How Were TJHSST Commended Students Harmed?

Part II:  (Part I: What’s a National Merit Scholar?)

The two parents driving this story, Asra Nomani, a former reporter and academic, and Shawnna Yashar, a lawyer, would have probably successfully grabbed the media cycle even if TJ’s administration had been error free. They are passionately committted to challenging the admissions changes at the school as leading members of organization challenging the school’s new admission policy..  Both were heavily involved in the election controversy that nearly got the school’s PTSA organization expelled from the national chapter, while Yashar spearheaded the lawsuit against Fairfax County School Board for keeping the schools closed.  I support their right to advocate;  my point here is simply that this entire issue didn’t occur as an organic parent movement but a focused, target effort to criticize the school.

The original story written by Nomani, makes the following accusations:

“For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships.”

These charges are all false.

The two adminstrators in question, principal Ann Bonitatibus and director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, have not been “withholding notifications”. They have not been denying the students with National Merit Commended status anything whatsoever. Commended ranking is not considered an award and does not render a student eligible for any scholarships they weren’t otherwise qualified for.

I’m reasonably certain TJ’s administrators simply overlooked notifying National Merit Commended students this year, and this year only.

Fairfax County School District says, categorically, that “each year”, TJ notifies students and that only this year had neither “email nor personal notification” occurred,  probably “a unique situation due to human error”. The district–not the school–is saying that TJ’s Commended notifications happen on time each year. The rest of this piece assumes that the Bonitatibus and Kosatka had to prove this to the district and that this year was, in fact, an error. Which strikes me as likely.

The most likely explanation for human error is that National Merit screwed up and didn’t put enough postage on the huge pack of 240 Commended certificates that were sent to the school, so the package got there late. Instead of arriving in late September, they arrived in mid-October. Given the relentless administrative calendars,  it’s quite believable that to someone, probably Kosatka, had moved onto other date-driven tasks and just forgot to build the email list and notify the students. As I wrote earlier about the life of an administrator, the task is a combination of grinding day to day tasks and

Routine yearly or regularly scheduled events that nonetheless require planning, which at the high school level might look like: the master schedule, state tests, graduation, accreditation.

Add “National Merit Commended notifications” to that list, particularly at a school where over 100 kids make semi-finalist alone. So maybe the director of Student Services, Brandon Kosatka, missed his window because of the delayed delivery and went on to the next pressing item on the school calendar and then six weeks later said oh shit I forgot and sent out the certificates in November.

So there it is. Because the school was late sending out the certificates, commended students who didn’t seek out the information on their own didn’t have the opportunity to list it as a fairly minor honor on their early admissions applications.

That’s….not a big deal.

One thing people need to remember is that TJ’s senior class is still part of the old highly competitive admissions process and even now still a highly competitive high school. TJ admission itself is a rough proxy for top 3-4% of all students. In 2022,  132 TJ students got Semifinalist, 240 got Commended. The remaining 19% of the 2023 graduating class probably had scores that missed the 3% cutoff by a point or two. In that context, Kosatka’s comment that “celebrating all but a few of the students” makes sense. They aren’t worried about low-achieving students resenting the two or three honors students, but rather actively making a big deal out of 80% of the class when the distinction is without a difference, at the TJ level.

Semifinalist is useful to a TJ student. Commended is not. (*Important future caveat below.) Commended wasn’t even that big a deal to the students themselves.  In the November emails written by an angry parent (presumably activist lawyer Shawnna Yashar), she admits that her son didn’t even bother to tell her about his Commended status because it’s not a big deal. The emails also show that the school used to have a National Merit ceremony, but nobody came so they quit having it.

So the only screwup the school made was in failing to deliver relatively meaningless certificates or notification, probably because the certificates arrived late. Not only would this have minimal impact….well, understand that the deparment is called “student services” for a reason, not “mandated responsibilities”. High school counselling departments spend a huge amount of time and money on helping their seniors in college admissions, but high schools themselves have very few, if any, legally required duties regarding the application process.

To put this minor delay in notification in perspective:

If a district deliberately withheld notification of Semi-finalist status–a far more consequential award–or  through incompetence or woke policy refused to complete the required paperwork for students, that school wouldn’t have violated any education law that the offended student could point to. Winning any sort of damages would be difficult.  What would the damages be? They might have made it to finalist status? Cool, but so what? They might have gotten a scholarship? Hard to prove. I’m sure people would have been fired in that event. But in a case far more actively damaging and malicious than what is at hand here, there’s still not a lot of legal obligation students can demand from their school. All responsibilities regarding college admission are on the student. Even if the school screws up.

The strategists driving this media manipulation understand, I think, that the failure notification story wouldn’t hold up–it was almost immediately challenged, although sadly not by anyone in the media reporting on this.  That may explain why they have emphasized that the failure to notify students rendered them ineligible for National Merit scholarships.

This is either a deliberate lie or simple ignorance.

Commended students aren’t eligible for any National Merit scholarships. The only related scholarships they can apply for are called Special Scholarships with corporate sponsorship. (The first link goes through the procedure I’ve summarized below, the second has a list of sponsors and criteria on pages 9-10).

In many cases, corporations offer a specific number of grants to high school seniors of employees (sometimes also in a specific region or seniors with a particular major). In years when they can’t find enough finalists meeting their criteria, they will use non-finalists.  

To qualify for a special scholarship, students have to complete an Entry Form with the sponsoring corporation as well as an application with the National Merit  by mid-December. The National Merit program then compiles a specific list of students that qualify for each particular scholarship. Commended students have no priority over non-commended. If the scholarship goes to non-finalists, the award is not designated National Merit and recipients can’t call themselves National Merit Scholars.

Any student who didn’t apply or didn’t meet the specific criteria would not be considered. Any student whose parents worked for a company offering a corporate scholarship could have filled out an application at any time after getting their PSAT scores the year before. The delayed or even non-existent notification of Commended status is completely irrelevant and oh, by the way, came in long before the deadline for Special Scholarships.

No Commended student was denied the right to earn a scholarship because there are no scholarships for Commended students.

Like I said: lying or ignorant.

The only potential harm done by the delayed notification was in the limited sense that students who weren’t aware that Commended cutoffs could be looked up online and who would have included that information on their early admissions applications. That’s a small group. And that potential harm is being remedied by the school reaching out to colleges to ensure they have this information for the students’ applications.

This whole story is just utter, unmitigated bullshit–so much so that I’ve spent considerable time trying to see if I’ve missed something. Surely someone who gets paid to report would have looked up some of this? But not.

I understand why the activist parents are ginning up the story. They want to create political or even legal sympathy for their efforts to restor TJ’s admissions policies.

I don’t understand why the media–not just the reporters, but the many pundits and policy analysts on Twitter–doesn’t take the time to do even minimal research to understand how asinine this story is. Sure, these are people on both the left and right who despise public schools and consider them incompetent. But they aren’t supposed to be activist hacks.

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*Many colleges are now prohibiting test scores as part of admissions. TJ is also ending its test-based admissions so it will no longer be a given that the students are top 3-4%. The class of 2026 may value Commended status in a way that current TJ students do not. No test-based admissions, no test scores on applications,  top 3% might be useful information. This doesn’t explain why current parents are freaking out, as it would have no impact on current seniors. It might explain why the school took the step of reaching out to the colleges and why they are planning on new procedures going forward.

What’s a National Merit Scholar?

If you know anything at all about the PSAT, then the current conservative media hysteria charging the elite Virginia high school with “withholding announcement” of National Merit awards makes no sense at all. Before I heard about this brouhaha, I knew 90% of everything about the PSAT. Figuring out how to explain that this hysteria is absurd  required me to learn the other 10%, which I’ll now share with you, dear readers.

The PSAT is formally known as the PSAT National Merit, Scholarship Qualifying Test, or PSAT/NMSQT. Back in the dark ages, from 1959 to some point in the 19990s,  the test had a legitimate function as an initiation to the SAT proper. Juniors took the PSAT and seniors took the SAT in October, which was SAT Day. By the time I began tutoring in 2002, “SAT Day” had already moved back to March of junior year, per College Board recommendation. Before the pandemic, competitive students began taking the SAT much earlier in their junior year. So as a practice test, the PSAT long ago lost its utility.

The real value of the PSAT comes from its association with the National Merit awards.  Originally, the Scholarship Qualifying Test was a different entity that identified top students as semifinalists,  who then “confirmed” their SQT score with an SAT. But tests are expensive to write, so in 1971 the two organizations joined forces and the PSAT became the qualifying test.

National Merit qualification is the PSAT’s reason for existence these days. For students, qualification permits recognition that has otherwise been erased from the modern era–and by modern, I don’t mean the current post-Floyd “tests are bad” phase but going back to the 80s or even earlier. All you need for National Merit recogntion is a  really high PSAT test score that puts you in the top 1% of all testers. The SAT has no equivalent. There’s no official SAT 1600 Club, no “Top 1% Score” label students can include in their CV.

So a major point of the PSAT–arguably its only real value–is to identify the top 1% and giving them bragging rights. Since Asian immigrants and months or years of prep broke the tests, the labels aren’t as impactful as they once were. But to Asians, they are particularly important because the scores can’t be gamed by state discrimination. While states with high Asian populations have higher cut scores, the scores themselves are the only way to play. No one is culling out Asians or making them meet a higher standard. The single standard is so essential to the National Merit qualification that, rather than change this, a national recognition category was defined for the lower scoring ethnicities.

