SAT Subject tests

Here's a piece I wrote that will be in the Los Angeles Daily Journal (Ca's primary legal newspaper next week). It's one of those issues which I think is a big deal b/c it will make a substantive change in UC admissions (IMHO for the worse). Been tough to get anybody to care about it though.
I will be going to India for some vacation and training of Indian lawyers next week. Will be there for 3 weeks.Probably won't get to this blog much.

A Bad Change in UC Admissions' Policy
The University of California Academic Assembly, a group which represents UC faculty, has recommended that UC’s Board of Regents change current admissions policies at its nine undergraduate UC campuses. The faculty proposal will be considered by the Regents in July.

Currently, undergraduate applicants to any of the University of California’s undergraduate campuses are required to submit either a standardized ACT or an SAT Reasoning test result, and two SAT Subject tests. The Academic Assembly has proposed ending the requirement that students take the Subject tests. Applicants would still be required to take either the ACT (including the writing test) or the SAT Reasoning test.

On its face, the Faculty proposal is a common sense suggestion to ease roadblocks for underrepresented minority applicants who, while otherwise eligible to apply to UC schools, fail to meet the Subject test requirement. Dr. Ana-Christina Ramon, research coordinator for the University of California, Los Angeles’ Ralph J. Bunche Center is quoted in the magazine “Diverse Issues in Higher Education” about the recommendation. Ramon said: “Research has found that minority students are less likely to take the SAT subject tests. It’s an additional test and many minority students don’t always have the opportunity to take the test or even recognize that it’s necessary.”

The problem is that the Subject tests are often the best yardstick that admissions’ evaluators have to predict how students will fare once they get to college. Rather than eliminate Subject tests, UC should work with high schools to make sure that qualified students understand the need, and have the chance, to take those tests.

When the faculty proposal first surfaced in March, the Los Angeles Times reported that “(S)ome UC professors privately wondered whether the proposed change was a way around California’s Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action initiative passed by voters in 1996.”

That concern is well-founded.

Cases involving challenges to university affirmative action admissions’ policies have reached the Supreme Court three times, in the cases of DeFunis, Baake, and Gratz/Grutter. In the Defunis case, the Court ruled that the issue of DeFunis’ admission to the University of Washington law school was moot but in both the Baake and Gratz/Grutter cases the Supreme Court affirmed the principle of a public university’s right to consider a person’s race as one factor in the college’s admission decision.

However, in each state in which the Court has considered the issue of race and admissions (Washington, California, and Michigan), voters subsequently passed anti-affirmative action laws prohibiting their public universities from using race as a factor in admissions.

Michael Brown, Chair of the UC Systemwide Academic Senate, defended the Faculty proposal, telling the Los Angeles Times that most faculty were convinced that the subject test requirement was “cutting people out of at least a shot of consideration for no reasons that have to do with achievement.” Brown suggested that the current subject tests limit UC’s ability to bring in as diverse a class as possible.

But at the least selective UC campuses, the fear is that the faculty proposal will open the door to a lower-calibre of student. In a letter to Brown expressing why UC Riverside could not support the faculty recommendation, Thomas Cogswell, Chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate, wrote that without a clear and compelling reason to change the current admission’s policy, UC Riverside faculty opposed replacing a bright line with a broad grey zone that would cause admissions staff at Riverside to dip lower into the applicant pool.

The broad grey zone is otherwise known as “comprehensive review,” a policy approved by the Regents in 2001 which allows admissions officials to look beyond just an applicant’s grade point average and test scores.

The Faculty proposal, in addition to eliminating the Subject test requirement, will open more applications to a comprehensive review. UC’s comprehensive review policy came under attack several years ago when then Chairman of the UC Board of Regents, John Moores, examined evidence from 2002 and concluded that Berkeley was admitting low-scoring (based on SAT scores) blacks and Hispanics at twice the rate of similarly scoring Asians and whites. In 2004, A UC review panel came to a similar conclusion based upon their analysis of the entire UC system.

It is hardly a stretch to suggest that by eliminating the objectivity of the SAT Subject tests, admission’s officials will be suspected of playing favored race cards.

