MIT Returns to Using SAT to Keep Out the Riffraff

During the pandemic, many colleges and universities decided to drop the most infamous discriminatory tools of the college admissions trade: the SAT and ACT. Now that wishful thinking regarding Covid has entirely displaced rational analysis in our nation's policymaking centers, it's not surprising to see the first of America's most privileged universities for the most privileged move backward to once again adopting a screening tool born in an era, unlike now, when colleges did not feel compelled to hire PR firms to disguise their racism and bigotry.

So MIT says forget the research showing how the SAT, ACT, GRE, or any other standardized test cannot account for stereotype threat or the benefits accrued by test-takers family wealth and income. 

Below is a clip from a brief paper by Tom Rudd in 2011, and below that are the charts which demonstrate clearly the points about family income and SAT scores. So congratulations MIT: you have shown us your reestablished priorities to protect your institution's white wealthy elitism. One would think such rarefied air would reek less of untreated sewage. 

A close look at the distribution of average SAT scores by race and family income suggests that what the SAT does a very good job of measuring is “access to opportunity.” The correlation between SAT scores and reported family income is very high. In 2009, the highest average score on the SAT was posted by students who reported their family income as greater than $200,000 annually.  For these students, high access to opportunity, generally evidenced by high SAT scores, is cumulative. Access to high performing primary and secondary schools leads to high SAT scores that lead to heightened opportunity to attend selective colleges and universities which leads to greater opportunity to choose a life that “one has reason to value.” Despite historic and impassioned prognostications about the public mission of the academy to energize fundamental democratic values including racial and ethnic diversity, it appears that most highly selective colleges and universities use the SAT (or the ACT) as a key component of their admissions strategy.

By Catherine Rampell, New York Times Economic Blog 2009:

Source: College Board

Source: College Board

Source: College Board

Here are all three test sections next to each other (zoomed in on the vertical axis, so you can see the variation among income groups a little more clearly):

Source: College Board

A few observations:

• There’s a very strong positive correlation between income and test scores. (For the math geeks out there, the R² for each test average/income range chart is about 0.95.) 
• On every test section, moving up an income category was associated with an average score boost of over 12 points.
• Moving from the second-highest income group and the highest income group seemed to show the biggest score boost. However, keep in mind the top income category is uncapped, so it includes a much broader spectrum of families by wealth.

Try Illuminate Education and Make Your Student Data Accessible to Hackers

On its website, Illuminate Education states that "we deploy meaningful safeguards to protect student data." Furthermore, Illuminate pledges "our unwavering commitment to student data privacy."

Despite all the assurances, hackers just ripped off the personal data of 820,000 New York City students. From NBC New York: 

In what may be the largest breach of student data in U.S. history, personal information for roughly 820,000 current and former New York City public school students has been compromised, NBC New York has confirmed.

According to the city's Department of Education, the breach occurred in January when an online grading system and attendance system used by many public schools was hacked.

Education officials blasted Illuminate Education, the California-based company behind the system, claiming it fudged its cybersecurity protocols.

The company has not disclosed what, if anything, had been done with the data. The Department of Education is asking the NYPD, FBI and state attorney general's office to investigate the hack.

But, you know those grade cards and paper in-house attendance reports were so old school. You know, like secure. 

Reflecting on Green Dot’s Disastrous Locke Takeover

“Green Dot came and made it into more of a jail.” — Chris

My history of opposing the Green Dot Charter School Corporation back when I was an activist is well known. On Schools Matter alone there’s over a dozen pieces I wrote on them.

These days, as an educational rights attorney, I’ve successfully litigated against the corporate charter chain on a few occasions. Today I had a legal research assignment that involved looking up information on them and I came across this academic paper:

Taken Over: The Story of the Locke High School Takeover Through a Qualitative Study of Student Voice

by Loyola Marymount University’s Joshua Michael Beardall.