If, as I claim, that’s the primary feature of the PSAT, one might wonder why other kids not in the top 1% would bother taking the PSAT at all, given the wide range of SAT test prep and the complete lack of value the PSAT has in their lives. Hard truth: Most kids are only taking the PSAT to provide a decent-sized mountain for the winners to sit atop.

To keep the PSAT tradition alive despite the fact that the nearly three hour tet has little benefit for the other 96%, the College Board gives complete control to high schools.  Students don’t register for the PSAT with the College Board (as they do for the SAT). High schools administer and own the PSAT. They decide what day to run the test (Tuesday or Saturday). They decide if the test will be limited to their students or if they will sell seats to kids from other schools. They decide whether or not they will require their students to take it.The scores and notifications are sent to the schools, not the students–these are precisely the circumstances that created the TJ hysteria currently in the news. While the SAT registration fee increases almost every year, the PSAT is just  $18–very affordable to states who might want to pick up the tab.

In short, we still have the PSAT because the College Board uses the National Merit awards  to increase their cachet and in exchange gives control and affordability to high schools, who have various reasons for wanting their student population to take college admissions tests, from bragging rights about national merit to ensuring they aren’t missing bright unmotivated kids to..whatever, I haven’t gamed out all the advantages. Otherwise, it’d be long gone.

The essential category achievement in National Merit  ranking is “semifinalist”.

National Merit Semi-finalists are, roughly, those receiving the top 1% of PSAT scores. Designation isn’t an exact science, because the finalists are apportioned by state. Different states have tighter (California, Virginia) or looser (South Dakota) cut scores, but it’s basically the top 1%.

Most semifinalists go on to be finalists.  Not all do–for example, I was a semi-finalist whose school didn’t even bother to tell me there was paperwork to apply for the next step because my GPA was a 3.3 and I had something like 4 Ds so didn’t have a shot at finalist. But most.

The scholarships themselves aren’t all that big a deal. There are three categories of scholarships: NM corporate, NM university, and National Merit itself. Awards are far more subjective. The corporate scholarships are usually limited to students whose parents are employees, or living in a particular region. The university scholarships aren’t even offered by most schools but are used by less prestigious schools to offer full-rides to smart kids if they commit. The NM-sponsored scholarships are for $2500. So not that much money and–crucially–determined in late spring, long after college offers have been made. No application gloss factor.

So for all practical purposes, semi-finalists are the ball-game. They’re declared in September, and are a pretty reliable indicator that the student was in the 99th percentile for his state.

Prior to the TJ story, that’s what I knew.

The TJ story has various iterations but makes this charge:

Last fall, along with about 1.5 million US high school juniors, the Yashar teen took the PSAT, which determines whether a student qualifies as a prestigious National Merit scholar. When it came time to submit his college applications this fall, he didn’t have a National Merit honor to report — but it wasn’t because he hadn’t earned the award. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a nonprofit based in Evanston, Illinois, had recognized him as a Commended Student in the top 3 percent nationwide — one of about 50,000 students earning that distinction. Principals usually celebrate National Merit scholars…

To those of us generally familiar with the PSAT, there are two unfamiliar terms that immediately jump out: Commended Student and National Merit scholar.

The other fact that jumps out is the 3%. Remember, semi-finalist is top 1%.  So Commended Student is way downstream from the only important category. Basically, a participation trophy. I thought the term might be relatively new, but I found mention of it going back 30 years, so it’s not new–just unimportant. In fact, I think my own son must have qualified and DAMN NO ONE TOLD ME EITHER.

Then I dug into “National Merit Scholar” and learned that it is the formal term for kids who make it all the way through to a scholarship from the organization.  No one uses the term “National Merit Scholar” for anything less. And as I said, the actual scholarship winners aren’t as big a deal as the semi-finalists, which is why I hadn’t heard the term. (On the Advanced Placement side, AP Scholar has far more significance.) Here’s a University of South Florida campus celebrating the presence of eight National Merit Scholars on campus. USF Petersburg gives each student a full ride on tuition and board in exchange for the student openly committing to the school. This is not a list of semifinalists, even, as can be seen by the declaration of major.

So again: Semi-finalist status is coin of the realm. Commended is also-ran, Finalist is status too late to matter, Scholar is more status too late, but also some money.

So that’s nearly 1300 words on the National Merit and PSAT.

In Part II, I’ll explain why the l’affaire TJPSAT is not just nothing, but a really embarrassing nothing. Hint: everyone retweeting this story either genuinely thinks or is perpetuating a lie “commended” is “scholar”.

Same Thing All Over Again–But Events Happen

Many, many irritating things happened during the omicron phase, things that sent me into a mild depressive episode. One happy note, however, was that the union obsessive pretense that covid19 is dangerous meant we could have staff and department meetings on Zoom.

Our staff meetings occur before school, so we start the actual school day late. But the meeting start time is half an hour earlier than the normal school day beginning. So I have to get to school half an hour earlier on a day when school starts half an hour late. This induces a cognitive dissonance that eleven years at the same school has never entirely resolved, and every week, I’m at best five minutes late. Zoom meetings allows me to actually leave later in the day and listen to the meeting in my car. On time. Given that two years of school insanity has never once played in my favor, this feels like win.

Anyway.

Our department chair, Benny, was explaining….wait. Before I begin this story, I want to be clear that I’m not really criticizing anyone involved, including Benny. I should also mention, as I have before, that our school is blissfully indifferent to test scores. Admins really don’t care. This exercise I’m about to describe is about as far as we get to caring. Also relevant: since Common Core, juniors take a test that has multiple levels but from a practical standpoint is binary. Students are either “college ready” or they aren’t.

So Benny was asking for volunteers to run brief 30-minute math tutorials designed to help students review topics. We have an intervention time after lunch that can be used for this purpose. Nothing new; we’d done this for the two years pre-pandemic. Except.

“So we’ve identified the kids who failed algebra 1, geometry, and algebra 2 and give them the opportunity to come to tutoring.”

Wait, what? Kids who failed what?

In years past, we had all agreed that kids who failed algebra I and geometry had not a single chance in hell of testing as college ready.  I had argued, unsuccessfully, that we should still tutor those kids and bump their failing grade if they got….better. To use SAT terms: “college ready” is around 600 Math (top 30%). Any junior who was still working on algebra 1 or geometry would be rocking that test at 450.

I know kids in our school who made it to precalc and got a 500 on the SAT math section and did not pass the college readiness standard.

So Benny was suggesting that kids who’d had multiple shots at algebra 1 and geometry would somehow be able to pick up all they’d failed to understand the first time as well as all the topics they needed in algebra 2 in ten 30 minute sessions.

He’s also suggesting we give this tutoring to the kids who failed algebra 2. But in a good year, pre-pandemic, 60-70% of the kids taking and succeeding at algebra 2 don’t test as college-ready. Kids who failed algebra 2 were not good candidates for passing the college readiness marker. And tell them that if they succeed at an impossible task, we’ll change their grade but only if. Not just for trying.

I said nothing. All hail Zoom.

“If they go to all the tutoring sessions and make college-ready on the test, we’ll change their F to Pass.”

“What about the students that are marginal but passed algebra 2, trig, or pre-calc? We should give them the same tutoring. And kids who flunked pre-calc or calculus, they’d be eager for that deal.” suggested Pete.

In a good year, pre-pandemic, these were the kids we tutored. We spent time identifying the students who had it together enough to pass three or four years of math with a C+, a B, or even a shaky A, and gave them support. That’s what you always do, if you’re looking to get maximize kids across a finish line. These were the kids who had a shot at passing the test.

“No,” responded Benny. “The test only goes through algebra 2 material. Kids who’ve passed algebra 2 should be able to pass this test without tutoring or an incentive.” 

I said nothing. I didn’t volunteer, either. All hail Zoom.

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In the early days of my blog I would have immediately documented this craziness to provide some insight into how things work. Benny is, like all my colleagues, a progressive Democrat. But in math teacher typology, I’m the woke-conversant social justice warrior. Benny’s the traditionalist (check out our pass rates in this algebra 2 article). I know for a fact Benny doesn’t think his target group is up to the task he’s set. I know this because four years ago, we all agreed that the tutoring pool should be comprised of strong, motivated juniors taking algebra 2 or trig, along with any pre-calc students with Cs. This was the group whose pass rate we might be able to move from 0-10% to 30-50%.

Even more notably, in years past, I would have spoken up to make this very observation. I wouldn’t have been alone, either. Yet no one spoke up.

I’m not sure which is more worthy of comment: I’ve stopped bothering to write about the crazy unreasonable plans that show up in my teacher life, or I’ve stopped pushing back on crazy unreasonable plans that show up in my teacher life.

The first is easier to explain: events, dear boy, events. Both progressives and education reformers upped the nuttiness. The SAT changed to be a much harder test, then became irrelevant. Common Core spent billions on nothing. Two of education reform’s three legs got chopped off.  There was a pandemic and most of the craziness in that era I couldn’t bitch about because it was more central to my location than I usually allow online. Moreover, I try to say it once or maybe twice and then move on, linking to the original article to say “still this.”

