Calling Out the College Board and ETS: An Educators’ Campaign for 2008?
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In my last post, I made a couple sins of omission when giving thanks and measuring the success of Students 2.0.
Sin 1: Thanks to Stephen Downes for supporting the launch by featuring it in his (very influential, and rightfully so) OLDaily.
Sin 2: I didn’t mention what is, to me, the most valuable aspect of the Students 2.0 blog: the comments. Without them, we’d have a handful of students writing to the void. With them, we have the type of peer-to-peer, “student” to “adult” conversation on equal footing, that I dreamed would happen if this thing was done right. One more comparative stat:
- Number of posts:comments ratio: Students 2.0: 13 posts: 310 comments = 1:23 ratio. Beyond School: 424 posts: 995 comments = 1:2.3 ratio.
(–it’s enough to make me simultaneously weep with joy and gnash my envious teeth. It says so much for the educators who are leaving their own soapboxes to converse in the s2oh comment salons. Gives me hope, really.)
A delicious postscript / tempting call to action
I’m learning so much simply browsing my RSS feed for s2oh comments.
I’m also gaining occasional inspiration. To wit: Bill Fitzgerald’s idea about taking on the College Board for its hijacking of education and perverting it into a competition for points on SATs, AP Exams, and so forth. Here’s Bill’s comment, in response to Lindsea’s “One Sweet Dream” post:
The test prep companies drive a lot of the hype behind college pressure, as their profits depend on your parents getting worried enough to shell out mucho greenbacks so you can sit through classes designed to get you extra points on the SATs/APs.
(As an aside, I would love to see an entire high school class, nationwide, boycott the SATs/APs. The Educational Testing Service would suffer an enormous loss of revenue, as they would not take in the testing fees from a few million students (aka, the captive audience, aka, you). If enough students boycotted the exam to affect the statistical significance of the test, colleges would need to find a different way to evaluate students — and colleges would find a way to evaluate and admit students, because, while they also don’t want you to know this, colleges need you — and your tuition dollars — to continue to exist.)
Whether the specific tactic Bill envisions is the most effective is secondary to the idea of simply putting pressure on the College Board and the educational system to change. We’ve seen what an educators’ Twitter - del.icio.us marketing blitz could do with s2oh. Why stop there? Why not “man the tweets” again?
Anybody want to play with this idea? It could be powerful, seems to me.
If you like this post, please spread it: 
(But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)
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Clay,
So much of our world works on the top down model.
If only some influential colleges and universities would come out with a statement that they no longer consider SATs and ACTs, the lower level schools would follow like lemmings, go down like dominoes…you get the picture.
Until that happens, worried parents will always be pushing their students - and school districts - towards the high stakes, high anxiety testing.
Are there any studies that correlate success in college and/or in life with test scores? Just wondering.
diane
diane
30 Dec 07 at 12:17 am
Hi Diane,
I can see I’m going to have to hone this message, based on the underwhelming lack of response *sigh*. Thanks for yours, as usual
Here’s the idea: we edubloggers who are linked in the twitter networks write a post every so often - once a week? every two weeks? month? (I like weekly) - that targets a single brick in the wall.
Then we all, in the same type of concentrated twitter-del.icio.us (and we can add Digg and other services) blitz that catapulted Students 2.0 into the spotlight, bookmark that post at a scheduled time.
BAM. One nice blow squarely on that brick.
It could be college admissions policy one week, SAT the next week, AP the next week, network filtering the next week, over and over.
The beauty? It’s not labor-intensive. (More and more I’m seeing that it’s edublogger laziness that keeps us from being as much of a force for change as we could be. And I include my own click-finger laziness in that accusation, for the record.)
Am I making any sense at all? I think so. I’m not expecting magic bullets or instant change. But by constantly exerting pressure, who knows what effects this might have over time?
Clay Burell
30 Dec 07 at 1:30 pm
Hello, Clay,
I started a reply here, but it morphed into its own post — http://openacademic.org/news/why-not-boycott-the-sat
FWIW, I like your idea of the coordinated bookmark —
@ Diane: Malcolm Gladwell has an article from December, 2001 in the New Yorker — the article looks at Stanley Kaplan, and references a study completed by UC that identifies the AP as having some predictive validity wrt GPA, but the SAT has virtually no predictive validity at all.
It’s also worth noting that GPA does not equate to happiness — the article is here: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/12/17/011217crat_atlarge
Cheers,
Bill
Bill Fitzgerald
30 Dec 07 at 8:05 pm
Weblogg-ed » Some New Years’ Dreaming
30 Dec 07 at 11:56 pm
[...] far, my post about it has been met with silence. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong, to me; it just means either the right people [...]
Social Networking as Political Activism for Education | Beyond School
2 Jan 08 at 12:29 am
Not the same thing but pre-test scores to take certain high school classes were not an effective indicator of success. Sheer will and work ethic were better indicators. We have dropped the tests.
The top-down model stifles so much - students and faculty.
Louise Maine’s last blog post..A real model?
Louise Maine
6 Jan 08 at 1:27 am