to be paying sticker price than his peers at the Jesuit high school.

Why is that?

The Jesuit high school is not cheap, and parents there are not poor. I was shocked one back to school night when I realized just how expensive many of the family cars were. Parents at the school don't "act rich" and don't "dress rich" (at least as I define these things, which may be naive or just wrong, I realize) -- so I was brought up short when I realized that we had not actually moved our child to a "middle class" school.

Nevertheless, a large number of those students, it appears, are now attending college and receiving a discount to do so.

I'm going to ask C. how many of those students are receiving merit aid from Catholic colleges.

One more thing: I'm thinking that SUNY may have kept prices down better than a lot of other states, which might explain why SUNY isn't offering a lot of merit aid (although as I think of it, I believe I spoke to a parent whose daughter was given significant merit aid to attend Binghamton a few years ago... )

No one in my circles has been given merit aid to attend a SUNY school, and C was not offered merit aid to attend Binghamton, either.

I had the impression that one of the SUNYs was recruiting him pretty actively -- was it Geneseo? -- but no mention was made of merit aid.

Not a large sample size, I realize!

Why rich suburban school districts are the wrong choice for 90% of the kids attending them

ABSTRACT

Being schooled with other high-achieving peers has a detrimental influence on students' self-perceptions: School-average and class-average achievement have a negative effect on academic self-concept and career aspirations-the big-fish-little-pond effect. Individual achievement, on the other hand, predicts academic self-concept and career aspirations positively. Research from Western and developed countries implies that the negative contextual effect on career aspirations is mediated by academic self-concept. Using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 (a total of 398,750 15-year-old students from 57 countries), we test the generalizability of this mediation model in science using a general multilevel structural equation modeling framework. Individual achievement was positively related to academic self-concept (52 countries) and career aspirations (42 countries). The positive effect on career aspirations was mediated by self-concept in 54 countries. The negative effects of school-average achievement on self-concept (50 countries) and career aspirations (31 countries) also generalized well. After controlling for self-concept at both the individual and the school level, there were significant indirect contextual effects in 34 countries-evidence for mediation of the contextual effect of school-average achievement on career intentions by academic self-concept.
Big Fish in Little Ponds Aspire More: Mediation and Cross-Cultural Generalizability of School-Average Ability Effects on Self-Concept and Career Aspirations in Science
Nagengast, Benjamin 1 2; Marsh, Herbert W. 2 3 4 | Journal of Educational Psychology |
Publish Ahead of Print, 9 April 2012

Absolutely true.

Absolutely true.

I have seen the damage in my own child and in the children of other parents here and in neighboring towns where I tutor.

To this day, C. sees himself as stupid in math. Stupid. Not: OK in math, really good in verbal. Stupid. Can't do math.

When you're a little fish in a big pond AND YOU ARE A CHILD, WITH A CHILD'S BRAIN, AND A CHILD'S BLACK-WHITE WAY OF PUTTING TWO AND TWO TOGETHER, that's what you think.

Maybe I'll strike those all-caps later, when I read this again.

But maybe I won't.

AND SEE:
nominally high-performing schools
grade deflation and winner-take-all "star schools"

games people play

the Exo thread has comments on grade deflation, which Exo has not seen in the schools she teaches in:

Exo:

In fact, I've being teaching for 6 years now. Of course, I have not being teaching in really Upscale schools - but I have not met a teacher yet who actually would want to lower the grade of a student; in fact, most of us are looking to bring the grades up... Many are afraid that students failing will result in the very least with a talk with the supervisor (and that's a no-no for a untenured teacher) or other unpleasant consequences - for the teacher, not for the student.

So, there come in poster projects in HS, HW crossword puzzles, in class time spent on making PPt presentations etc... The grades must go up - to cover for HWs never done, tests failed, quizzes missed..

Catherine:

We're exactly the opposite.

The scores are always high no matter what the school does (high relative to scores from urban/rural areas), and the parents are PITAs [in eyes of admin] and the school needs a way to keep students out of Honors/AP ....

