By Doug
Martin
In
yet another sneak attack on Indiana public education and communities, the State
Board of Education’s Graduation Pathways Panel, in a move to eliminate the
abusive and redundant end-of-course assessments, “has recommended that students
take the SAT, ACT or a similar college entrance exam instead” in order to
finish high school, a move which would sit well with Hoosier Republican
lawmaker and past Indiana State Board of Education member, Todd Huston, who is now Senior Vice President of
State and District Partnerships at the College Board— the owner of
SAT.
The Graduation Pathways Panel is chaired by Byron Ernest, the state board of
education member who recently resigned as leader of K12, Inc’s “
beleaguered
Hoosier Academies charter school network
amid
state sanctions due to years of failing academics.”
Concerning
the SAT recommendation, the South Bend
Tribune notes: “The change was introduced to
the draft proposal less than a day before the panel voted to send it to the
state Board of Education. While other parts of the plan have been available for
public comment for weeks, few schools, teachers or families have been able to give
input about the exam requirement change.” The State Board will vote next month
on new graduation requirements, and state lawmakers “would then codify the
plan in the 2018 session.” The new recommendations, if approved, will start
with the class of 2023.
Since
the U.S. Department of Education has declared that “Indiana will
no longer be able to include students who earn the general diploma in
calculating school graduation rates,” 30 percent of
those being special needs students, the State Board, actually, is adding
another assault by proposing an exam which will weaken schools’ graduation passing rates and prime them for possible takeover by charter school operators.
And then there’s Todd Huston and the College Board.
Huston, who has received
$36,000
from the DeVos-Walton funded Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC and
$2,500
from Charter Schools USA, along with
$1,000
from Michelle Rhee’s Students First PAC, was one of Al Hubbard’s “GOP
Powerbrokers”
who met privately years ago to hash out the Indiana school privatization plan
before any laws were introduced.
Not
only is Huston paid handsomely by the College Board—for which he is listed as a
lobbyist in New York—raking in $325,433 in the period
from July 1, 2013 to June 31, 2014, with $47,000 listed as additional compensation
from the organization and other related organizations, he promotes Silicon
Valley’s online future-of-schools agenda by convincing schools to use “the SAT Suite of
Assessments to give students a chance to show their best work and get better
results with tools like Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy®,” a tool which now has the blessing of
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose Zuckerberg Initiative, in partnership with
the College Board, seeks to give “students in lower-income
communities and rural areas greater access to college pathway advisors and SAT
prep mediums like Official SAT
Practice on Khan Academy.
Huston and the College Board both accept edtech’s dream of a future education
system where there are no school buildings, Huston telling the media a few
years ago that “educators must
remake the
high school day to catch up with evolving technologies and methods.”
In 2016, unsurprisingly, K12 Management, the
online corporation from
Herndon, Virginia, handed
Huston’s campaign
$500.
Huston
is also the past Indiana Charter School Board member who, after leaving his job
as Tony Bennett’s chief of staff, went back to his old job with Cisco
Systems. Bennett, in turn, then used $1.7 million of state money to
purchase video-conferencing equipment from Cisco which wasn't used. Some of the equipment was never even
delivered.
David Coleman, the leader of the College Board and the
master
behind the Bill Gates-funded Common Core, gave Huston
$10,000
for his 2012 Indiana House campaign and Tony Bennett received
$2,500
from Coleman the same year.
Coleman, in 2015, made $742,278
for his role as the College Board CEO and a little over $155, 000 in other
compensation from the organization and related organizations.
Huston went to work for the College Board in
October 2012 , and Lewis Ferebee, the Indianapolis Public Schools supt., has been a
member of the
College Board’s board of trustees since November 2015.
In 2017, the College Board’s board of
trustees was highly criticized by nonprofit governance experts for not doing
anything to rein in “the
College
Board, which had about $77 million in annual profit and $916 million in revenue
in 2015” and a whole slew of problems in 2016.
As
Reuters
notes in 2016, there were “
cheating rings in Asia that exploit security weaknesses in
the SAT and enable some students to gain unfair advantages on
the exam.”
In 2016, a
“massive security breach” exposed around 400 questions “for
upcoming SATs,” and College Board members knew that a redesigned test “was
overloaded with wordy math questions, a
problem that handicaps non-native English speakers and reinforces race and
income disparities that Coleman has vowed to diminish.” Lloyd Thacker, from the Education Conservancy, asked “
What
is the mechanism that holds them accountable? I’m scratching my head.