I only had a few minutes to skim through the paper, but it features some excellent feedback on how the students felt about the hostile take-over of a once public school by the corporate charter chain. Written through a Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) lens, the paper takes a student-centric view of what Green Dot did. It also exposes the intrinsic racism of Green Dot and its carceral, white supremacist campuses. Passage like this confirm what activists have said for years:

“The students also believed that the community and school did not interact and that the school was in opposition to the community surrounding it…”

I recommend people check the paper out.

Reflecting back on the hostile Locke takeover, a couple of things come to mind. First, the takeover was, and still is, a disaster. The Green Dot Corporation had to restructure Locke a number of times as their failed management and policies played out. Second, Green Dot, which boasted it would dramatically improve student scores on racist and classist standardized tests, actually set records for having so many schools at the very bottom — including four Locke HS branches in the bottom 25 SAT scores in 2015.

Ironically, the well-healed, white executives running Green Dot at the time of the take-over boasted that they would “turn the school around” and make it a “great school” in short order. Boastful Marco Petruzzi claimed they’d do it in three years. Braggart Steve Barr said they’d do it in one. Neither prediction by the two non-educators came true. Green Dot has run Locke for more than a decade now. Where’s all the compliant press parroting bromides of how Green Dot “cracked the code”?

Petruzzi was a hedge fund manager prior to running the corporate charter school behemoth Green Dot. His lack of background in pedagogy showed in everything he did. Today he’s a furniture salesman. Truth is, Petruzzi’s always been a furniture salesman. This passage by one of his vendors sums up the real essense of the “education reformer,” Marco Petruzzi:

“…Marco Petruzzi, is an ex-Bain partner who joined Dovetail in 2018 to increase sales and profitability and overhaul their physical and technology infrastructure. Marco appreciates working with analysts that can make short work of thorny Excel problems, as well as going beyond spreadsheets to assist in the technical complexities of an ERP database migration.”

KPCC did a piece on how the Green Dot Charter Corporation did not meet its promises with Locke. This passage is instructive:

“Yet for all these improvements, Green Dot has also found out just how difficult it is to act on its initial promises. Locke High School's graduation rate — at 55.9 percent — is one of the lowest of any comprehensive high school in L.A. Unified, charter or otherwise.”

Caught this during further search: ‘The Myth of Charter Schools’ Marco Petruzzi, reply by Diane Ravitch.

Hillsdale College Proudly Published Putin Paean

Just after Putin helped elect D----- T---- as President, higher ed's highest bastion of Trumpism invited Christopher Caldwell, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, to deliver the keynote at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona on February 15, 2017, less than a month after the T---- inauguration (remember the record crowds?).

The speech was entititled "How to Think about Vladimir Putin." The President of Hillsdale College leadership was so impressed that, when he returned to campus, he had the College's ideological organ, Imprimis, to print an adapted version of the speech.

Below is a tiny excerpt, but it offers a strong whiff of the corrupt, xenophobic, white nationalist, anti-intellectual stench that attracts corrupt, xenophobic, white nationalist, anti-intellectual governors like Bill Lee from hundreds a miles away:

Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy. He is the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled. His job has been to protect his country’s prerogatives and its sovereignty in an international system that seeks to erode sovereignty in general and views Russia’s sovereignty in particular as a threat.

. . . if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time. On the world stage, who can vie with him? Only perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey.

. . . .

Why are American intellectuals such ideologues when they talk about the “international system”? Probably because American intellectuals devised that system, and because they assume there can never be legitimate historic reasons why a politician would arise in opposition to it. They denied such reasons for the rise of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. They do the same with Donald Trump. And they have done it with Putin. They assume he rose out of the KGB with the sole purpose of embodying an evil for our righteous leaders to stamp out.