Princeton, btw, has a formal policy of grade deflation.

At the end of the semester, professors have to limit the number of As they assign as final grades, even if students have been getting As all semester.

That's Princeton. Super-expensive, super-achieving students.

Grade deflation.

Anonymous:

All too true! There's a push to cap the top grades and an easy way to do that is to demand the impossible of and/or downgrade the work of the top students, because "they could do better than this." Of course, by doing group projects (teacher chooses groups, of course), lower-achieving kids can be given top grades for work done wholly by the top kids, who don't want to risk a lower grade by letting others do the work. And the gap vanishes! There are lots of similar games...

SAT Verbal Tutor:

Wellesley now has a formal grade deflation policy as well (at least in 100- and 200-level classes; upper level seminars don't have a cap). I know that a lot of professors felt like they were backed into a corner because of it -- in the past, they would have been generous to an A-/B+ student whose grades rose throughout the semester, but after the policy was implemented (after I graduated), they had no choice but to grade down because they didn't want the administration on their case.

AND SEE:
winner-take-all schools ALL POSTS

Take it out on the students

My son is finishing up a multi-subject portfolio for his sophomore US Lit honors class. Exemplars from each subject must be collected and put into a notebook. Students are required to list a specific CCSS standard and then explain how each piece of work relates to that standard. One that my son used was: "F-TF.1. Understand radian measure of an angle as the length of the arc on the unit circle subtended by the angle." He then had to explain how the work fit this standard. This project came, of course, after the teacher complained about how he was required to do this for all of his lessons. My son has to do this for all of the subjects in the portfolio, even those (like music) that don't have a specific standard defined. This is a teacher who doesn't hand back homework with any explanations. You have to make an appointment to meet with him after school to find out why he graded the way he did. And, if you somehow fail to get to this appointment, he will create a new grade of zero for you in his gradebook. This is a teacher who prides himself on grading 10 points lower than all other teachers. Got to toughen up those soft little honors kids. Also, this portfolio has to include your resume to be accepted into the junior class. You are interviewed and have to orally convince the teacher (or some volunteer parent) that you should be accepted. You also have to create a resume for an imaginary job sometime in your future, listing all of your degrees and experience. It has to include imaginary letters of recommendation. I told him that he is learning creative resume enhancing skills. Of course, he has a PhD from Harvard. It reminds me of how some teachers ask students what grade they would give to themselves. I told my son to always say 'A'.

writers should take the SAT

I was just talking to Debbie S, who reminded me that a passage from one of my books appeared on an SAT critical reading section. I think it was a section of Animals in Translation, but I don't recall at the moment and can't seem to scare up the email she sent me with the passage attached).

Meanwhile Debbie is no slouch in the professional writing department, either. Her book will be published by a major house, and her advance puts her in a small and select group.

We both have 10s.

I think other writers should take the SAT and see how they do. We can compile a database. I'm serious:  I'd love to see how 'real writers' do on the SAT essay. I'm guessing we'd see a lot of 10s.

Actually, I'd like to see professors take the SAT. I'd be willing to wager a small sum of money that college professors would consistently score lower than top-scoring high school students.

I'm not exactly sure why I think this, but I imagine it has to do with the K-12 grading I've been dealing with over the years.<sup>*

*</sup>grade deflation posts

Grade Reversal?

I'm collecting anecdotes!

Specifically about cases in which smart students are getting lower grades than their classmates. 

Perhaps they aren't explaining their answers to math problems.

Perhaps they don't do well with the arts & crafts/"creativity" components of English and social studies assignments.

Perhaps they don't cooperate well in group assignments.

Perhaps they participate insufficiently in class discussions.

Perhaps their classrooms are too cluttered and chaotic for them to concentrate.

Perhaps they are overwhelmed by big, interdisciplinary projects and multi-step directions.

Perhaps they are too uninspired to "go that extra mile" that top grades require.