The second question is more interesting because it’s not the usual answer. I’m not burnt out. I’ve not given up. I still care. I gritted my teeth and actually picked up my phone to put an observation in the chat yes, while driving, but Benny had set “Chat to Host Only” and so I didn’t end up driving into a ditch while typing a carefully worded but cynical comment.

If I have one Big Idea on high school math instruction*, it’s this: teach less and learn more. Find your comfort limit and develop your skills. Move on if you’re interested.

Kids who struggle with math could productively learn to apply arithmetic, geometry, and a little bit of algebra. The next group, the bulk of high school students, could do a huge amount of math with all that plus second year algebra, basic trig, and some stats. Top tier really should stop at analytic geometry, functions, and more trig. We could teach so much math that calculus could wait until college.

We will never be able to do this, because everything in education is about race. Astonishing, really, why more people can’t grasp that basic reality. Pick any education proposal you like, apply race, and you’ll realize it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.

But individual schools like mine can still focus on helping kids at every point of the spectrum, even if we have to work through the state mandated structures for class sequencing. In terms of test prep, state tests might only focus on how many students were “college ready”, but we could focus on our average score. Maximize everyone’s score and celebrate that our lowest achievers worked hard to get every question right. This is, in fact, what we did the year before the pandemic. Absent that, we could focus solely on the students who are near the line and increase their pass rates, as I mentioned above.

My first five years at this school, I spent hours advocating for my vision. Chuck, the math coach, and I did our best to find a math path in our existing curriculum to route weaker students through. We differed on end goals–Chuck felt students should fall out by failing, I thought any plan that had students getting Fs by design was absurd–but we both shared the goal of homogenizing our classes so we could teach more content to those who were able and willing. In 2019, we took the top half of algebra 2 juniors, along with the non-honors precalc students and gave them prep sessions. This *dramatically* increased our college ready numbers to nearly half, when in prior years, before and after Common Core, we were happy with low 30%.

In early 2020 we had just started our tutoring groups for the state tests. Juniors still in A1, geo, and bottom half of A2 got skill review on the basics, to raise their confidence and willingness to try on the test. We also prepped the A2/Precalc students as described above.

Then the pandemic shut everything down. No tests in 2020, no prep in 2021 because of a different schedule. We get back in 2022, and the policy is now back to “let’s only give tutoring to kids who have no prayer of passing the test and promise them something they really need but only if they pass the test.”

And only as I wrote this did I realize that Chuck retired at the end of 2019.

Chuck, who endlessly advocated and presented at the district and administrative level. Chuck, whose emails reminding me to be sure to fail more kids annoyed me, but who was at least on the same page. Chuck, who was far more successful than I understood until he left.

Personnel matters.

That’s not the reason I originally began writing this, but once again, writing things down helps me find insight. Need to keep that in mind.

A couple other points.

When I mention events in the title, I wasn’t thinking of Chuck’s retirement but two other major ground shifts. For four years or more, major state university systems and their community colleges have completely abandoned remediation (See “Corrupted College” for details). In all the coverage, left and right, approving and disapproving, of the wholesale abandonment of SAT/ACT requirements in college admissions, no one mentions an obvious fact: grades are worthless. If grades are worthless, then schools up and down the selectivity food chain are going to acquire thousands of students whose transcripts say 4.0 but whose abilities are at the ninth grade or lower level. It seems to me that this will necessarily lower standards dramatically for college diplomas.

While improving math achievement for all students is a worthwhile goal and one I sign on to, my original advocacy for tutoring on state standardized tests was sourced in my desire to help students avoid expensive college remediation and for those of those who needed it, give them a better leg up to pass those remediation classes.

That’s pretty clearly  no longer going to be an issue. Thus, while I still think this approach is crazy and cruel, my concerns about their future in a degraded college system is less acute.

The second shift comes in answer to a question some might be wondering about: Why not Ed for Chuck?  Why don’t I volunteer for Chuck’s work?

My first response is hahahahahaha. Chuck’s job not only needed diplomacy and adminspeak, but also organization and focus. I’m 0 for 4. Moreover, Chuck had spent years teaching at an elite local (public) high school and had transferred here specifically to take on this task. He cared about teaching, but wanted to run a program, and taught less as a result. I care about teaching, and don’t like teaching less.

But the second response came a bit more slowly. Over the past five years, I’ve also undergone a shift in teaching topics, one that utterly gobsmacked me. If you’d asked me a decade ago how I would branch out, I’d have said my druthers were to still teach math, but up my quota of history and English. Ideally, say, in an AP Lang/Lit/US History class designed for bright kids who can read well but hate homework. I also predicted I’d be doing more mentoring.

None of that came true. Instead, I’m teaching with no prep (yay! more money, more variety, less boredom!) and running a program that I don’t talk about because it’s too specific**. But I am making a difference at the individual student level (from remedial to excellent) and the school-wide level with tons of money (which I need***) and  visibility (which I don’t).

Now, we can all agree that I’m an ornery cuss who seeks out the hard way every time. But surely, if I’m not looking for something that falls into my lap, I should take it and run with it rather than beat my head against a wall on an issue that is contrary to stated policy, requires endless handling and maintenance, and gives me no visibility except as a troublemaker?

Don’t worry, though. After I began this piece our district ended staff and department zoom meetings. Back to in-person, where I will inevitably mouth off.

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*Actually, all subject instruction.
**Please don’t speculate, particularly to others. Remember how I wear anonymity.
***Not me personally. For the program.

False Positives

I quit writing about tests. And test prep.  Five, six, years ago? I still taught test prep until this year, always giving in to my old employer’s pleas to teach his Saturday classes. But I largely quit the SAT after the last changes, focusing on the ACT. I still love tests, still enjoy coaching kids for the big day.

Explaining why has been a task I’ve avoided for several years, as the doubt is hard to put into words. 

It was an APUSH review course, the last one I taught, I think. Class hadn’t started for the day, but one of my five students was sitting there highlighting notes. She was a tiny little thing, perky and eager but not intellectually remarkable and it was March of what would have been her junior year.

“This is my last test prep course. I’ve taken the SAT for the fourth time, took AP Calculus BC last year, and I’m all done.”

“Yay! How’d you do on the SAT?”

“2400,” she said, casually. “I got 2000 the first time, but I spent the whole summer in two prep courses, plus over Christmas.”

Boom.

Like I said, she was….ordinary. Bright, sure. But her APUSH essays were predictable, regurgitating the key points she’d read in the prep material–pedestrian grammar, too many commas. Her lexile level was unimpressive. Nothing terrible. I gave her some tips. 

This girl had placed in the 99th percentile for the SAT but couldn’t write a grammatically complex sentence, much less an interesting one. Couldn’t come up with interesting ways to use data (graphs, statistics). Couldn’t accurately use the words she’d memorized and didn’t understand their nuance in reading text

She was a false positive.

I’ve known a lot of high scoring students of every ethnicity over the years–and by high scoring, I mean 1400-1600 on the 1600 SAT, and 2200-2400 on the 10 years with the three tests. 5s on all AP tests, 700+ on all Subject tests. Until that conversation, I would have said kids had high test scores were without exception tremendously impressive kids: usually creative, solid to great writing, opinionated, spotted patterns, knew history, knew the underlying theory of anything that interested them. I could see the difference, I’d say, between these kids and those slightly lower on the score scale–the 1200s, the kids who were well rounded with solid skills who were sometimes as impressive, sometimes not, sometimes a swot, sometimes a bright kid who didn’t see much point in striving.

Every time saying it, though, I’d push back memories of a few kids who’d casually mentioned a 5 score, or a 1600 or 2400, that took me aback. That particular kid who didn’t seem all that remarkable for such a high score. But in all these cases, I was only relying on gut instinct and besides, disappointingly high IQ folks exist.   For every Steven Hawking there’s a Ron Hoeflin. Or a Marilyn vos Savant, telling us whether or not larks are happy.  Surely the test would sometimes capture intellect that just wasn’t there in the creative original ways I looked for. Or hey, maybe some of those kids were stretching the truth.

But here, I had my own experience of her work and her scores were easily confirmable, as my employer kept track (her name was on the “2400 list”, the length of which was another shock to my prior understanding). She got a perfect score despite being a banal teen who couldn’t write or think in ways worthy of that score.

Since that first real awareness, I’ve met other kids with top 1% test scores who are similarly…unimpressive.  98+ percentile SAT scores, eight 5 AP scores, and a 4.5 GPA with no intellectual depth, no ability to make connections, or even to use their knowledge to do anything but pick the correct letter on the multiple choice test or regurgitate the correct answer for a teacher. Some I could confirm their high scores, others I just trusted my gut, now that I’d validated instinct. These are kids with certainly decent brains, but not unusually so.  No shame in that.  But no originality, not even the kind I’d expect from their actual abilities. No interest in anything but achieving high scores, without any interest in what that meant.

It probably won’t come as a shock to learn that all the kids with scores much higher than demonstrated ability were born somewhere in east Asia, that they all spent months and months learning how to take the test, taking practice tests, endlessly prepping.

The inverse doesn’t hold. I know dozens, possibly hundreds, of exceptional Asian immigrants with extraordinary brains and the requisite intellectual depth and heft I would expect from their profile of perfect SAT scores and AP Honors status. But when I am shocked at a test score that is much higher than demonstrated ability, the owner of that score is Chinese or Korean of recent vintage. 