There doesn’t seem to be a countervailing
voice here at all.”
Reuters
found that many trustees were sent an email in 2015 telling them not to do
interviews with the news outlet concerning the SAT.
In
July
2017, San Diego's school board took legal action against the College Board
“after the Advanced Placement tests of more than 500 of the city's high school
students were declared invalid because their seats were too close together.”
The College Board didn’t notify Scripps Ranch
High, where the test was given, about its new seating arrangement protocol,
according to the school, “until two days before the testing.”
The College Board has a history of questionable practices.
In
2008, it settled with
New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo’s office after an investigation found
that the College Board was running a kickback scheme where “the College Board,
which developed and marketed numerous products and services related to student
financial assistance, gave significant discounts on those products and services
to certain colleges which agreed to place the College Board's loans on their
'preferred lender' list. This effectively directed students towards loans that
might not be the best or least expensive option for them."
The College Board “is no longer a lender,” for
other unrelated reasons, “although it continues to provide financial aid
advisement services to students,”
ABC
News wrote at the time.
The College Board, too, came under fire for not giving better oversight when a cheating scandal in New York in
2011 led lawmakers to ask questions,
and in
June
2015, a printing error which gave some SAT takers extra time to finish
sections of the test involved 487,000 students.
The
College Board (and the makers of ACT) sell
your children’s data freely. As the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy’s
Rachael Stickland and Leonie Haimson write,
students, while taking the SAT, may be asked to hand over personal information
(which may include social security number, “grade
point average, religious affiliation, ethnicity, family income, interests,
citizenship, disabilities and more”) on an opt-in questionnaire and click
a box which says they agree to be a part of the College Board’s Student Search
Service. The College Board and ACT then sell some of the information to
colleges and universities, which can use the data against students applying for
admission.
According to recent information on the College Board website, the social security numbers, disability
information, grades, scores, and parental income are off
limits, but POLITICO in 2014 wrote that these marketed "profiles can include information about the students’ grades and
academic coursework — and also religion, ethnicity, citizenship status
and expected need for financial aid in college. The ACT also lets
customers filter student profiles by family income, parents’ education
levels and student disabilities."
POLITICO, in 2014, also noted that "the College Board did recently
update its privacy policy, after Vice President John McGrath told
POLITICO it might not have been clear to students exactly how much
information is shared with third parties."
POLITICO also stated that a woman from Illinois sued both the College Board and ACT for selling her personal information, but the case was dropped when it was discovered that the woman "had never even taken a College Board exam".
In
2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Chicago rejected another lawsuit against the College Board and ACT (which
a federal judge had thrown out earlier) which sought damages for the selling of
personal information which may have included "name,
address, sex, birthdate, school, grade level,
ethnic group, email address, and intended college major." EdWeek
summed up the verdict by writing that “The court said the plaintiffs
could not show that the test organizations' profiting from their information
deprived them of any economic value of that information.”
Although the College Board
would not disclose how much it makes from such information, Stickland and Haimson, using POLITICO figures, estimate that “ACT’s profits
generated from selling student profiles were approximately $15 million in
2012.” The College Board, according to
information on its website,
now sells student personal information at 43
cents per name.
A
lot of Indiana taxpayer money will be wasted on SAT fees, if this issue goes
through. According to Eric Weddle, the “state education department has estimated a $5 million cost
for every high school student to take the SAT or ACT.” Although the actual cost of the changes being
proposed is unknown, “the panel avoided answering concerns from local districts
about the fiscal impact.” Bob Behning “suggested state agencies would put
together budget requests for the General Assembly if additional funds are
required.”
As Furman University education professor
and researcher Paul Thomas writes
concerning the SAT in South Carolina schools in his “New SAT,
but same old problems”
piece published on October 22 2017, “SAT
average scores should never be used to rank schools, districts, or states in
terms of academic quality; this caution, in fact, comes from the College Board
itself.” Regardless of what promoters
say of the new and supposedly approved SAT, the research still shows that “High-stakes
test scores are mostly markers for race, social class, and gender; and are in
only small ways reflections of achievement. Most standardized test data are 60
percent or more correlated with factors outside the schools, teachers, and
students,” Thomas writes. Better yet, as
Thomas sums up, “we need the political will to address crippling social issues
related to food insecurity, stable work and housing, and healthcare, but we
also need the political will to stop changing standards and tests every few
years and, instead, confront directly the inequities of our schools (such as
tracking and teacher assignments) that mirror the inequities of our
communities.”