And perhaps the actual academic requirements in math, science, writing, etc., are so low that they have no way to exhibit their strengths.

Whatever your child's/students story is, please share it here.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

cranberry on wealthy schools & the sorting machine

The tracking and sorting process goes on, while the administration denies its long-term effects on the students. Placement into high school courses is decided on the basis of teacher recommendations, not grades, strangely enough.

In our affluent high school, we're told, "all the students who remain in the top math track, who take AP BC calc, receive 5s." As a parent, I feel that this means that they are too restrictive in placement, and encourage too many children to drop out of the most demanding track. 3 is passing. Our society does not need to save tuition for 6% of the graduating class. Our society needs as many children as possible to take challenging math classes.

I took AP BC calc in my day, and received a 5. Frankly, it's not that challenging a course. More than 6% of the school population should be prepared to take the test. If the top 20% were encouraged to remain on track for BC Calc, or even the top 15%, I'd find it much more equitable.

I do feel the pressure of, "your kid's not that special, you know," in the insistence that the academic load is challenging, while seeing how restrictive placement is.

Same here.

Attewell's study (pdf file) is a revelation:

The odds of a student in an affluent star public school taking AP math or AP science are 71 -76 percent of the odds of a student of the same demographics and SAT who attends a nonstar public school.

The Winner-Take-All High School: Organizational Adaptations to Educational
Stratification
by Paul Attewell
p. 286

That's what we pay the big bucks for.

decline at the top: how math departments in wealthy schools treat students

Ask any realtor: Prospective buyers with children compete for homes in neighborhoods where the public schools are top-notch, believing it will increase the youngsters' chances of admission to the best colleges.

A recent study, however, suggests that can actually put applicants at a disadvantage.

A paper published in the October issue of Sociology of Education finds that students at the 200 or so most elite public high schools face a tougher road getting into top colleges than do comparable students at other, less prestigious high schools.

To polish their school profiles, many "star" high schools have evolved systems of grooming only the top tier of their students for the most selective colleges, which handicaps all other students in the hot contest for college, author Paul Attewell contends.

[snip]

Mr. Attewell offered two stories of students from "star" schools in Boston suburbs to illustrate the culling process.

One boy who wanted to take AP science and math in high school was told by math department faculty members that he wasn't suited to the work.

When his parents pointed out that he had scored in the top 1 percent on the Preliminary SAT, school officials responded that the boy was smart, but not smart enough, Mr. Attewell said.

The student ended up in the less advanced math track and went on to a good college, but not an Ivy League-caliber school as he had wished.

A girl from another school scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT, but received a C in math because the grading curve at her school was so high, Mr. Attewell said. She had A's in other subjects, but the C affected her class ranking and likely contributed to her failure to be admitted to her chosen college, he said.

Some Top Students Just Average At 'Star' Schools
By Catherine Gewertz
Vol. 21, Issue 10, Page 5

It's a myth that colleges "control" for tough grading in wealthy suburban schools.

They don't.

portfolio assessment and grade deflation

I've left a comment at Flypaper re: portfolio assessments used to deflate high achievers' grades.

Grade deflation is a topic near and dear to my heart.

"The Puzzzle of Gender Differences"

Abstract

This paper explores differences between men and women in educational outcomes and responsiveness to educational interventions. Male education levels have stagnated for decades, while female education levels have risen steadily. Women now outnumber men in college, with especially large sex differentials among Blacks and Hispanics. Existing evidence shows that females respond more strongly to intensive preschool interventions and incentives to perform in college; I provide new evidence that females are also more sensitive to college costs. To shed light on this pattern of results, I trace the development of gender differences in educational attainment from primary school through college. I show that boys now start school at a later age than girls and are more likely to be retained in grade. In a historical reversal, boys are less likely than girls to be enrolled in school at age 16. Fewer men than women men now graduate high school; among those who do graduate, men are more likely than women to hold a General Equivalency Diploma (GED). About a fifth of today's gender gap in college attainment is explained by sex differences in the probability of graduating with a high school diploma or a GED. Controlling for these factors halves the gender gap in college attainment for cohorts entering high school in the 1980s. Among those born in the early Eighties, racial and ethnic differences in the gender gap in college entry are completely explained by differential rates of high school graduation and GED receipt.