I don’t know whether American kids (of any race) could achieve similar scores if they swotted away endlessly. Maybe some of them are. But my sample size of all races is pretty high, and I’ve not seen it.  On the other hand, I’m certain that very few American kids would find this a worthwhile goal. 

Brief aside: when I taught ELL, I had a kid who was supposedly 18. That’s what his birth certificate said, although there’s a lot of visa fraud in Chinese immigrants, so who knows. He didn’t look a day older than fourteen. And he had very little interest in speaking or learning English. Maybe he was just shy, like Taio, although I’d test him every so often by offering him chocolate or asking him about his beloved bike and he showed no sign of comprehension. But then he’d ace multiple choice reading passages. Without reading the passage. He had no idea what the words meant, but he’d pick the right A, B, or C, every time. I mentioned this to the senior ELL teacher, a Chinese American, and she snorted, “It’s in our genes.”

I don’t think she was kidding but the thing is, I don’t much care how it happens. If American kids are doing this, then it changes not a whit about my unhappiness. It’s not a skill I want to see transferred to the general teenage American population. (That said, the college admissions scandal makes it pretty clear that, as I’ve said many times, rich parents are buying or bribing their way in, not prepping. And unsurprisingly, it appears that Chinese parents were the biggest part of his business.)

Now, before everyone cites data that I probably know better than they do, let me dispatch with the obvious. Many people think test prep doesn’t work at all. That was never my opinion  When people asked me if test prep “worked”, I’d always say the same thing: depends on the kid. “Average score improvement” is a useless metric; some kids don’t improve, some improve a bit, some improve a huge amount. Why not pay to see if your kid improves a lot? But I also felt strongly that test prep couldn’t distort measured ability to beyond actual ability, and I no longer believe that.

But I didn’t believe what critics at the time said, that test prep worked…..too well. I didn’t believe that false positives were a real problem. And the terrible thing is–at least to me–is that I still believe normal test prep is a good thing. Distortion of ability, however, is not.

As the push to de-emphasize tests came, as test-entry high schools came under attack, as colleges turn to grades only–a change I find horrifying–I could no longer join the opposition because the opposition focused their fire almost exclusively on their dismay at the end of meritocracy and the concomitant discrimination against Asian immigrants. I oppose the discrimination, but I no longer really believe the tests we have reliably reveal merit to a granular degree. The changes I want to see in the admissions process would almost certainly reduce Asian headcount not by design, but by acknowledging that specific test scores aren’t as important.

I have other topics I’ve been holding off discussing:

• why I support an end to test-based high schools in its current form
• why we still need tests
• how the SAT changes made all this worse
• how the emphasis on grades for the past 20 years has exacerbated this insanity
• why we need to stop using hard work as a proxy for merit

But I needed to try, at least,  to express how my feelings have changed. This is a start. It’s probably badly written, but as you all know, I’ve been trying to write more even if the thoughts aren’t fully baked, so bear with me.

 

 

White Flight From Admissions-Test High Schools

I’ve written this approximately 5 billion times on Twitter, but Razib Khan’s review of Charles Murray’s new book, coupled with my recent failure to create any articles at all, combined to convince me to put it in essay form.  The point has nothing to do with the book, which I haven’t read yet but is certainly excellent, or the review, which is perceptive, particularly the last bit.

But this part here is often repeated and quite misleading:

In New York City, the elite Stuyvesant public high school illustrates the discrepancy between the quality of our discussions of systemic racism and how race, class, and education actually interact in the real world. Admission to the school is based on a standardized test. The current student body is 73 percent Asian American and 19 percent white. New York City is about 15 percent Asian American and 30 percent white. In other words, white kids are under-represented in the student body (though far less so than blacks and Latinos).

John Podhoretz mentioned the same stat a few months ago:

If you add whites, blacks, and Latinos together, they will constitute around 37 percent of the kids at these eight schools. Now take a wild stab at the ethnic origins of the absolute majority of admits—a stunning 53.7 percent in all. You guessed it. Asian.

…

This is the case even though Asians make up a little less than 12 percent of New York City’s population. Black people make up 26 percent. White people make up around 26 percent. Latinos make up around 26 percent. And Asians? Around 12 percent.

The stats are all true, but there’s one big problem: both Khan and Podhoretz use the wrong stat. It doesn’t matter how many whites and Asians are in New York City, but how many of them are in public schools. 

White kids are twice the absolute number of Asian kids in the New York City general population, but public school population is a different matter:

• • 40.6 percent Hispanic
  • 25.5 percent black
  • 16.2 percent Asian
  • 15.1 percent white

These stats have been mostly consistent for a decade or so; the NY Times correctly lists the populations back in 2010, when whites were 15% and Asians14%.

So Razib and Pod use the fact that whites are twice as populous as Asians to demonstrate the shocking disparity in the specialized school population. But in fact, whites and Asians are equally represented in the public school population, so the disparity is already half as bad as they say. 

But there’s still more data that is rarely mentioned in the white/Asian disparity debate–Podhoretz does bring it up, but as usual misses the relevance. Given that whites and Asians represent equal populations in public schools, it’s worth looking at the attempts and admit rates:

NYCDOE on 2020 SHSAT results

The dark blue line at the bottom shows the acceptance rate of testers by race. Notice that whites and Asians have basically the same admissions rate (caveat: the thousand multi-racial or unknown race have a very high acceptance rate). Asians probably have higher scores on average than whites, as more of them get into top-ranked Stuyvesant. Given the much higher, one might say obsessive, Asian dedication to test prep, this isn’t surprising. New York City test scores show 3rd through 8th grade white and Asian ELA proficiency rates the same in English, although 77% of Asians test proficient in math and “only” 66% of whites do the same. I couldn’t find granular data for 8th grade in NYC only, but suffice it to guess that they test at roughly parity in ELA and Asians do better in math.

Point being that whites and Asians both have high proficiency levels on state tests and identical admissions rates to the specialized high schools.

However, take a look at the top line of the graph, showing overall testers by race.  Despite their overall population parity, whites and Asians have very different interest level in the schools. Twice as many Asians took the test as whites. 

This reporting tool reveals that in 2019, at least, there were 12,769 Asian and 11,147 white 8th graders.  So about 64% of Asian and 39% of white 8th graders took the SHSAT.

Well, that’s…..weird. 

It’s almost like whites aren’t nearly as interested in attending the “best public schools in New York City”. 

This thoroughly screws with the traditional conservative take on merit-based high schools, which goes like this: “Asians work hard, study hard, care about school, and that’s why they dominate admissions in the best schools.” 

How come whites aren’t testing–that is, applying–to the “best” schools? 

In an article that almost certainly couldn’t be written today, the Atlantic goes through the history that explains why whites are less interested. First, a very interesting graph on Stuyvesant student population over a 20 year period:

Atlantic also did populations for Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech

Notice that black and Hispanic population has been cut in half, but white population has dropped by more than half. If Stuyvesant admissions are truly test-based, as I’m sure they are, that shouldn’t happen. Only at Brooklyn Tech did white population increase, and only slightly.

The Atlantic points out that the drop began in 2002, when mayor Michael Bloomberg instituted school choice:

The white population at Stuyvesant hovered around 40 percent from the late 1980s until the early 2000s, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Around 2003, when Bloomberg became mayor, the number of white kids at these schools dropped as the number of schools that screen for academic criteria like grades or exams, or require an audition or interview, more than doubled.** This selectivity increased the pool of schools that were considered “good,” which diverted many white students away from the specialized schools and into these newly prestigious schools.

So when Bloomberg allowed all public schools to screen for academic criteriam, suddenly, whites weren’t interested in Stuyvesant and the other specialized high schools. (Note: while elite private schools do suck up a lot of bright black and Hispanic kids, a lot of the others attend these “choice” high schools.)

White NYC public school students aren’t failing in their efforts to get into the specialized high schools. They aren’t interested. They aren’t applying. They have schools that are just as good.

While the national status of the specialized high schools is unquestioned, it’s pretty clear that the local status is much diminished. Asian students are overrepresented in these schools not because the schools have high academic standards and desirable status, but because bright white, black, and Hispanic kids have equally good options that they find more attractive. Why bother with obsessive test prep and a school culture that Americans find unpleasant when you can set a perfectly solid standard that keeps out the low-skilled and unengaged? 

Look throughout the country at the test-based schools and you’ll find a similar pattern, although the SHSAT is the only test whose results are readily available online. But in every area with a mostly Asian test-based public high school, look for  an equivalently ranked school that’s mostly white, that also has more blacks and Hispanics. I don’t know enough about Virginia area schools to state this with a certainty, (I’m trying to write more, research picayune yet interesting details less) but this 2019 reporting reveals that whites comprised only 25% of the admissions to Thomas Jefferson High School, while they are surely more than 25% of the population.  In other areas, like San Francisco and Lowell, whites rich enough to live there pay for private school or move south or east in the megalopolis.

It’s simply inaccurate to refer to the specialized high schools as “New York City’s best schools”.  It’s totally wrong to argue, as most conservatives do, that Asian kids are “dominating” academics, or that the lack of black and Hispanic kids at these schools is a mark of a “failed education system” or even “black culture not valuing academia”.

