The College Board announced it would be dropping its controversial “adversity score” on the SAT college entrance exam that informed schools of the socio-economic background of students taking the test.
Students who take the SAT college entrance exam will now be assigned an “adversity score” to inform schools of their social and economic background, including the crime rate in their neighborhoods and the poverty levels of their high schools, says the College Board.
Parents raised concerns that an SAT test question asked students to write an essay on an excerpt from an op-ed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Jon Boeckenstedt, the Associate Vice President for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University, took to Twitter to say, “Did you try to turn a national tragedy into a promotional opportunity? I’ve seldom seen something in poorer taste.”
Progressive billionaire George Soros via his Open Society Foundation is listed as a “funding partner” of the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE).
As Reuters observes, when Coleman’s College Board set out to redesign the SAT to align it with Common Core, the new exam was supposed to reflect more “real world applications” than the test’s prior versions.
Federal agents seized computers and other materials from Manuel Alfaro, former executive director of assessment design and development at the College Board. Alfaro had contacted government officials from seven states, making accusations his former employer lied about its tests in bids for state contracts.
Hundreds of exam questions from the College Board’s redesigned SAT college entrance exam have been leaked to Reuters, the news wire reports.
The plummeting popularity of the Common Core standards has extended to Catholic schools in the United States—about half of which were signed onto the nationalized standards by their bishops despite a push back from many Catholic educators and theologians.
A Catholic education organization that identifies itself as “the national voice for Catholic schools” says Common Core “architect” David Coleman will serve as keynote for the group’s annual convention in March of 2016 in San Diego.
Stanley Kurtz believes the battle over AP U.S. History is even worse for America than that over the Common Core standards.
“Next year the College Board will roll out a major change in the SAT that will make comparisons with past results impossible, and allow Common Core proponents to argue ‘these are different and better tests, so don’t pay attention to past results,'” Wurman states. “We are lucky that this year’s SAT has not changed yet, so the decline is clearly visible and cannot be hidden or denied.” The College Board president is David Coleman, the so-called “architect” of the Common Core standards.
Last week, Danniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, cited recent changes the College Board made to the Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) framework as a “victory” for conservatives. Experts on the framework, however, think that is quite a stretch.
With conservative grassroots activists having educated parents, teachers, and lawmakers about the nature of the Common Core standards initiative, proponents of the education reform are desperate to bolster a possible presidential run for Jeb Bush, who was recently booed at CPAC by conservatives for being a champion of the now grossly unpopular plan.