The Hillsdale Curriculum: Adult Mythology as Children's History

For the antiquarian curriculum crafters at Hillsdale College, it's never too early for children to start absorbing the lies and distortions that have warped American history to conform to the self-imposed ignorance of white Americans who refuse to admit the truth. Therefore, the mythologized glories of our past are to be administered beginning in kindergarten and continuing throughout high school and college. Below is the Introductory page from the K-2 unit on the Civil War era:

Now if all this seems a little ambitious for first graders, you'd be right, of course.  But child development is not a specialty or even a concern for the classical masters who reconstructed this 19th Century historical mythology for the special "benefit" of kindergartners who end up unfortunate enough to be enrolled in schools that utilize the kind of blatant propaganda that Governor Bill Lee would like to feed to Tennessee schoolchildren.  

This curriculum is built on discarded and/or discredited renditions of America's past that seek to sanitize the American history, beginning with the American founders and their Puritan forefathers.  You may see for yourself by downloading the curriculum for free.

Below is an example of the developmentally inappropriate "approaches" that the curriculum wizards at Hillsdale have put together.  I have circled one of the many examples of discredited and discarded historical distortions that minimize the systemic nature of humans owning other humans and the role that that reality played in slave owners' desire to go to war to preserve the perversity of that economic and social arrangement. 

In this example below, teachers are urged to take the "approach" with K-2 children, no less, that most Southerners were not slaveholders and that they were actually fighting to preserve "states' rights."  I know, you probably thought that rotted chestnut had been discarded. Think again.

This is what Governor Bill Lee wants Tennessee elementary school teachers to provide our students. 

Just for the record, the 1860 U. S. Census shows that 30 percent of Southern families owned other humans.

Self-selected reading! Susan Ohanian in the LA Times

Feb. 21, 2022 LA Times

To the editor: As a longtime teacher of kids having difficulty in school, I’m worried about The Times’ description of new L.A. Unified School District Supt. Alberto Carvalho as a leader “acutely focused on testing and other data to improve school and student performance.”

I just worry about how much of that “other data” involves how much time kids spend freely reading books of their choice.

My class was grouped as the “lowest scorers” in third grade. We started the day with an hour of silent reading. The kids chose the books to read. As a teacher, I showed them lots of possibilities for good reading.

And I told my talkative principal, “No interruptions, please.” The kids, who’d probably never seen an adult reading, saw me read during that hour.

Individually, they wrote to their favorite authors. Imagine the thrill of having such stars as Jack Prelutsky and Beverly Cleary write back.

At the end of the year, every child except one scored at grade level or above on the sacred standardized test. Now, I only wish I had the data so important to Carvalho — the number of pages read by those kids in books they chose to read.

Susan Ohanian, Charlotte, Vt

Critical Race Theory: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Who Gave $184 Million to Hillsdale College in 2019-2020?

 Below is a clip from Hillsdale's 990 for the period ending June 2020:

Really? $184,000,000 in contributions and grants in one year to a small "liberal arts" college in a single year? Where, oh, where could all that money have come from?

We do know that the Kochs' Americans for Prosperity has an interest in Hillsdale's "classical" education model, as seen in this interview by AFP Foundation Florida's Lee Dury as he finds out more about Hillsdale's Barney Charter School Initiative from Hillsdale's Assistant Provost, Dr. Kathleen O'Toole. The money trail remains a mystery, however.

The same year that Hillsdale reported $184 million in contributions and grants on its 990, Governor Bill Lee traveled to Hillsdale to find out more about the Hillsdale Charter School Model. According to Hillsdale's President, Larry Arnn, Lee was so impressed that he asked Arnn to bring Tennessee some of that white Christian 19th Century book learning:

All of the classical schools with which we are involved, which number close to 50 now, pursue the aims in this Honor Code. There are wonderful citizens all over the country who have taken the lead in founding these schools alongside the College. Some of them are in public office, and here I single out Governor of Tennessee Bill Lee. About two years ago, he visited Hillsdale College to sit in my Aristotle seminar for two and a half hours and to learn more about our work with K-12 education. With the encouragement of the governor, we have undertaken to found several dozen schools in Tennessee alone. This is a mighty work. We will continue to help extend it everywhere.

