College Board Is Selling Student Data to Selective Colleges

As a reward for his devotion to corporate power during the creation of Common Core, David Coleman was handed the plum job as CEO for the College Board, where his work to shape college applicants in the image desired by Bill Gates could continue, unimpeded.  

Now Coleman's greed has joined forces with the greed of America's richest universities and colleges to misuse student SAT data to enrich all participating parties. For just 47 cents each (payable to the College Board), colleges and universities can buy SAT records of Ivy League aspirants and invite them to apply, whether or not the students ever had a chance in hell to get in.

More applicants to say no to makes selective colleges look even more selective, thus raising the prominence of their brand, and it gives the College Board a half-buck per head, plus all the extra dough that rolls in from kids retaking the SAT when they find out that, oh, Columbia is interested in me??  

Diabolical? You bet. The Wall Street Journal has the story:

Jori Johnson took the practice SAT test as a high-school student outside Chicago. Brochures later arrived from Vanderbilt, Stanford, Northwestern and the University of Chicago.

The universities’ solicitations piqued her interest, and she eventually applied. A few months later, she was rejected by those and three other schools that had sought her application, she said. The high-school valedictorian’s test scores, while strong by most standards, were well below those of most students admitted to the several schools that had contacted her.

“A lot of the rejections came on the same day,” said Ms. Johnson, a 21-year-old senior film major at New York University, one of three schools that accepted her out of 10 applications. “I just stared at my computer and cried.”

The recruitment pitches didn’t help Ms. Johnson, but they did benefit the universities that sent them. Colleges rise in national rankings and reputation when they show data suggesting they are more selective. They can do that by rejecting more applicants, whether or not those candidates ever stood a chance. Some applicants, in effect, become unknowing pawns.

Feeding this dynamic is the College Board, the New York nonprofit that owns the SAT, a test designed to level the college-admissions playing field.

The board is using the SAT as the foundation for another business: selling test-takers’ names and personal information to universities. . . .

The Cubberley Tradition Continues at Stanford and Pearson

One of the classics in the history of American education is Raymond Callahan's 1962 EDUCATION AND THE CULT OF EFFICIENCY.  In the free Chapter 5 available here, you can read about the various strategies and tactics that were devised a hundred years by the social control and social efficiency zealots who were attempting to take over American schools and run them like Henry Ford's assembly lines.  That's right--they largely succeeded.


If you have not read the history of American education, anyone could end up believing there is something new or reformy in the endless stream of corporate edu-solutions and testing insanity--when, in fact, today's efficiency cult represents the reforms of 100 years ago:  universal testing, sorting by test scores, segregation, centralized curriculum control, and governance by mayors--all of these modern "reforms" were popular among the eugenics-inspired visionaries of a hundred years ago.  


One of Stanford University's most devout eugenicists of the time, Elwood P. Cubberley, wrote the efficiency movement's version of educational history, and thus enshrined the social efficiency version of the past for more than a generation of education students.  By the 1960s when Callahan's book first appeared, historiography was changing big time, and since then it has changed even more, so that now we have rich and detailed histories that challenge the official view espoused by Cubberley and his white male protestant businessman cronies. 


If Pearson and Stanford U. have their way now, a hundred years after the first coming of social efficiency, learning the history or philosophy of education, or even child development, will become disposable froth for teacher education programs, or at least these course will be held hostage by a new technocratic assessment tool that teacher candidates must pass before they get a credential to teach.  


Because this generation's efficiency cult cannot control history, as their predecessors did through Cubberley's official tome almost a hundred years ago, the present generation of preservers of the status quo simply plan to make history irrelevant to the process of teacher preparation and credentialing.  Remember Margaret Spellings?  What gets tested gets taught.


And so it is with renewed vigor that everyone who cares about the education of  teachers, rather than training them like seals, should boycott Pearson--any Pearson products, any time.  From Education Radio:


Pearson's Teacher Performance Assessment: Exposed!