The simple fact is that everyone involved in this debate has no idea what they are talking about. They see the specialized high schools as pure meritocracies. In fact, they are an expensive service NYC provides Asian immigrants who want to get their kids away from black and Hispanic students.

Now, some of this is my interpretation, so I’ll try and break it down.

Fact: white student interest in the NYC specialized schools is far lower than Asian interest, despite similar representation in public school population and similar acceptance rates to the eight schools.

Fact: when Bloomberg allowed public schools to restrict admissions, a large number of prestigious local schools set standards and this led to a drop in white student interest in the eight specialized high schools.

Opinion: whites are uninterested in the NYC specialized high schools because of the Asian immigrant culture.

Opinion: immigrant interest in any “merit-based” institution, coupled with the ability to build less competitive, but still exclusive, institutions leads to reduced white interest. 

Opinion: what the media refers to as “best schools” is not what American parents consider “best schools” if the schools are overwhelmingly populated by Asian immigrants and contain the competitive, grade-obsessed Asian culture.

The white flight away from test schools to public schools with test-in standards explains why white parents were freaked out when di Blasio threatened to end this option. DiBlasio can’t change the specialized high school requirements but he can end white parents’ ability to sculpt their own schools. If diBlasio did end these programs, I’d expect white participation in the specialized high school application process to double.  Alternatively, whites may decide it’s time to leave the city entirely, although that’s a different decision in New York City than it is when moving from San Francisco to, say, Palo Alto.

So the primary rationale for ending or changing test-based high schools is to make public schools more attractive to American (read white) parents.  The real driver isn’t equity. That’s just cover. District leaders might talk about the importance of black and Hispanic achievement, but  (as many have noted) ending test-based admissions always leads to more white students. Most of the parents screaming about the end to test-based schools are Asian parents–most of them immigrants, many making demands that might possibly be considered a tad ungrateful. Given a choice between a school that pleases newly-arrived Asian immigrants and one that pleases their tax base of mostly white but all high-income parents–and also improves black and Hispanic participation–which option is the best political strategy?

As usual, conservatives–and, for that matter, black opponents like Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and Wilfred Reilly–get it all wrong. They are wailing about the injustice to the Asian immigrants and the threat to merit. They complain that black students aren’t encouraged to compete or achieve. But this is all bullshit. There are smart black kids. They have other options that they find much more attractive.

Asian dominance of specialized public schools has nothing to do with academics or high standards. It’s white flight. Districts are taking action to end white flight. This is unsurprising and something that conservatives would normally support except their loathing of public schools interferes with their ability to notice the obvious. 

I  shouldn’t have to point this out. But there’s one thing that I’ve noticed elites of either party are categorically reluctant to discuss, and it’s something that a (barely) upper middle class white living in extreme diversity is uniquely suited to observe. White people living around huge populations of Asian immigrants aren’t enamored with them. When you read that Asian participation in an institution or activity has soared, start by wondering whether absolute white participation has significantly declined. Then find out why.

Naturally, when elites do discuss this behavior, it is tagged as racism by conservative and progressive alike. Plus ca change, and all that.

*******************************************************

There are many reasons my writing has fallen off a cliff this year, not least of which that remote teaching is far more work. But another key reason that I just figured out recently involves the huge push over the last year to end SAT and other test based admissions policy, an issue that would normally be right in my wheelhouse. But my opinions on all this have grown more complicated in the past five years. 

There are people who think I dislike Asians, and that’s just not true. I do have concerns about the huge influx in Asian immigrants since the 90s. (there’s a clear distinction between them and those who have been in the country for decades and multiple generations.) South and East Asian academic culture is rife with fraud and competition, and I don’t welcome its influence here in America. I grit my teeth and scowl at Americans* who talk about the Asian work ethic, Asian two-parent families, and all the other “positives” that they are just sure lead to Asian success (recently on display in Andrew Sullivan’s podcast with Wesley Yang). It’s all bullshit. Asian immigrants are people, and like all people they range from utter scum to totally amazing. But culturally, they have attitudes and values that are in total conflict with American ones, and Americans should not allow these values to override what makes American education great–and yes, American education is great. Nor has our education system ever been overly obsessed with grades, competition or endless study. We should seek to acculturate Asian immigrant education values, not reward them.

Leaving aside all the value-judgment (theirs and mine), I am also disturbed at the constant confusion between grades and achievement, as well as the utter ignorance of the real problems with the SHSAT scoring that would reward an Asian immigrant (or anyone else) scoring in the high 90s in math and the 40s in verbal while rejecting a black or Hispanic kid (or anyone else) scoring in the high 80s on both.

But none of my distaste leads to approval for college admissions offices discriminating against Asians by using enough of them to boost their metrics and dismissing the rest. Nor does it mean we can ban test prep. And using grades as a proxy for achievement, which is the actual means by which we are eliminating test-based admissions at both college and high school, is utter madness. Not only are grades basically fraud, but a grade-based admission process will encourage segregation, particularly for blacks and Hispanics. Black kids at integrated high schools have better scores than those at majority minority high schools, but lower grades. This is the Big Lie that runs all through the “top students at each school” admissions process. Grades favor low achievers. Tests don’t. 

However, I’m far more skeptical of the value of test scores past a cutoff mark than I was before around 2016. That is, an SAT score of 600 verbal or math has meaning. I’m not sure a 2400 SAT score does anymore. Well, it does, but not reliably. That’s a topic for another article. 

So tests, yes. But cut scores and a lottery, not ranking by score. That’s a topic for another day as well, but I wanted to be clear that I am unhappy–very, very unhappy–with the current move away from test-based college admissions. I believe we are destroying the value of a college diploma beyond redemption. It’s very worrying.

Once again, parts of this are more disjointed but focus is on writing to get past this perfection block, so bear with me.

*I mentioned this throughout, but unlike Asians, who often say American to mean “white”, I mean American as all races. If I mean American whites I usually say so.

Dropping Admissions Tests: CalTech

Note: This is an expansion of my tweet storm.

It’s one thing when Janet Napolitano grabs the first opportunity to dump the SAT. The UC system has been desperately trying to rid itself of the restrictions imposed by California’s 1997 affirmative action ban for two decades: declaring a ban on the SAT unless the College Board redesigned it and made everyone else pay, focusing more on the subject tests, then banning them, requiring the essay then banning it. So naturally a pandemic that prevented large gatherings would be seized upon to get rid of it entirely.

(By the way, I put the odds of the UC developing its own test at exactly zero. Any legitimate test would have the same racial imbalances as the existing tests–without the ability to blame the failings on the College Board. They can’t use the state test, known as the SBAC, because it, too, has the same achievement gaps as the SAT. Moreover, if they used the state test, out of state applicants would have to take another test, probably the SAT/ACT. A test they could take multiple times, while California applicants can only take the SBAC once–a disparity that won’t survive a lawsuit. A UC-only test would increase the burden for all California students who wanted to apply elsewhere, and any out of state students applying to UC–how likely is that? No, they’re hoping they can maintain standards without the test, or they will reinstate it in a couple years regretfully, giving a bullshit reason. End digression.)

But then I learned that back in January, California Institute of Technology ended its Subject test requirement and a few days ago went SAT/ACT test blind.

Really?

Caltech has long been celebrated by affirmative action opponents for its refusal to bow down to diversity admissions policies–evidenced by the growth of its admitted Asian undergraduates.

But that is, in part, because Caltech isn’t harassed by lawsuits or hauled up by the media as an example of the evils of using meritocracy. The university has always been deemed too small for diversity shills to bother with.

So whatever reason Caltech had for dumping tests, I don’t think it came about because of public pressure. The most recent announcement didn’t make even a ripple: no media gloating, no aforementioned diversity shills gloating about the change.  I follow this sort of news closely and only heard about it by accident a couple days ago.

Not knowing anything about Caltech’s internal politics, I began with the two most obvious candidates: a change in leadership or a decline in rankings. Leadership has been unchanged since 2013, and Rosenbaum was no apologist for his school’s admissions policy.

Change in rankings, on the other hand, was plausible. I remember it being ranked #1 in 1999, when a change in the USNWR team made the rankings less concerned about reflecting public opinion. Now it’s at 12. But does Caltech seem like a school that would care? This analysis argues that perhaps the change was made to attract more international students. Maybe. Again, I don’t know all the internal politics.

But what the hell, I didn’t become Ed Realist to hem and haw about significant college admissions decisions. Let’s go straight to the demographics, which offer a real surprise or, as I said on Twitter “holy shit.  Loak at Asian, white, and Hispanic changes over the past two years.”

These two graphs show the same data, just in different forms. The first shows the percentages of Asians, whites, Hispanics, blacks, and International students.

Note: I don’t do regressions or….p values or whatever the hell they’re called. (kind of kidding, I usually can dredge up what they’re called and what they do.). This is just a very simple graphic representation of first year admissions data, skippibng Native Americans and 2 races.

The second shows the same data but in linear form and raw numbers instead of percentages. I thought both of them were useful, pick the one you like best.

I only included the bottom two lines, black and international, because otherwise people would wonder why I’d left them off. The big news is in the top three.

I found 1996 data in a Caltech newspaper article; it matches 2000 data pretty well.

My first thought, before collecting the data,  was that Caltech was using the pandemic to maybe get fewer Asians. But it turns out they’ve cracked that nut in many ways. Asians, whites, and Hispanics are at close to parity. (38, 22 and 29 percent).