Who sent Aristotelian Gov. Bill Lee to Michigan with an order for 50 new charter schools that Lee would like to place in TN public schools, rent free? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

TN's Bill Lee Plans $32 Million for White Christian Nationalist Charter Schools

 . . . [Hillsdale] College values the merit of each unique individual, rather than succumbing to the de-humanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called “social justice” and “multicultural diversity,” which judges individuals not as individuals, but as members of a group and which pits one group against other competing groups in divisive power struggles (Hillsdale College 2018-2019 Catalog, p. 15)

Located since 1853 in Hillsdale, Michigan, Hillsdale College (HC) is a small Christian liberal arts college (think Greek, Judeo-Christian, and American traditions almost exclusively) with just under 1,600 undergraduates.

On the Hillsdale College 2021 catalog page headed "Hillsdale College Faculty Statement On Academic Freedom," the page is heavy with references to the College's commitment to "ordered liberty" and "moral order." Though "ordered liberty" is never defined, context clues point me to conclude that faculty are free to practice academic freedom as long as it coincides with the dictates of an administration bound to uphold a politically-conservative view of Trump-approved Christian principles and a staunchly Spartan conception of ordered liberty:

Hillsdale College affirms that academic freedom is bound up with a valuable legacy of other freedoms and duties. Among these are the following aspects of ordered liberty to be considered with their related moral and social obligations: freedom of worship; freedom in work; freedom in politics; freedom in the economy.

Hillsdale College affirms that all these freedoms are dependent upon the maintenance of a moral order; and that academic freedom in particular requires attachment to a body of truth, made known through the order and integration of knowledge. Of such truths the College is the conservator and renewer, and the primary function of the College is to transmit, through these truths, some measure of wisdom and virtue.

In short, if you want your students to read Marx, rather than a Hillsdale-approved detractor, you'd better ask the President first. 

Back in the good old days when white patriarchy, unregulated capitalism, and scientific racism went unquestioned, Hillsdale College, which was given its name by Freewill Baptists in 1853, was free to run the lives of its students as Baptist clergymen saw fit. Male and female students, for instance, who wanted to walk together on campus during the 1850s, had to first seek permission from the College President or the Dean of Women to do so.

In some ways, though the upstart Hillsdale College in the early days was a progressive outlier.  Its founders were largely abolitionist teetotalers, and one faculty member was active in the formation of the Republican Party in 1853. More importantly, anyone, "irrespective of nation, color, or sex" could seek an education at Hillsdale. Many of its students fought for the Union Army during the Civil War, and Hillsdale was the first in Michigan and the second in the U. S. to “to admit women on an equality with men.”  

Today, enrollment numbers show pretty equal representation between women and men (just under 1,600 total), even though 90 percent of students enrolled in Hillsdale's only PhD program in Political Thought are men.

By the 1960s and 70s, however, any vestiges of progressivism were swept away when students at Hillsdale and elsewhere began receiving federal college assistance.  With federal aid came requirements for federal record keeeping and accountability, which Hillsdale refused to do when faced with the mandate to file reports required under Title IX.  

Hillsdale went to court, and in 1984 the College was handed a final defeat in the courts on the matter of federal reporting requirements. Having grown increasingly hostile to federal reporting requirements, the Trustees decided to cut ties with any federal funding, which included refusing student attendance when that attendance required students to pay their way with federal grants or loans.

You can imagine how this decision made Hillsdale's white student body even whiter. But we really don't know how white, unless we go there and do a head count, since HC does not report any racial or ethnic numbers publicly. (After a search through most of the web pages of HC's website, I could find zero photos of black or brown students, though I did see one Asian student).

In terms of faculty diversity, HC ranks 3,627 out of 3,790 American colleges, according to College Factual--which puts HC in the bottom 10 percent.