excerpts:

I provide new evidence on sex differences in the impact of tuition prices on college choice, entry and completion. The new evidence presented in this paper suggests that lowering college costs will not close the gender gap in college attainment. A drastic reduction in the cost of college substantially increases the college enrollment and completion rates of women, but has no impact upon men. The divergence in impacts by sex is especially stark among nonwhites, among whom gender gap in educational attainment is largest. I conclude that policies that make college less expensive will increase education levels, but widen the gender gap, since more women are on the margin of entering and completing college.

[snip]

My findings complement existing evidence that girls are increasingly better prepared than boys to enter college (Goldin, Katz and Kuziemko, 2006). I show that boys now enter elementary school at a later age than girls and are more likely to be retained in grade; both of these differences have increased over time. Over the lifecycle, sex differences in academic performance cumulate; boys fall further behind girls as they age. Among cohorts entering high school in the Seventies, 25 percent of boys were below their expected grade by age 12, compared to 17 percent for girls. Among those in high school during the Nineties the rates were a stunning 36 percent for boys and 24 percent for girls.

[snip]

Several facts are clear ... First, age at school entry is rising. The share of six-year-olds enrolled in first grade or above drops sharply between the 1962 and 1998 birth cohorts. The drop is sharper for boys, from 95 percent for the 1962 cohort to 80 percent for the 1998 cohort. Among girls, the drop is from 96 percent to 84 percent. Boys are getting a later start in elementary school, relative to girls, than they once did. The gap is especially large for cohorts born in the early Eighties, when kindergarten retention was a popular policy.

Second, boys fall further behind girls as they age. In the 1962 birth cohort, 25 percent of boys born were enrolled below their expected grade at age 12, compared to 17 percent for girls. The gender gap in retention peaked among the cohorts born in the mid-Eighties: 36 percent of 12-year-old boys and 24 percent of girls were behind grade. For the most recent cohorts, 32 percent of 12-year-old boys and 25 percent of girls are below grade. These statistics imply that, starting early in school, boys are older than their female classmates, and that this difference is growing. These substantial shifts in the relative age composition of boys and girls in elementary and middle school grades are as yet unexamined by economists. A growing age gap between girls and boys could alter classroom dynamics in unexpected ways, as well as alter social relationships between boys and girls.

A further implication is that boys now reach the minimum age of school-leaving at a lower level of educational attainment than girls. To the extent that compulsory-schooling laws bind, boys will drop out of school at a lower level of educational attainment than girls. Even if boys were to drop out of school at the same age as girls, they would do so with lower levels of completed schooling. However, boys now leave school at a younger age than girls, a reversal of the historical pattern.

[snip]

[T]he enrollment rate is identical and equal to one for girls and boys in primary school and middle school. After age 15, in all three cohorts, the two sexes begin to diverge in their enrollment rates. But where girls once fell behind boys in their school enrollment starting at age 16 (Figure 6, gray line for 1962-63 birth cohorts), girls now they pull ahead of boys at the same age (dashed line for 1982-83 birth cohorts). The differences intensify with age. At age 21, boys from the cohort born in the Sixties were 4.2 percentage points more likely than girls to be enrolled in school. Boys from the cohort born in the Eighties are 4.7 percentage points less likely than girls to be enrolled in school.

Cradle to College: The Puzzle of Gender Differences in Educational Outcome (pdf file)
Susan Dynarski
Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government & National Bureau of Economic Research
May 2007

My findings complement existing evidence that girls are increasingly better prepared than boys to enter college (Goldin, Katz and Kuziemko, 2006).


teachers and schools...