The graph below uses 2002 as a benchmark, showing increase and decrease Using tests, supposedly with pure meritocracy, they’ve cut white admissions in half from 2002, and returned Asians back to their 2002 numbers. Before now, I’d have bet that reducing Asian percentages was a near impossibility. But Caltech has done more than that.

I have no point other than wow, take a look at this. A top ranked university chopped its Asian admissions in half without really increasing the international student population. Is that normal?  Since the school managed this without ending the SAT or Subject test requirement, why end them now? What explains this? I’ve rummaged around looking for CalTech specific explanations, but haven’t found anything. I’m wondering now if I’ve missed a trend in college admissions demographics.

Of course, go back up a chart or two and look at the yellow. African Americans are practically  non-existent at CalTech. I suspect the most common explanation provided is correct: blacks who have the chops to go to CalTech are offered massive sums to go to higher-ranked schools.

Still, looking at the flat line for African Americans, it’s hard not to wonder, for the umpteenth time why Black Lives Matter isn’t pulling down the Statue of Liberty for its pro-immigration propaganda.

International Students in America: Fewer, Please. A Lot Fewer.

I just noticed Noah Smith’s recent thread on importing students. He’s quite wrong (which wouldn’t be the first time).

Noah is upset that international students are choosing Canada rather than America.

I couldn’t be more pleased.

The best argument for reducing the flow of international students: America should not be draining the brains of the world.  If indeed we are taking China and India’s brightest people, then we are robbing those countries of the intellects needed to lead and educate their next generations–all so that they can drive down labor costs for Facebook and Google.

Noah doesn’t care about other countries, though–well, that’s probably not true. But in this case, he thinks more international students is good for America.

His case: we shouldn’t worry about foreign STEM students, because the US is graduating more STEM students than any country but India or China.

But as anyone following education trends in the US can tell you, a substantial number of those US STEM graduates are from China and India. Many STEM graduate programs are overwhelmingly dominated by international students.

and at least

33,000 of Science and Engineering undergraduate degrees go to international students. This is six year old Pew data, but it’s a good look at how big a slice of our undergraduate STEM degrees are taken up by international students.

While Smith is correct that educational attainment has consistently risen in US, I’ve written before that much of this is driven by a relentless push for US colleges to lower standards and give college credit and diplomas to students with limited reading skills and middle school math ability.  We can debate the value of this increase, but it’s certainly not evidence that international students aren’t hurting American college education.

We can import international students AND lower standards. Neither is related to the other, and neither is anything to brag about.

Smith then proceeds to argue that 1)  foreign students aren’t taking slots from citizens and 2) rather, they are PAYING for the education of American students!

The first is simply false. From 2008 to today, the undergraduate student population at Stanford has increased by 8.5%. The undergraduate international student population increased over that same time by nearly 47%.  At the University of Michigan Ann Arbor over the same time period, campus population grew by 14%, while the international students increased by half.  In this long-form article on University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the university admits that admission of out of state American students had dropped since the massive increase in international students–and the number of African American students has fallen hard from an already low rate.  And none of these schools mentioned are among the campuses, most of them top 50 schools, with the most international students.

International students are taking spots from Americans at selective college campuses.  Full stop. Noah is wrong.

The second part is more complex. Unquestionably, public research universities with limited domestic-out-of-state enrollment began turning to  international students when states cut funding.  Moreover, some schools, like  Ohio State , seem perfectly willing to keep students in Intensive English hell for eternity, or as long as they’re willing to pay tuition, whichever comes first. So some of the appeal of unqualified foreign students does seem to be their money.

But is that all? I see several reasons to wonder.

First, the choice to turn to international students is, by definition, a choice against instate students.  The universities could choose to charge more tuition and focus on providing services for the in-state students who can pay. They choose otherwise.  Why? Next, it appears that international students get about 8%  of their funding from US sources (7.9% from state, a bit from US government, according to link above).

While their additional tuition is attractive, it’s also obvious that international students cost a great deal to support. Despite the protestations of many a university admissions officer, many if not most international students are completely incapable of functioning in an American university. Some schools have started charging more for those services, but, as the story acknowledges, before that point the international students were costing a great deal more. And if international students are valuable for their out of state tuition, why are some universities abandoning the international student premium, or giving it back in scholarships? .

So the argument that international students are increasing purely to subsidize in-state low income recipients  at public universities is….shaky.  Besides, a quick look again at all these private schools with the most international students. State funding wasn’t behind those increases.

Having watched this most recent push for international students going on for a decade now, I’m deeply skeptical that public universities are increasing their take of international students for the sake of their in-state applicants. These aren’t short-term moves. Prestige and money for niceties seem to be much more the focus than the in-state students.

Pish tosh, sez Noah, the advantage of international students  is not about educating local undergrads”.  We are thus instructed to ignore all his arguments in favor of American students that I carefully spent half a page deconstructing and rebutting.

It’s about RESEARCH. Research is what boosts the local economy, by drawing in talent and capital and money. The goal should be to UPGRADE scattered second-tier universities into good research universities.

And, from a different tweet thread:

International students are an important part of the university-centered regional development strategy that is pulling towns and regions all across America out of the hole dug by the Rust Belt and the Great Recession…But that’s not all that international students do for America. Their presence improves and increases research labs at American universities. That generates business activity in small cities across America. Want to revive the Midwest? You’re going to need second-tier universities to become first-tier universities, and create local innovation. International students are very important to that strategy.

He develops his thoughts on the value of a university to a community in an op-ed:

I’m sorry, I can’t resist: You boys know what makes this bird go up? 

So, mid-tier universities should import international students to fuel a Midwestern Enlightenment, create intellectual capital that will draw in others to benefit from the bounty. A western Renaissance of smart educated people wading through the rich flow of generated ideas.

Of course if the ideas were generated by international students, the ideas are probably copied. Or maybe the research was just faked.

Take look at the names on his list of top international countries turning out STEM students, or just the countries sending the most students.  China, India, Russia, Iran, Indonesia, and Japan.  Toss in Saudi Arabia.

These are all countries that excuse and encourage tremendous educational and academic fraud.

The students who have the means and desire to come to America to study come from fantastically corrupt countries. They generally show up for college  woefully unprepared, which is unsurprising, given that their test scores and transcripts are generally a work of fiction created by the very companies the colleges hire to find, er, “qualified” students.

Before and during their college experience,  many international students cheat every way they can–from lying on their applications, to  paying ringers to take college admissions or TOEFL tests, to cheating in class, to not even being students at all and just getting work visas–and when they are caught, they routinely wail that their cheating is totally okay in their own cultures, so how could they possible know?

Numerous reporters will hunt down academics to bleat reassuringly that oh, dear, it’s terrible, but not all international students cheat, but far fewer will mention the numerous studies demonstrating that it’s quite a lot of them, and always in greater percentages than domestic students.  The research that exists is far less interested in quantifying the impact of the cheaters on the rest of the university, and far more interested in explaining why they cheat and how they can be educated and encouraged to stop.

These often unqualified students with no understanding of American academic standards are just the seeds of Noah Smith’s grand plan to revitalize the Midwest. He wants many, many more of the same.  He wants American colleges to import millions more rich students from countries with a strong culture of student cheating and academic fraud. We’ll get them to plagiarize grant applications and produce a stream of federal funding that will run Potemkin research labs from Pocatello to Wheeling, the better to pull in start up companies to lie to venture capitalists about the great new product that some kid lied about to get an A in a senior seminar.

I’m not entirely kidding, either.  The degree to which universities are actively encouraging fraud in admissions and overlooking dishonesty and plagiarism to avoid upsetting international communities is shocking. Increasing the population would make a bad situation far worse.

Colleges have brought in far too many international students as it is. We should bring in less. I’m pleased the wave appears to be receding, although it has receded–and come back–before. I might not agree with Stephen Miller’s reasons for ending Chinese student visas, but bring it on. Ending Saudi Arabian student visas would be an inadequate, but painful, penalty for Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

One thing is certain: the mid-western townsfolk wouldn’t object to fewer middle-easterners. Or easterners, for that matter.

What should public universities do if states reduce their funding? They should reduce the number of students or reduce the number of services. Perhaps they could consider accepting only college ready students, insisting on students who could read at a tenth grade level and demonstrate mastery of second year algebra.  They might limit first year curriculum to a sequence of humanities and advanced math–put everyone in the same courses, leave variety to the following years. I feel sure there are ways to teach capable students more cost-effectively.

That approach may not revive moribund towns. But it wouldn’t flood them with international students who view the locals with contempt, either. Or turn them into mini-Vancouvers.

Rather than flooding the zone with federal dollars for research projects staffed by rich Chinese kids, we could use those same dollars to start vocational training centers. Maybe give grants to unemployed or unemployable to relocate and spend some money being trained in construction, in digital technology, auto mechanics and body work, and other skilled labor. That would stimulate the local economy. And if those trained left the area, well, there’d be more coming. Just like with college.

America has to start making do with its own people. It might not be easy.  It might not be better, at first. But it will certainly be fairer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homework: The Rules that Matter

While reading another carefully worded propaganda blast on the value of  homework, I thought of Pirates of the Caribbean, a splendid film that I’d remembered recently for my ELL class.