Responding to the proposed UC policy change, Dean of Admissions at Harvard University, William Fitzsimmons told a reporter from the Harvard Crimson that his University’s internal studies have proven the efficacy of Subject test scores to predict academic success at Harvard. Fitzsimmons said, the Subject tests “have been better predictors than either high school grades or the SAT (Reasoning Test).”

When UC policy makers evaluated the University’s standardized test requirements several years ago, they found that Subject tests were the best single predictor of freshman grades (better than high school grade point average or the SAT Reasoning test) based upon UC data compiled over a four-year period. Subsequent UC research has concluded that the Subject tests are better predictors of overall academic performance in college than the Reasoning test.

The Faculty recommendation is especially perplexing in that the Committee previously urged the University to place twice as much weight on the Subject tests as upon the Reasoning test and, before the College Board made minor changes to that test, suggested the University eliminate consideration of the Reasoning test altogether.

A UC commissioned report issued five years ago concluded that the Subject tests offered the University a number of advantages over the Reasoning test. The report urged “that the University seeks to measure mastery of the content of the high school curriculum, that using scores from appropriate admissions tests to complement high school grades increases our ability to achieve this goal, and that achievement exams are more suited to measuring mastery of the high school curriculum than exams designed to measure general intellectual aptitude. Moreover, achievement tests provide information that students and their families can use to prepare for college and that schools can use to evaluate and improve their own programs.”

Six of the nine University of California schools are ranked within the top fifty colleges in the 2008 U S News & World Report list of top national universities. In order to remain competitive with the other top schools, UC should not water down its admission requirements.

The University of California seeks a laudable goal of insuring that the state’s colleges will be available to a wide spectrum of students. Given that colleges have just completed the most competitive admission’s cycle in our country’s history, with no letup foreseen for at least the next several years, it is no small task to provide access to many capable students. Surely, though, the answer is not to throw away a merit-based opportunity for students to demonstrate competency.

Xmas newsletter 2007

Alright. I got the message from my daughter through my wife that if I want a real blog I've got to start writing some funny family stuff. Here was last year's Xmas newsletter which we've been putting out for about 15 years.

It’s Xmas 2007 from the Amabile/Mattimore Family
Hi again from the Luddites who are now probably the only clan that continue to send out a Christmas epistle through the U.S. Postal service. This will likely be the last anti-Xmas newsletter you’ll receive from us with a U.S. origin. Our new address is Jean Amabile/Patrick Mattimore, 100 Rue De Geneve, 01170 Gex, France. Our respective e-mails are kidlawyerjuvi@hotmail.com and patrickmattimore1@yahoo.com.

After 31 years living in the Bay Area, Jean decided it was time for a change. Pat, who had wanted to move 25 years ago, was finally just settling in to the perfect job, but agreed to go along with the program. In the course of a month or so, Jean retired from the public defender, rented a house in France, bought a car, got a new job, went to China, packed the house and moved. Pat is stuck picking up the pieces and will follow on December 18. Jean's new job is with an organization called International Bridges to Justice. At the moment, she is probably on a bus headed to work listening to French tapes.