Skimming the surface of this article, I was wondering whether sex differences in educational attainment might be the one phenomenon schools & pundits decide not to blame on parents, seeing as how we're talking about two populations of students -- boys and girls -- but just one population of parents.

Then I came to this passage:

Where in the lifecycle does the gender gap in schooling emerge?

Tracing the arc of educational production through the lifecycle provides suggestive evidence on the degree to which gender gaps in education among young adults are a function of biological differences, the choices of parents, the actions of schools and their own choices.

The answer will help us to rule out some existing hypotheses about its sources, and perhaps generate some new ones. If the gender gap first appears during high school, then we would focus on boys and girls as the decision-makers weighing the costs and benefits of educational investments. By contrast, if the gender gap first appears in first grade, we would tend to discount theoretical explanations that treat boys and girls as the decision-makers. We would instead focus on the actions of parents, teachers and schools.3 Changes in teaching methods, the composition of the teaching force, and the organization of schools would all be plausible culprits.

Existing research suggests that teachers and schools do play a role in generating sex differences in educational outcomes. Dee shows that girls and boys both learn more when being taught by a teacher of the same sex. Anderson (2006), in a reanalysis of data from the Perry Preschool, Abcederian and Early Training Projects, shows that the effects of these programs were large for girls and nonexistent for boys. Malamud and Schanzenbach (2007) show that female teachers rate the performance of boys more harshly than that of girls.

I must say, the puzzle of gender differences in educational attainment is not much of a puzzle to me. Getting a boy through public school in one piece -- especially a middle school --- isn't easy.

Public schools are utterly feminized. It's not just that women make up the majority of the teaching staff and, in my district, nearly all of the administration. The ideology of public schools is "feminine" regardless of the sex of whichever educator happens to be taking your son to task for poor character or inadequate school spirit at any given moment.

The language is feminine.

I recall a time when the only people using the word "enhance" were the folks writing up the bride's wedding gown for the women's pages.

Seed pearls. Weren't seed pearls always a big enhancement?

Not any more.


grade deflation for boys?

Harris School Assistant Professors Ofer Malamud and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, for example, wondered whether their (very preliminary) finding that teachers rate boys more harshly in reading and science than suggested by standardized tests may perhaps explain boys’ detachment from school early on.

Mind the Gap: Gender and Schools

I hadn't intended to get into this yet, but..... bingo.

This is exactly what's been happening around here: grades in school much lower than standardized test scores, a gap not explained by emotional or behavioral problems.

That is to say, C. does all of his homework (the bulk of it on time), is reasonably engaged in school, likes his teachers, likes his friends, wants to do well, has a record of 2 detentions in 3 years (one for an unauthorized lunchtime trip to the library where he attempted to print out his Earth Science homework before the librarian had him arrested and clapped in irons) ... and yet his grades are so-so while his standardized test scores are high. Extremely high in the case of reading.

I've mentioned the fact that, come fall, C. will attend a different school.

The new school is selective; they take no one scoring below the 75th percentile on the entrance exam. Thus, a few weeks ago, we were stunned to receive a letter from the new school informing us that C. had placed into "Advanced Honors Algebra 2."

When I say "stunned," I mean really, really stunned. Stunned as in speechless.

Here in Irvington, C. has had the computer-generated comment "Finds subject matter difficult" printed on his math report card, and that's pretty much been the message we've been given about C's capabilities any time we've raised any issue in any class.^*

During our course placement meeting at the high school, the guidance counselor told C. repeatedly that, "Math is a challenge for you." She said Math is a challenge for you so many times that I finally said, "Math isn't a challenge for C. when I teach it," which should give you some idea of how many times the words Math is a challenge for you were uttered: enough times that I actually said "Not when I teach it" out loud, instead of just wanting to say it and wishing later on that I had.

C. was not placed in Honors math for high school here. Next year he would have taken regular geometry along with the rest of the sophomore class. He would have been accelerated by a year because he's completed Math A, but he'd be back in the regular math track with all the kids who have been finding regular math to be -- wait for it! -- a challenge (as well as with the regular-track kids who haven't found regular math to be a challenge, of course).