Today, the progressive outlier that was once Hillsdale has morphed into and defensive bastion of white right-wing Chritian activism.  Its early Republican founders who were largely abolitionists have been replaced by Goldwater, Nixon, and T---p era Republicans devoted to preserving white rights under the guise of liberty and freedom, which is essentially anti-government when government is involved in enforcing federal statutes and regulation in ways that chafe against the "freedom" to discriminate . 

Here is some representative rhetoric from HC's page, "Civil Rights in American History:"

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Rise of Affirmative Action

The understanding of civil rights in America has been transformed fundamentally since Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The view that every individual has a right to equal treatment under the law has been replaced by a system of affirmative action that demands race be taken into account in the pursuit of equal group outcomes.

Identity Politics Today

Identity politics holds that America is fundamentally and irredeemably racist. This ideology, which has become dominant in American public life, requires discrimination in order to elevate and privilege the identities of the oppressed.

To alleviate any doubt about the partisan nature of Hillsdale College's efforts to free itself from the bondage of federal mandates such as the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, ADA, U. S. Equal Employment, LGBT protections, etc., here is the latest affirmation of Hilldale's hostility to any such encumbrance.  Note that the Obama Administration is called out, specifically:

Resolution of the Board of Trustees

WHEREAS the Board of Trustees and Administration of Hillsdale College have been entrusted with, and are determined to uphold, the original and great principles and mission of the College as set down over 165 years ago by its founders; and

WHEREAS those principles and that mission require the College to provide “sound learning” to all willing students, and to do so in a way that perpetuates the “blessings of civil and religious liberty” and “intelligent
piety” in the land; and

WHEREAS the entanglement of the federal government in the financing of colleges and universities, and the consequent regulation of these institutions by federal agencies, violate the idea of limited government embodied in the Constitution; and

WHEREAS such violations are inherently corrupt, as seen in attempts of the Department of Education to compel Hillsdale College to count its students by race, in direct violation of the noblest principles of the College and of America; and

WHEREAS the Obama Administration and Congress today appear, even more than the worst of their predecessors, bent on extending federal control over American higher education and other areas of American life; now therefore be it

RESOLVED that Hillsdale College will continue zealously to defend and uphold, against all threats and inducements, its independence from federal government financing and federal government regulation; and be
it further

 
RESOLVED that the Administration of Hillsdale College, with the support of the Board of Trustees, will continue to provide not only the finest liberal arts education, but also national leadership in promoting the principles of liberty across the land, and to pursue these aims in strict avoidance of all subsidy from the federal taxpayer.

Now it is obviously difficult to square this high-sounding resolution, especially the last sentence, with the College's tax-exempt status, which relieves it from federal and state tax obligations on any of its net assets worth more than $1.25 billion. There's lots of dark money going to Hillsdale each year.

Hillsdale College's president is Larry Arnn, who was paid $1.2 million in salary and bonuses in 2019.  Arnn received his Masters and doctorate from Claremont Graduate School.  After being granted a PhD in 1985 from Claremont, he founded and served President of the right-wing Claremont Institute for the next 15 years. He remains a Trustee of the Heritage Foundation.

Hillsdale's resolve to pursue "strict avoidance of all subsidy from the federal taxpayer" is particularly puzzling, since Hillsdale is now providing the T_____-approved curriculum and instructional model for charter schools that could not exist without the public per-pupil expenditure that the Hillsdale Model charter schools receive.

Do you remember the 1776 Report, which was the work of T____'s 1776 Commission to attempt to undercut the 1619 Project?  The 1776 Report provided a partial K12 social studies curriculum that was meant as the whitest of whitewashes on the Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project, which had successfully spawned a K12 curriculum that includes the actual history of slavery in the story of America's past.  

Besides conservative ideology and a palpable animosity to cultural diversity, affirmative action, and social justice, what pedagogical expertise undergirds the 1776 Curriculum? And what is the connection to Hillsdale?  To the first question, we must answer, not much; to the second question, almost everything.  