Research on homework, and debates about research on homework can’t really be taken seriously. It’s all more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules. But the fundamentals of homework are very much a cascading series of Jack Sparrow’s “two rules that matter“. For high school, anyway–and if it’s not high school or beyond, it doesn’t matter.

So as long as we’re just hanging here, pay attention. The only rules that really matter are these:

Savvy?

“Homework” is practice, work that is assigned with the intent to improve fluency and understanding. Math homework is the most common sort, but there are also science lab notes, reading textbook notes, those idiotic shoebox assignments, collages, or any other sort of out-of-school activity that isn’t formal written expression or assessment.

“Corrupted” is a strong word for grading that is very much standard procedure in most high schools nationwide, but appropriately dramatic given the degree to which grades are used as a proxy for ability. Many teachers would be upset at this description of their usual practice; in this conversation of mostly college-level instructors, most of the participants acknowledge that many students do well on tests, but flunk or get a much lower grade because they don’t do the homework.  Others point out how absurd this is. At the high school level, far fewer are found in the second group.

Teachers have a wide, legally enforced latitude in grading, but districts and schools can institute policies that reduce options. Overwhelmingly, these policies take place in low income schools, where the students shrug off the Fs and the failure rates affect the graduation rates. District and school efforts to protect students from low grades due to homework take the shape of  forced incompletes,  banning zeros and sometimes banning graded homework altogether.  And the public always scoffs. Lazy kids these days.

District or school-imposed restrictions are not to be confused with parent-initiated drama fests about homework overload.

The research on homework almost all focuses on two questions: does homework improves academic performance? How much homework are students doing? (The latter issue, in particular, has been annoying American parents for decades.)

I’m not…terribly interested in either of those questions. The first, which most consider quite important, is specifically in conflict with a teacher’s responsibility to grade accurately. No one would ever assume that homework improvement is anything other than relative to student ability.

But grades aren’t relative. Teachers can’t grade homework without impacting students’ performance grade. They can’t.

And so  they shouldn’t.

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I don’t do homework, and this isn’t the first time I’ve written about the primary damage done by homework’s corrupting impact on grades.

Grades, really, are the main issue. Grades in America are simply junk. I can’t stress this enough.  Research–never mention a moment’s reflection–reveals that in  Title I schools like mine, an A denotes a much lower performance than at a high-income high school.

No one’s interested in adequately assessing student merit across classrooms, much less school districts, much less cities, states, or countries, so laugh at anyone who declares passionately that Harvard and other private universities are discriminating against more worthy claimants, Asian or otherwise.  No one knows who the worthy claimants are, and no one’s interested in finding out.

But that’s a topic for another day.

The Case Against The Case Against Education: Toe Fungus Prevention

Part Three of my Caplan thoughts.

–Caplan, The Case Against Education

In Caplan’s world, toe fungus stands in for the “disease” of no education. The fungus cream is public schools. Caplan believes he’s proved that public school hasn’t worked, and thus we should stop funding public education. Live with the illiteracy and innumeracy that is only slightly mitigated, and then temporarily, by failing public education.

Caplan screws up the analogy. He says the obvious remedy is  “don’t use the cream”  (end all public education) but then explores “use less of the cream” (end subsidies) or “buy a cheaper cream” (curriculum austerity).

But I digress. Caplan uses some extremely old data–the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). The NAAL results are categorized as Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate, and Proficient (the survey had originally wanted to use “Advanced”, but considered it too value-laden. As if “Proficient” isn’t.) Caplan uses this data to argue that Americans are incredibly uneducated and therefore American education is terrible–the toe fungus that can’t be cured.

There’s a lot wrong with his analysis, some of which I’ll hold off until the next chunk, and he misrepresents NAAL’s connection to public education. Besides, static education snapshots are pointless. Change over time and disaggregation, baby, or it’s nothing. So I disaggregated by education category and found change over time, using the same report Caplan cites.

NAAL has three categories of assessment: prose, document, and quantitative. The adults surveyed were captured by their highest level of education: still in high school all the way through graduate degree.  So I broke the scores into two categories. First, on the left, are the scores of those whose highest education was vocational school or lower. On the right, those with some college through graduate degrees. In each case, the graph shows the average score for that category in 1992 and then in 2003. I’m terrible at data display, but I made the axes the same–the actual scores go from 0 to 500, but that was too small.

She average reading ability of an individual with post-secondary education declined significantly from 1992 to 2003, while the decline in high school educated reading abilities declined less significantly or not at all. Quant scores were unchanged.

Here’s another take on the data, using a graph straight from the report. The percentage of “proficient” readers declined significantly for most college categories, while remaining largely unchanged for the high school only educated groups.

At the low end, the “less than/some high school” reading abilities dropped in the prose category, but the rest remained largely unchanged.

Caplan doesn’t look at change over time, and so doesn’t take on the challenge of explaining why the average college graduate living in America became less proficient at reading over a decade.

Caplan’s opponents in the economics field argue that education builds human capital. Human capital is, or should be, reflected in the score gaps between different education categories. Those with some college should have higher scores than those with none, and so on.

So I calculated the change in the gap between “adjacent” education categories from the 1992 NAAL to the 2003 study.

So in one decade, the human capital improvement of education dropped in all but one college category.

From 1992 to 2003, high schools produced the same caliber of student. Colleges produced lower quality students that had built less human capital with their increased education.

It will come as no surprise that colleges produced more graduates than before.

s.

Caplan goes on about inflated credentials, the perils of increased access. But he doesn’t acknowledge a simple truth: it’s colleges, not high schools, that have significantly deteriorated in their ability to build human capital.

Why?

Because they are increasingly reaching further down into the barrel, accepting everyone. They’re accepting kids who can’t read at an eighth grade level, who can’t do middle school math. They have no standards beyond what’s on the high school transcript (giving high schools tremendous incentives of the wrong sort). For the past several decades, post-secondary education have been accepting transcripts at face value, then testing the students to establish how truthful the transcript was, then putting the students whose abilities didn’t match the transcript into remediation. Every state has its tale of trying to increase access, only to learn how shockingly unprepared and incapable students were, and how their efforts at remediation ended in failure.

All these efforts have only depreciated the value of a college degree. But not content with accepting unqualified students and trying to remediate them before, sadly, flunking them out, colleges kept reaching further down. It’s now quite possible to get accepted to college with Algebra 2 on the transcript, demonstrate that you have only elementary school math, take middle school math classes for credit, and earn a degree. No more remediation. Math was the last holdout; English and grammar requirements have been much easier to ignore.

Caplan argues that most cost benefit analyses for college education fail to account for dropouts. But colleges are reducing the risk of dropping out by lowering standards even further. His own college accepts unqualified students every year; 25% of George Mason’s freshmen enter with SAT scores below the “college ready” standard.  Now that colleges are ending remediation and giving credit for middle school ability, the risk of dropping out will continue to diminish. Those who want to “signal” will have to get graduate degrees–and of course, some academic will come along in a few years and deem “graduate degree” a “path to success”, and then everyone will do that.

“Would you rather have a Princeton degree without the education, or the Princeton education without the degree?”  Caplan asks, and readers go oooooh and aahh.

But that wasn’t always the case. Back when a college degree had meaning, a degree from a decent public university meant an education that would take one further than a Princeton diploma with no knowledge. Unfortunately, colleges have unilaterally obliterated all faith in their ability to educate, leaving  competitive admissions  on test scores–tests not administered by colleges in any way–as the only indicator of potential intelligence.

Caplan’s fix is to deny all educational funding. Applying that solution simply to colleges won’t solve anything. Colleges will still have the incentive to lower standards. The free market won’t fix the signalling problem. Ending public funding of education won’t stop colleges from lowering standards and giving degrees to anyone who can buy them. It will just deny any chance of education to those who can’t afford it. Over time, America under Caplan’s rule would be a country where rich people got educated, not smart people. We spent generations giving opportunity to those who could achieve. Our error was not spending too much money, but forgetting the meaning and the demands of education itself.

In Caplan’s view, “We would be better off if education were less affordable.” He wants to deny education to everyone who can’t afford it.

Why make it about money? Why not about ability?

We could prevent  or minimize toe fungus, the failure to successfully educate,  at the college level by setting a standard for college entry. Those who meet the standard can still qualify for public funding. I suggested a standard, back when I was an optimist who couldn’t even imagine colleges abolishing remediation.

Setting a standard for college entry would reduce the risk of failure as well as increase the human capital earned by even an incomplete education. Going to college wouldn’t just be another educational choice, but a choice only available to those who have the ability to develop and use the education.

Understand that I’m not some purist, calling for the days of Latin and Greek. I’m saying that colleges should accept students who can read, write, and calculate at an agreed-upon level. The levels we used in the 30 years after World War 2 would do nicely.

There are obviously–oh, so very obviously–political problems that go along with restricting access to higher education. But Caplan, man, he’s bold. He’s fearless. “In any other industry, a whistle-blower would be an outcast.”

So why call to eliminate public funding, denying education to qualified people who can’t afford it, while not bothering to fix the obvious standards problem in college admissions?

Maybe Caplan’s political ideology suggests the nail to which libertarianism has the hammer. I dunno.

What I do know is that people have been complaining about “too many kids are going to college” for forty years or more. It’s not new. It’s not bold. The devil is very much in the details. Which Caplan avoids.