The funny thing about the "Advanced Honors Algebra 2" placement was that math was the only Honors course C. got into at his new school. No Honors bio, no Honors English, no Honors social studies, even.

Naturally, we were downcast. It just didn't seem right that C. could suddenly be an Honors math kid and not be an Honors history kid. So we were back to brainstorming the edu-situation, trying to figure out what had happened, speculating about the best approach to take to change their minds, etc. Very discouraging. The one thing in life we do not want to be doing ever again is wrangling with our kid's school about anything.

Ed called the school & spoke to the assistant principal, who said she'd get back to him.

When she called a few days later, I answered the phone and the AP said the computer had made a mistake. C. was in Honors everything. English, bio, math, history.

I'm so trained to the idea that school is a challenge for my kid that I panicked -- Honors everything?? We hadn't remotely been thinking about Honors everything. We'd been going back and forth between asking the school to put C. in Honors history, too, versus asking them to swap Honors math for Honors history so he'd still have one Honors course but it would be in his best subject.

I started stuttering and stammering, and finally said, "Honors Bio? Can he handle Honors Bio?"

"He'll do fine," the AP said. Her tone was short; she was ending the conversation. Clearly, she had no idea what I was talking about. The way things work for incoming freshmen at the new school is: the kids take an admissions test and a placement test, the computer assigns them to Honors or regular track courses, and the school sends a letter to the parents inviting their child to take whichever Honors courses he's tested into.

Then the parents send a letter back saying their child accepts the honors invitation.

And that's it.

A week later Ed spoke to her and asked, "Do you recommend that he take all Honors courses?"

The AP said, "Yes."

That was all. "Yes." The word "yes" sums up the school's entire position on whether a kid who's been placed in an Honors course should take an Honors course.

We're entering a completely different world.

Have I mentioned the fact that the new school is a boys' school?






The Why Chromosome: How a Teacher's Gender Affects Boys and Girls
by Thomas Dee


^* If I get around to it, I'll exercise my FERPA rights to have C's school record corrected. Knowing me, I probably will get around to it.

revenge of the C student

from Education Week

Robert J. Sternberg often writes about a lecture-style psychology course he took as a college freshman in which he got a C. “There is a famous Sternberg in psychology,” the professor told him at the time, “and it looks like there won’t be another.”

To Mr. Sternberg, the vignette illustrates that conventional assessments don’t measure all the abilities students need to succeed in life.

A nationally known psychologist, he has spent much of his career designing new measures that might more accurately capture the full range of students’ intellectual potential at the university level.

Now, a team of Yale University researchers is using the same ideas to rethink the tests that schools use to identify pupils for gifted and talented programs in elementary schools.

The team’s Aurora Battery, named for the colorful spectrums created by the northern and southern lights, is being translated and tested with tens of thousands of 9- to 12-year-olds, not only in the United States, but also in England, India, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and other countries.

If the preliminary results from those tests are borne out, its developers say, the new assessment could yield a very different pool of gifted students—one that includes a higher proportion of students from traditionally underrepresented minority groups than is often the case now.

[snip]

“This test has the potential to capture a more diverse population of students with a more varied and better-qualified array of skills,” said Elena L. Grigorenko, a psychology professor and the leader of the Yale study team in New Haven, Conn.

[snip]

Traditional intelligence tests, these researchers say, measure only a narrow subset: memory and analytical skills. Also known as “g” for general intellectual ability, those skills come in handy for comparing and contrasting, analyzing, judging, and classifying, and they are the kinds of abilities that teachers tend to value and emphasize in the classroom.

If people who score high on such measures succeed later on in life—and studies show that they often do—it’s partly because the educational system is geared to reward their particular mental skills, Mr. Sternberg said.

