David Coleman, head of the College Board (of SAT fame) and sparkplug to the creation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), seems to believe that if we can measure it, we can know it and evaluate it. He also seems to believe that measurement results in truth absolute, not truth relative, a mindset more comfortable to 18th and 19th-century thought than it should be to the 21st-century world of post-Einsteinian understanding. His beliefs are, at their core, simplistic, reductive, and regressive. Simplistic in that they narrow learning to memorization and established process; reductive in that they ignore anything that cannot be measured; regressive in that they can only look to what has been established, not to speculation or invention, to what will or can be discovered in the future. Such a mindset of arrogance of the known sweeps away any enthusiasm for the exploration.

Coleman is in the process of changing the SAT, something about as valuable as putting a new coat of paint on an ’86 Yugo. The resulting vehicle may look a little better, but it still is doubtful as a means of getting anyone where they want to go.

In today’s New York Times, Jennifer Finney Boylan writes:

The SAT is a mind-numbing, stress-inducing ritual of torture. The College Board can change the test all it likes, but no single exam, given on a single day, should determine anyone’s fate. The fact that we have been using this test to perform exactly this function for generations now is a national scandal.

The problems with the test are well known. It measures memorization, not intelligence. It favors the rich, who can afford preparatory crash courses. It freaks students out so completely that they cannot even think.

Not only that, but Coleman is certainly going to yoke his revised SAT to his CCSS, leading American education further down a defined and restrictive path to a model of education completely unable to change with the times and that sees itself only in terms of itself. It takes advantage of reluctance to trust teacher judgment, a reluctance built through growing hysteria about American public education that began with the 1983 report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, a deeply flawed attempt to convince Americans that their schools are failing.

Boylan asserts, correctly:

The thing is, though, there already is something that accurately mirrors the grades a student gets in school. Namely: the grades a student gets in school. A better way of revising the SAT, from what I can see, would be to do away with it once and for all.

We won’t get rid of it, however, until we learn to trust our teachers, the grade-givers, once again. Unfortunately, after thirty years on the pillory, their reputation is so tarnished that it is probably going to take another generation, at least, to re-establish confidence in them.

In the meantime, as we work to teach the value of teaching, we are going to have to fight the shibboleths that Coleman and the other educational “reformers” are trying to shove down our national throat. If we don’t, the teacher will be replaced completely by a meritocracy based on an updated version of the old Chinese imperial exams and monitored by machines. “New” will become a thing of the past.