Here are the two most frequent questions and the most frequent comment we get about the move: (Actually, we get lots of questions about why Jean is bringing Pat along but she has been kind enough to deflect those)…
• What will Pat be doing? This is an intriguing question usually asked by people that don’t know us well. There are at least two implications contained in this seemingly innocuous question- (1) that Pat was doing something previously and (2) that he will be doing something once again. The lawyers among our readers will recognize at once that the appropriate objection to the question is that it assumes facts not in evidence.
• What do the kids think about the move? Our immediate unstated answer is “Who Cares?”, but our more reflective considered response is “Who Cares?” Liza apparently thinks it’s great because (a) she has already planned a side trip to Salzburg or Strasbourg or whateverburg over the holidays and (b) it will be much cooler to crash with mom and dad for several years in France than it would have been staying in San Francisco when her student visa expires in Canada next year. Willie will no doubt be looking for ways to enrich his personal economics with a trip to Amsterdam before returning to Canada.
• “We really envy you guys.” This is curious. Most of our friends have at least as much dough as we do and could do exactly what we are doing. What people really mean to say is that they really envy the thought of what we are doing, but no one in his or her right mind would actually do this. Ummm, the right mind part is accurate but here’s Pat’s typical proposed daily schedule:
6 a.m.- 6:30 Walk the dog (Duke has miraculously survived into old age and will cost approximately three times as much to get to France as either adult)
7 a.m.-9:30 Walk or drive the Peugeot to a French café. Read the International Herald Tribune, bastardize the French language with an order of a latte and croissant. Check e-mail on laptop
9:30-11- Find a quaint spot in which to run
11-2:00- Shower, lunch on cheese and bread (no wine). Write a bit about something of which the writer will know little but profess a lot
2:00-4:00- Hiking in the French or Swiss Alps depending on mood and where the Peugeot ends up that day
4:00-4:10- Practice French (maybe)
4:10-6:30- Rendezvous with spouse in Geneva for hobnobbing or convince her when she comes home that way too many things were happening to cook dinner and clean so that we will need to eat out
Evening until bedtime- Recover from strenuous day.
Jean’s routine will be similar except that she will be working hard all day to support Pat’s lifestyle.
Liza is a fifth year senior at U of T. Hopefully you won't hear from us next year that Liza is a sixth year senior at U of T. Life is comfortable for her in Toronto. She's got her grandmother's fur coat to keep her warm in the winter.
Willie is a sophomore at Queens University. He continues to pace himself so that he just passes his courses.
Both kids and the dog will be spending Christmas in France.
Please consider inviting yourself as well. Alors! A bientot.

Back to the present. Here's more Tull.

Aqualung

Some of the oldies don't hold up so well. This one does okay, though.
And hopefully this links to my daughter Liza's blog (And BTW it's Jefferson Airplane!).
http://lizaproperty.blogspot.com/

Replace Aptitude Tests with Achievement Tests

Today's oped on what's wrong with the SAT and what we can do about it.
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/opnOPN34062408.htm

Titanic

Always happy when something I write gets picked up. Here's a link to an AP piece I wrote that was in yesterday's paper.
http://www.alexandrianews.org/?p=1392

Great song by Jamie Brockett even if he gets about half the historical facts wrong like which direction the Titanic was heading in. Unfortunately, the song gets cut off at the end too.

Ripple

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Here's a little bit about our family.

file:///Users/Pat/Pictures/iPhoto%20Library/Originals/2008/Paris%20model%3F/CIMG0300.JPG

My son Will is in India this summer working on a project to help train Indian defense lawyers to represent criminal defendants. My wife and I will be doing a training there if I find someone to house sit our marvelous dog, Duke. My daughter, Liza is in Toronto and has just started a theater company that auditions new shows. I'll post a link to her blog in the next couple of days.

Sad-Eyed Lady- Dylan

Hope this Dylan song will pop up.

Advanced Placement

I write about Advanced Placement fairly often. Here's a link to something I wrote for Education Week earlier this year and a bit of an update. I'll keep trying to make this more sophisticated with links and pictures and videos and stuff.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/03/05/26mattimore.h27.html?qs=mattimore
It’s pretty certain Aesop was not an economist. Had he been, his fable about the goose that laid the golden eggs would have taken a different turn. First, as the goose produced more and more eggs, market demand would have decreased the eggs’ value. Second, the farmer and his wife would have been unlikely to slaughter the goose to get at what they thought was gold inside for fear of flooding the market.

Often though, companies behave the same way as the farmer and his wife did in Aesop’s story. They get greedy and think short-term rather than what may be in their best long-term interest. In the education business, the golden goose parallel has been the story of the rise of the College Board’s Advanced Placement program.

The AP program is a series of 37 college-level courses which students take in high school and for which they may receive college credit.

The nationally administered AP exam is scored on a scale of 1-5 with 3 being considered a passing score. Some colleges will grant students credit for an exam grade of 3, but increasingly more selective universities require a 4 or 5.

The AP program grows at a rate of approximately ten percent per year. It was originally developed in 1955 to give elite high school students an opportunity to take a couple of college courses.

