The New SAT
I recently read the article in Time Magazine about the new SAT (Cover story, this week:
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101031027/story.html), and it got me thinking about one of my favorite topics, standardized tests. While I am ambivalent about the described changes, I think on balance it will probably be a loss. Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, is ordering changes that will make the SAT more of an achievement test that measures what students have actually learned in school than an aptitude test that measures something akin to intelligence or "developed abilities" (no one is exactly sure what an aptitude test measures--there is a raging debate about it--but it does measure something real and important, though not all important).
Caperton is attepting (by his own admission) to use the SAT as a vehicle to force curriculum reform across the country. He is hoping that the test will measure what a student learned in school in reading, writing and math. This means that if a student wants to go to college, he will have to learn at minimum a non-trivial amount of content during high school. Likewise, his school will have to teach him a non-trivial amount of content--a task some schools fail to do. Caperton is hoping that by changing the SAT, he will finally give schools the incentive they need to change their curriculum and successfully teach students what they ought to be learning in high school. If Caperton is right, he could have a powerful positive effect on school quality across the nation and could do it in such a way that bypasses the politics of a national curriculum mandated by Congress.
This argument depends on schools lacking the incentives to teach this content. It is popular these days to think that this is the case. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act is operating on very similar assumptions (though his sees strong positive incentives in money and students, whereas Caperton sees the negative incentive of angry parents whose kids can no longer get into college). But what if the problem in today's schools is not incentives for teachers or school districts? What if the problem is lack of resources or deep-set cultural problems? The incentives embeded in the new SAT (and NCLB) are ones fairly narrowly targeted at schools. What if the weak link is the community that refuses to raise enough taxes to pay for a quality education? Or parents who do not instill discipline and self-control in their children? Or a society that does not communicate a value of education equal to the value that we derive from its effects? I see the new SAT addressing those issues only very imperfectly.
The one big benefit I see of this overhaul of the SAT is that it will be a concrete representation of what colleges think it is necessary to know to be well-prepared for college. This is not trivial. I was happy to see that grammar will play a big part in the new test. While in its execution, the essays on the proposed test will not be designed to encourage great writing, the symbolic power of requiring writing on the test is powerful. More math skills will be required to succeed on the test, and students will have to be able to critique what they read in more formal and subtle ways. All this is good and sends a message of seriousness from colleges to students and their educators.
On the other hand, if the incentives are not strong enough to solve the real problems facing public schools, a significant number of students who would have done well on the old test will do poorly on the new test. Some will argue that it all comes out in the wash anyway, since other populations will do better. But I think that the population that loses is a population we don't want to have lose. It is that group of students who are smart, able thinkers who have had dreadful secondary school experiences. It is probably populated disproportionately with black males. The SAT has traditionally been the best way for these students to convince colleges to take a chance on them. Now that opportunity will be lost, or at least diluted. And, perhaps, with the loss of that opportunity, even more students from that population will lose out on a college education and all of the life opportunities that such an education provides.
The students who gain from the change in the test are those who have paid attention in school, worked hard, but haven't developed the critical thinking skills that the old test focused on. Many of these students deserve to go to college, and the new test will help them achieve that. On the other hand, the college application process considers high school grades and essays, both of which the "winner" population is likely to excel at anyway. The new SAT unbalances the application portfolio, and skews the benefits towards one sort of person.
My other big complaint with the new SAT is the loss of one of the last reasons to teach critical thinking skills. These skills are very hard to teach and hard to measure (writing a valid quantitative comparison question, for example, is not an easy thing to do!). It is already too easy to ignore them. But we as a society lose something very real when our ability to think critically is diminished. I have been involved in the test prep industry, preparing students for the graduate school tests, and so have seen up close the prevalance of lazy critical thinking. It is this lack of acute critical thinking that allows Bush and his cronies to effectively fight the critics of his tax cut by saying that "the average taxpayer will get x dollars of relief".
Spin doctors and marketers everywhere should be cheering the advent of the new SAT, those of us who care about the health of civil society should be wary.
Solution for Iraq?
One idea I haven't seen batting around in the peanut gallery of commentators on the Iraq situation is the idea of handing out oil dividends to the Iraqi people. What if the US announced that, as soon as logistically feasible, every Iraqi who registers with the US gets a share of the Iraq oil revenues until such a time as there is a legitimate, sovereign government of Iraq? It seems to me that this might kill quite a few birds with one stone:
1. Put some capital in the hands of regular Iraqis, and begin the process of redistributing some of the wealth in that country away from the Ba'athists. (Anyone with macroeconomic understanding--would this just cause inflation?)
2. Give Iraqis a direct interest in the stability and infrastructure of their country. If you know the size of your check depends on the prevalence of law and order, you will be more likely to act in such a way as to contribute positively to such law and order.
3. At some point in the process, the US could transfer trustee-ship of the oil industry to a board of directors elected by the shareholders (i.e. the Iraqi people). This could be practice in democracy with the people's dividend checks operating as an incentive to fulfil their civic duties prudently.
4. The loss to the US in access to and control of the oil market would be more than compensated by the increased credibility we would get in our claims to be not just out for the oil. If I am right about (2), the post-war stabilization process would also get a lot cheaper.
5. The Bushies could give the contract to set up the dividend distribution system to Haliburton, so the campaign checks would keep rolling in.
Welcome to Collaborative IQ, a blogspace to develop ideas about economics, policy and politics (and anything else that has captured my attention). I believe ideas never fully develop until they are exposed to the light of others' thoughts and criticisms. This blog is my way to expose my ideas to such an inspection by a wider, and hopefully more diverse, audience than I get in my insular world of a PhD program in policy analysis.
Some rules of the road:
1. Comments are sought after. My thoughts have lots of holes and I welcome people to point out those holes and fill them in thoughtfully.
2. Attacks and pompous hot air are not welcome. I hope that much of what I write will be on topics that are controversial and don't have pre-existing good answers. Personal attacks are not helpful. If you think you know the answer definatively, you'd better be ready to prove it convincingly.
3. I reserve the right to comment publicly on all violations of rule 2--blogger's prerogative.