Someone should alert Robert Sternberg to the fact that this problem has been solved. Once you've got Connected Math, block scheduling, and portfolio assessment the kids who got straight-As back in the day become reliable B students.

Implement the middle school model in your town et voilà. IQ gap gone.

In its entirety, Aurora is a comprehensive battery that includes a group-administered paper-and-pencil test, a parent interview, a scale for teacher rating of students, and some observation items. The paper-and-pencil test gauges creativity, for instance, by asking students to imagine what objects might say to one another if they could talk, or to generate a story plot to fit an abstract illustration on a children’s-book cover.

A question assessing students’ practical skills with numbers directs test-takers to draw a line mapping the shortest route between a friend’s house and a movie theater.

Ideas of Practical and Creative IQ Underlie New Tests of Giftedness
by Debra Viadero
Education Week
Vol. 27, Issue 38, Pages 1,16

At last!

A standardized test that can tell me whether any of my kids has the sense it takes to come in out of the rain.

Seeing as how our family motto is no common sense-y, I'm guessing no.

the one that got away

Major find.

A 1991 Atlantic Monthly article on The Other Crisis in American Education.


the 16-year decline and the 1995 "recentering"

By way of background: SAT scores declined from 1964 to 1980. Math scores rose most of the way back up to where they'd been but verbal scores did not, and in 1995 the College Board recentered the scores.

My district's scores, which are significantly higher than those for other schools in our demographic, assuming I've read the charts correctly (chart correlating income and scores here; chart for determining significance here) are:

V-540 M-568 W-540 total: 1648

Prior to 1995 those scores would have been:

V-460 M-560

1108 today; 1020 before 1995. Big difference.


decline at the top

Over the years I've seen various rebuttals of the claim that the decline was due to an expansion of the pool of test takers. See here and here.

What I had not seen was the data showing that the decline was concentrated at the top:

[N]orm-referenced tests .... were able to tell us not just about the existence of the decline but something about its magnitude--half a standard deviation on the SAT--and something about its source--the decline on all norm-referenced tests was much greater among students at the top of the score distribution than among those at the bottom.

The decline at the top was so steep that the absolute number of students scoring over 650 on the verbal half of the SAT declined 45 percent between 1972 and 1982. That means the pool of top talent available for scholarship and research, for business and industry, and for the military has actually shrunk. We need to enlarge it again as quickly as we can by encouraging excellence in our schools, and we need tests that will let us gauge our progress at that vital task. The best-calibrated gauge for these purposes is a norm-referenced test. That is why a national census of educational quality should include not just a test of V and M, but a norm-referenced test of those essential, all-purpose abilities.
p. 49

[snip]

The importance of these periodic checks on test constancy is well illustrated by data on the SAT. They show that efforts to hold the difficulty level of the test constant over the years were quite successful from 1941 to 1963; less so from 1963 to 1973, when some downward drift occurred, making it a bit easier to get higher scores after 1963 than before.[23] The SAT was also easier to read in the 1960s and the 1970s than it was in the 1940s and the 1950s; the difficulty level of reading passages on the test declined, as measured by the Dale-Chall formula, from a corrected grade level of 13 to 15 to only 11 to 12.24

All in all, SAT scores in recent decades probably underestimate the great American score decline by about 8 to 12 points, roughly one-tenth of a standard deviation.

source:
A National Census of Educational Quality—What Is Needed by Barbara Lerner NASSP Bulletin / March 1987 p. 56

the one that got away

While the rest of the country was falling apart, SAT-wise, some schools sailed through those years unscathed. Daniel Singal's 1991 article summarizes a study of the ones that got away:

What has caused this great decline in our schools? The multitude of reports that now fill the library shelves tend to designate “social factors” as the prime culprit. Television usually heads the list, followed by rock music, the influence of adolescent peer groups, the increase in both single-parent families and households where both parents work, and even faulty nutrition.