The Post reported this past week that the Denver Public School District plans to improve school achievement by expanding the number of AP courses offered and removing prerequisites to taking the classes.

That sounds fine, except in a companion article to the piece about planned AP expansion, the Post also reported some abysmal results of tests taken by freshmen in the District. For example, less than half a percent of freshmen taking an introductory algebra test scored an “A” grade while over two thirds of the test takers received “F”’s. Eighty-seven percent of those tested scored below a “C” on the earth science test and only 9% received an “A” or a “B” in American Literature.

So instead of improving the delivery of high school services, the District is going to be investing heavily in providing college-level courses to students.

The College Board encourages the nonsensical policy of AP expansion in school districts in which majorities of students can’t handle high school work by misleading the public as to the success of AP.

For the fourth year in a row, the College Board has reported that higher percentages of students succeeded on AP exams last year than in the preceding year. That assertion distorts the reality.

Going back to at least 2000, the percentage of students passing AP exams, based on the numbers of students taking the exams, has declined. Beginning in 2005, the College Board began reporting passing percentages based upon the total class of graduating seniors in each state, whether they had taken an AP exam or not.

Nationally, the percentage of students passing an AP exam in 2007 (based on those who took an exam) declined from 2006 by over one percent.

Minority non-Asian numbers are particularly discouraging. Education Week reported that "the percentage of passing exams taken by Hispanic students slipped 5.5 percentage points over the past four years, to 43 percent in 2007. The percentages of passing scores among the group the College Board refers to 'African-American or black'
slipped by nearly 4 points, to just 25 percent."

Trevor Packer the executive director of the AP program has been forthright about the program's growing pains, telling Education Week last year that there is a "dark underbelly" to AP expansion because "there have been entire schools or districts where almost no students are scoring 3 or higher."

Before we invest more dollars in expanding the AP program, we must provide the pre-AP infrastructure in our middle schools to insure that students are prepared to meet the challenges of AP. Otherwise, we can expect that our AP failure rates will continue to climb and a golden program will lose its sheen.

Expat

The President’s signature No Child Left Behind Law has been derailed. Despite rising test scores, California Democrat Representative George Miller, NCLB’s original chief sponsor, now calls the law “the most negative brand in the country.” Neither of our two major candidates for President is spending much time talking about NCLB these days and legislation to renew the law is dead.

Yet this was an Act passed in the aftermath of 9/11 that was supported by over 90% of Congress.

Now nearing the end of President Bush’s terms, it is easy to forget the promises from the man who proudly adopted the mantle America’s Education President. During his first week in office, the President said that his administration had “no greater priority than education.”

President Bush said: “We’ve got one thing in mind: an education system that’s responsive to the children, an education system that educates every child, an education system that I’m confident can exist;”. The President challenged Americans to overcome the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in exhorting schools to close the “achievement gap” among the races.

There is an enduring image from President Bush’s first term. On September 11, 2001, the President is in an elementary school classroom reading a storybook with a child. The usual interpretation of that image is that it is as an example of the President’s indecisiveness during a time of national emergency.

There is another interpretation of the picture. It is an interpretation that suggests that the education of America’s school children is a top priority, even as other compelling events would eventually force the President to discontinue reading with the child.

For all the “loose change” talk in this election season, neither candidate has apparently given much thought to an education agenda. Indeed, although we remain a country with many children still behind, the media has not challenged the candidates on educational issues either.

The first step our next President should make is to reaffirm the pledge of President Bush that our country has “no greater priority than education.” Our next President should use his public platform to reinstitute presidential visits to our nations’ elementary school classrooms to dramatize the importance of our commitment. Whomever is elected President must develop an educational agenda built upon the principles of NCLB, even if the program has a different name.

There have been many interpretations placed upon the significance of the events of 9/11 in altering the course of our nation’s history. No one, however, has paused to consider the important school mission that President Bush was embarked on that Tuesday in September when his day was interrupted by terrorists. One of the unfortunate consequences of 9/11 was to shunt the nation’s educational crisis out of the public’s consciousness. It is time to put the education of America’s children back on center stage where it belongs.