 

Corrupted College

I try  to take the long view on education policy.  In the long run, education reformers, education advocates, and policy wonks are wasting their time trying to change the underlying reality.  They’re paying their own bills and wasting taxpayer dollars. Nothing else.

But every so often, I worry.

Check out this Edsource story on the  California State University system’s announcement of its intent to abandon the “strategy” of remedial courses.

At last! I thought. CSU was finally telling low-skilled applicants to attend adult education or community college. Hahahaha.  Five years of education policy writing just isn’t enough time to become properly cynical.

CSU is not ending its practice of accepting students who aren’t capable of college work. CSU has ended its practice of remediating students who aren’t capable of college work. It makes such students feel “unwelcome.” Students who aren’t capable of doing college work are getting the impression that they don’t really belong at college.

And so, CSU is going to give students who can’t do college work college credit for the classes they take trying to become ready for college.

Understand that the CSU system has been accepting these students for over 30 years. CSU used to offer unlimited remediation until 1996. After taxpayers protested, CSU passed regulations reducing remediation efforts to one year and vowed to ultimately eliminate all remediation by 2001. But alas, when 2001 came along,  ending remediation would dramatically reduce black and Hispanic enrollment, so the deadline was extended to 2007. (Cite ) But 2007 came along and things were even worse. After that, well, California ended its high school exit examination  and retroactively awarded diplomas to all the students who hadn’t been able to pass it. Why bother? CSU was accepting students who didn’t have the diploma anyway.

So, CSU decided on a new “strategy”, defining “college readiness” as “student is earning us tuition dollars”. They’re even looking at ending any sort of reliance on California’s version of the Smarter Balanced test, the Early Assessment rating that California has used for years to guide high schools towards getting their students ready for college.

Loren J. Blanchard, CSU executive said  that remedial education represents a deficit model that must be reformed if we really hope to achieve our equity and completion goals.” James T. Minor, a “senior CSU strategist for Academic Success and Inclusive Excellence” says that purely remedial or developmental classes “is not a particularly  good model for retention and degree completion.” Jeff Gold “emphasizes” that all the new program does is offer “extra help and services”, that rest assured, academic quality shall continue undisturbed. The CSU just wants to make sure that students who can only do middle school work “belong here” at CSU. CSU trustee chairwoman Rebecca Eisen is “thrilled” to hear about this change, as more students will “feel this is something they can do” and stay in college for longer.

Reporter Larry Gordon accepts all this at face value. He doesn’t push Blanchard to explain why students who can’t do college level work aren’t, by definition, a deficit model. Or why students who couldn’t pass an 8th grade math test should be retained long enough to complete a degree.

Nor does Gordon  observe that CSU has been offering extra help and services for thirty years.  In the current model, the help and services were not counted towards graduation. In the new model, they will be. That’s the change. Giving college credit for colleges that an advanced eighth-grader could complete is a reduction in academic rigor.

And note that Rebecca Eisen, at least, knows that Jeff Gold is lying. The remedial students were leaving because they couldn’t do the work. The change will make the students stay. Because the classes will be made easier and the students will get credit for them in this reduced academic environment.

Edsource checks in at Cal State Dominguez Hills, which has already been converting its remedial courses to “co-requisite” courses in statistics and algebra and that remedial students taking the co-requisite courses are passing at roughly the same rate as those who aren’t remedial.

Left unmentioned is that Cal State Dominguez Hills’ converted SAT averages has a 75th percentile SAT score of 450.  Everyone at CSUDH is remedial by a “typical” college’s standards–and by CSUDH’s standards, eighty percent were remedial in both math and English, which gives a small hint as to why the college might want to end remediation.

While Gordon reports the news without any context on the student ability level, he hastens to assure readers that ignoring remedial status is a public university trend. “Several other states, such as Tennessee, reported success in putting students in so-called corequisite courses starting in 2015. The City University of New York is taking similar steps by 2018 and also is starting to allow math requirements to be fulfilled by statistics or quantitative reasoning classes, not just by algebra.”

Meanwhile, this  decision “dovetails” (read: is driven by)  the CSU Graduation Initiative, which is a plan to increase the four-year completion rate from 19 to 40 percent.

So in 1996, California wanted to completely end remediation by 2001. Now, in 2017, California wants to give students college credit for remedial courses so that in eight more years two out of every five students will graduate in four years.

I once wrote an essay calling for a ban on college remediation.  But events are just getting way ahead of me. Anticipating that colleges would start giving degrees to people with middle school skills was something I foolishly rejected as implausible.

But as bad as this is, my dismay and disgust is deepened a thousand-fold by this fact: high schools aren’t allowed to teach remedial courses.

We can’t say hey, this kid can only read at the eighth grade level, so let’s give him more vocabulary and leveled reading. Heavens, no. In fact, you see education advocates arguing that giving kids reading above their ability level is going to improve their reading (something unestablished at the high school level). In practice, this means that all but the most severely deficient readers are expected to read and thrive on Shakespeare and Sophocles.

We can’t say hey, this kid can’t do pre-algebra, much less algebra, and at his current knowledge and interest levels, he can’t possibly succeed at the three or four years of math past algebra that high schools require for graduation. No, we have to  teach second year algebra concepts to kids who aren’t entirely sure what 6×8 is because we know they’ll graduate before they end up in pre-calc.  High schools with diverse student populations can’t offer courses for the entire range of abilities encountered. Schools with entirely low-ability students can just lie.

Thanks to the education reforms of both the right and left, high schools are under tremendous pressure to force all their students into advanced courses and not given any options for students who aren’t ready. There is no “ready” but college-ready.

It’s gotten so idiotic that many high schools have started “dual enrollment” programs for their at-risk students. The best students are taking demanding high school courses. But the at-risk kids are going to college to get the remediation their high schools aren’t allowed to give them.  They shade the truth, of course, mouthing nonsense about giving kids a taste of college. But read between the lines and you’ll see that the students are getting remedial courses. So high schools are paying tuition for low-level kids to take middle school courses at their local college.

But why? I’ve asked, time and again. Colleges are allowed to remediate. Why not let high schools provide the remediation, get kids closer to college ready? Any remediation we do will reduce the burden on colleges.

Ah, but that’s where the idiocy gets intense. The same public universities offering (or ending) remediation require that all students take advanced courses in high school.   CSU application requirements include algebra 2. If CSU remedial students were even approaching second year algebra ability, the university system wouldn’t be ending remediation.

But CSU, and all the other colleges with admissions requirements well above the ability of the bottom 30% of their student population, know this. So why?

I’ve thought and thought about this, and can only come to one conclusion. Colleges are desperate to give opportunities to black and Hispanic students in a public atmosphere with no tolerance for affirmative action. They’ve tried every way they can think of. Standards have already been lowered. Course demands have been almost entirely eliminated–top-tier public schools will issue bachelor degrees with no additional math courses (after the remedial course, that is).  This is just the next step.

The public discourse has become almost entirely bifurcated. At one end, we see education reformers hammering on high standards while suggesting, tentatively, that perhaps everyone isn’t really meant for college. We see learned professors opining that of the two proposed methods of improving low-income kids’ academic achievement, “no excuses” is better than integration because at least “no excuses” won’t hurt suburban schools.

Meanwhile, the actual colleges are lowering standards dramatically to the point that we will now routinely see people–primarily but not all black and Hispanic–with bachelors degrees despite reading at the eighth grade level and minimal math abilities. What makes anyone think that actual achievement is going to matter?

I haven’t seen any education reformers discuss the constant push to end or limit remediation, which has been going on for five years or so. They aren’t terribly interested in college policies. Education reformers want to kill teacher unions and/or grab public funds for essentially private charter schools, and this doesn’t help.

So now our public universities will accept anyone with a transcript spelling out the right courses. They’ll just put them in middle school courses and call it college. Education reformers, college professionals, all the middlebrow pundits opining on our failed education system won’t care–they send their kids to more expensive schools, the ones whose diplomas won’t be devalued by this fraud.

I’d put this insanity into the bucket of “Why Trump Won”, but does Betsy DeVos even care? She’s too interested in using federal dollars to push choice to win disapproval  denying federal dollars to colleges who want to “improve access”. She’s the worst of both worlds: a committed voucher advocate who wouldn’t be bothered by the destruction of public universities. But then, a  Democrat EdSec wouldn’t give a damn–in fact, a Clinton or Obama presidency would probably pressure colleges to lower standards even more. No one seems to actively try to change these policies.

But public colleges like CSU and CUNY are what bright kids from less well-connected families, kids whose parents don’t have the social capital to get into the “right” schools, were once able to use to get ahead. These schools have already done themselves a lot of damage, making it harder and harder for anyone, no matter how qualified, to get through in less than six years because of the time, resources, and expense involved educating the near-illiterate–and, of course, paying for  vice-chancellors of gender sensitivity and diversity awareness by accepting loads of Chinese students who prepared for college by committing fraud on the SAT.

If this doesn’t stop, America will have a much more serious problem than failed college students with huge college debts and no diploma. We’ll have thousands of college grads who got their diplomas with no better than eighth grade reading and math skills.

I’m not a high-standards maven.  Nor am I patient with the pseudo-cynical idiots who think they’re in the know, smirking that college degrees have been worthless for years.

No, they haven’t. But they’re going to be.

Meanwhile, people should maybe read more David Labaree.