T----'s Chairman for this 1776 Report was none other than Hillsdale President, Larry Arnn, who chose Carol Swain, retired right wing Vandy professor of law (think Clarence Thomas in a dress), as his Vice-Chair.  The Executive Director is Arnn's right-hand man at Hilldale, Mathew Spalding, who is Hillsdale VP in charge of Hillsdale's DC operations.

The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission
Larry P. Arnn, Chair
Carol Swain, Vice Chair
Matthew Spalding, Executive Director
Phil Bryant
Jerry Davis
Michael Farris
Gay Hart Gaines
John Gibbs
Mike Gonzalez
Victor Davis Hanson
Charles Kesler
Peter Kirsanow
Thomas Lindsay
Bob McEwen
Ned Ryun
Julie Strauss

The 1776 Report provides the ideological foundation for the 1776 Curriculum, which is meant to provide an antidote to the fact-based inclusive portrayal of American history.

Dr. Kathleen O’Toole, Assistant Provost for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College, gave NWEF a statement about the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum: 

“The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum represents a culmination of the endeavors of decades of forming and honing curriculum at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale Academy, and its dozens of associated K-12 charter schools, bringing together and producing a content-rich curriculum that covers both American history as well as American government, politics, and civics,” O’Toole said.

If you haven't already figured out why Gov. Bill Lee would choose this particular outfit as his unqualified choice to lead his new charter school initiative that would drain 32 million pubic dollars from the public schools just to get 50 new charters up and running, then you haven't been paying attention to Lee's complete subservience and unqualified fealty to the former President. Lee believes that schools must produce more patriots, and patriots must be miseducated by conservative propaganda.  

Bill Lee must be sent packing in November.  You think?

Cash to Poor Families and Early Childhood Brain Activity

In a randomized controlled study, new research finds "causal impact" between decreasing poverty and increased brain activity of young children. 

Significance

This study demonstrates the causal impact of a poverty reduction intervention on early childhood brain activity. Data from the Baby’s First Years study, a randomized control trial, show that a predictable, monthly unconditional cash transfer given to low-income families may have a causal impact on infant brain activity. In the context of greater economic resources, children’s experiences changed, and their brain activity adapted to those experiences. The resultant brain activity patterns have been shown to be associated with the development of subsequent cognitive skills.

Abstract

Early childhood poverty is a risk factor for lower school achievement, reduced earnings, and poorer health, and has been associated with differences in brain structure and function. Whether poverty causes differences in neurodevelopment, or is merely associated with factors that cause such differences, remains unclear. Here, we report estimates of the causal impact of a poverty reduction intervention on brain activity in the first year of life. We draw data from a subsample of the Baby’s First Years study, which recruited 1,000 diverse low-income mother–infant dyads. Shortly after giving birth, mothers were randomized to receive either a large or nominal monthly unconditional cash gift. Infant brain activity was assessed at approximately 1 y of age in the child’s home, using resting electroencephalography (EEG; n = 435). We hypothesized that infants in the high-cash gift group would have greater EEG power in the mid- to high-frequency bands and reduced power in a low-frequency band compared with infants in the low-cash gift group. Indeed, infants in the high-cash gift group showed more power in high-frequency bands. Effect sizes were similar in magnitude to many scalable education interventions, although the significance of estimates varied with the analytic specification. In sum, using a rigorous randomized design, we provide evidence that giving monthly unconditional cash transfers to mothers experiencing poverty in the first year of their children’s lives may change infant brain activity. Such changes reflect neuroplasticity and environmental adaptation and display a pattern that has been associated with the development of subsequent cognitive skills.

This latest finding is consistent with a body of research that shows direct correlations between family wealth, family income, school funding, and child academic achievement levels.  

It is sickening to think that monthly federal tax credit payments to families with children have been discontinued due to white privileged intransigence among anti-democrats.  The cutting of child poverty in half, which the program promised to accomplish in just a few years, could have been the greatest education reform of the past half century--if education reform were actually meant to help the disenfranchised, rather than holding them accountable for the educational problems that the white power establishment created.