Those who attribute the loss of academic performance to social factors don't take account of the small number of high schools around the country that have managed to escape the downturn. Some are posh private academies; a few are located in blue-collar neighborhoods. What they have in common is a pattern of stable or even rising test scores at a time when virtually all the schools around them experienced sharp declines. There is no indication that the children attending these exceptional schools watched significantly fewer hours of television, listened to less heavy-metal music, were less likely to have working mothers, or ate fewer Big Macs than other children. Rather, they appear to have had the good fortune to go to schools that were intent on steering a steady course in a time of rapid change, thus countering the potentially negative impact of various social factors.

It would seem obvious good sense to look closely at this select group of schools to determine what they have been doing right, but as far as I can determine this has been done in only two national studies. The better one was issued by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) in 1978, under the somewhat pedestrian title Guidelines for Improving SAT Scores. Now out of print and hard to find, it contains one of the most perceptive diagnoses available of the underlying malady in our schools.

[snip]

The report identifies one main characteristic that successful schools have shared—the belief that academics must invariably receive priority over every other activity. “The difference comes,” we are told, “from a singular commitment to academic achievement for the college-bound student.” These schools did not ignore the other dimensions of student life. By and large, the NASSP found, schools that maintained excellence in academics sought to be excellent in everything else they did, they “proved to be apt jugglers, keeping all important balls in the air.” But academic work came first.

Two other factors help account for the prowess of these schools in holding the line against deterioration. The first is a dogged reliance on a traditional liberal-arts curriculum. In an era of mini-courses and electives, the tiny group of high schools that kept test scores and achievement high continued to require year-long courses in literature and to encourage enrollment in rigorous math classes, including geometry and advanced algebra. Though the learning environment in those schools was often “broad and imaginative,” in the words of the NASSP, fundamentals such as English grammar and vocabulary received heavy stress. The other key factor in preserving academic quality was the practice of grouping students by ability in as many subjects as possible. The contrast was stark: schools that had “severely declining test scores” had “moved determinedly toward heterogeneous grouping” (that is, mixed students of differing ability levels in the same classes), while the “schools who have maintained good SAT scores” tended “to prefer homogeneous grouping.”

If attaining educational excellence is this simple, why have these high-quality schools become so rare? The answer lies in the cultural ferment of the 1960s.

So there you have it.

The hardy little band of schools where student achievement did not decline shared three characteristics:

• academics first and foremost, with a commitment to excellence in all endeavors
• “dogged reliance on a traditional liberal-arts curriculum”
• homogeneous grouping; schools with heterogeneous grouping had “severely declining scores”
  

My own district is doggedly moving in exactly the opposite direction. Character education and the whole child over academics, the fragmenting and blurring of the curriculum via "Exploratory" courses and interdisciplinary teaming thanks to the middle school model, and an "identified need" for "balanced classes." Balanced classes being the new term of art for heterogeneous grouping in these parts.

Oh, and more more technology.

Most school districts are headed in this direction, and the kids at the top will be hurt.

I think kids at all levels will be hurt, but if I had to guess I'd say the kids at the top and at the bottom will be worst off. More on them anon.

Nobody cares. The kids at the top are assumed to be bulletproof; as our middle school principal told a well-attended school board meeting, "I'm not concerned about the kids at the top."

The kids at the bottom can flounder and sink until they qualify for special ed. Then they'll get some "pull-out."


stagnation at the top - Fordham report
Tracking: Can It Benefit Low Achieving Children?
Linda Valli on tracking in 5 Catholic high schools, 1
Linda Valli on tracking in 5 Catholic high schools, 2
"school commitment" in Valli's study of tracking in Catholic high schools
7th grade depression starts in 1st grade

ability grouping in Singapore
characteristics of schools where SAT scores did not decline
The Other Crisis in American Education by Daniel Singal
Hiding in Plain Sight: grouping & the achievement gap
tracking: first random-assignment study

SAT equivalence tables
SAT I Individual Score Equivalents
SAT I Mean Score Equivalents

chickens have come home to roost
the deathless meme of the high performing school
Allison on the naturals