A recommended schedule for taking the SAT, ACT, and AP tests

The Princeton Review published a High School Testing Timeline, with recommendations for when to take what tests.  Keep in mind that PR is in the business of selling test prep.

Here are key parts of the Princeton Review Timeline, with brief explanations of our local high school’s approach* to testing posted in blue text:

THE FRESHMAN YEAR

The Princeton Review philosophy is to not take tests during the first year in high school. We don’t even think it’s a good idea to take a PSAT as a 9th grader, because the scores seem to create more, not less, stress for the freshmen and their families. The one consistent exception to this is if a freshman is doing very well in her (or his) 9^th grade Biology class, and is planning to take AP Biology before the end of the Junior year. If these two factors are in place, then we think it is a good idea for that student to take the Biology Subject Test (formerly known as the SAT II) in Ecology.

Our Local School —
Similar to above, except that many accelerated science students take AP Environmental Science in eighth or ninth grade as an alternative to biology.

THE SOPHOMORE YEAR

October: Take the PSAT or the PLAN
These tests during the sophomore year are opportunities for risk free practice that should not be missed. We do not recommend intensive preparation …

May: If you are in an AP class, then you will have the chance to take the AP in May. Some students take an AP class, but then do not take the AP exam. You do not want to be one of these students. College admissions people tend to frown upon students from AP classes who duck out on taking the AP exam.

June: Take any appropriate Subject Test
Traditionally, if a Sophomore is going to take a Subject Test in the 10th grade, it will be in either World History or Chemistry….

Our Local School —
Similar to above, with the opportunity to take the PLAN only recently becoming an option.  I’m glad they now offer the PLAN because it sets the stage for taking the ACT, which is a better choice than the SAT for some students.  Students taking AP classes are required to take the AP exam.

SUMMER BETWEEN THE 10TH AND 11TH GRADE YEAR

If you have the time, the inclination and the resources, this is the time frame best suited for test preparation. The students have learned the vast majority of the material that will appear on the SAT (and if they’ve completed Algebra II, they’ve learned all of it), and it’s a considerably less stressful time to be doing this work….

Our Local School —
Most students are advised to defer any test prep until after they’ve taken the SAT in their junior year.  According to guidance counselors, at that point a student will be in a better position to decide if he wants or needs tutoring.

JUNIOR YEAR

While many different scheduling strategies can satisfy individual student’s needs, the majority of students fall into two distinct categories: “Aggressive” and “Regulars”.

AGGRESSIVE
(Includes high academic achievers, kids with proactive parents, students who had a lot of time to prepare during the previous summer but who anticipate being extremely busy in the spring, students who want to try to achieve some flavor of National Merit status, very weak testers who may need extended preparation to achieve acceptable scores, and students who will apply as Early Decision candidates).
October – SAT followed by PSAT (may not be appropriate for weaker testers)
November – Language listening subject tests for native speakers
Winter – Refresher preparation
Mar – The second crack at the SAT, if necessary
April – Try the ACT
May – AP’s/Subject Tests
June – Subject Tests

REGULARS
Sep/Oct – Light prep (PSAT Clinic)
October – PSAT
Fall/Winter – Intensive prep (can do extended prep starting in November or begin in January, both in preparation for the March/April test in either the SAT or the ACT)
May/June – Subject Tests (if needed) or a second attempt at the SAT

Our Local School —
Similar to above recommendations on Subject and AP tests, but less aggressive on other testing matters.  Our high school generally recommends waiting until the spring of junior year to first take the SAT, followed by the ACT if the SAT score was lower than desired.  On the subject of test prep, our school appears slightly schizophrenic in their outlook.  Guidance counselors do not recommend extensive test prep for the vast majority of students, but the school administration sends the message that the highest test scores are the result of test tutoring.  My guesstimate is that at least half the students pay for some type of test prep.

SENIOR YEAR

The Senior year can become complicated because it is so late in the cycle, and the permutations are very dependent upon the individual student. From the broadest perspective, if you’re “Aggressive”, then October should be your last ACT/SAT/Subject Test attempt. The “Regular” students may take these exams up to, and including, December of their senior year and still make it in time for most colleges’ admission deadlines (including the UC schools).

Our Local School —
Similar to above, with a general recommendation to complete testing sooner rather than later.

* This is based on my experience and observations, so I make no claim that this is a comprehensive representation of their official policy.

Related:  College application timeline

A primer on New York State public school pensions

A primer on New York State public school pensions provided by Capital Region BOCES:

New York state’s school district employees outside of New York City generally belong to one of two public pension systems – the New York State Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS) and the New York State Employee Retirement System (ERS).

The pension benefit that individual retirees receive depend on various factors, including: which system they are in; their salary; the date employment began; years of service; and age at retirement.

Pension systems have three sources of revenue: employee contributions, employer contributions (those from state and local government and school districts), and the investment returns on these contributions.

Employee contributions are based on the date employment began. Employees hired before July 1976 were not required to contribute. Those hired since then have had to contribute 3% of their salaries for at least a portion of their careers; and new employees will contribute 3% or more for the duration of employment.

How are the contributions of state and local governments and school districts determined?  Employer contributions are determined according to an accounting model that takes into account the future liabilities (pension payouts) of the system and the value of the fund. The state sets employer contribution levels each year in order to ensure that the systems are fully funded in relation to future obligations.

Market conditions are a major factor in determining pension costs.  The contribution rates of the state pension systems are set annually by accounting for the value of the funds in relation to future obligations. Therefore, as markets fluctuate—and cause the value of the ERS and TRS investments to change—so do the rates of employer contributions to the systems. Thus, the economic slowdown of recent years has been a major driver of the increases in pension costs to school districts and other governments in New York state.

…
As pension costs rise student services are cut

In our local district, pension costs have risen more than 50% over the last two years and now account for 7.2% of the total budget, up from 5.1% in 2010-11.  This has meant ongoing cuts in student services as taxes are diverted to pay for pensions.  The trend is up, and by 2015 pension costs are expected to eat up 35 percent of property tax collections.

The good news

New York is one of a handful of states that entered the current economic downturn with a fully funded pension system, according to a 2010 study from The Pew Center on the States. Many states have funded their pension systems at levels far lower than their future obligations require, and some have skipped payments altogether— but not New York.

Related articles

• ‘Exploding pension costs are the single biggest threat to local government’s ability to deliver needed services’ (costofcollege.wordpress.com)

Google search tips for students

Students lack good Google search skills.

Sadly, though web searches have become an integral part of the academic research landscape, the art of the Google search is an increasingly lost one. A recent study at Illinois Wesleyan University found that fewer than 25% of students could perform a “reasonably well-executed search.” Wrote researchers, “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process.”

If college students are so poorly prepared to conduct Google searches, K-12 students must be even less so.  With all the talk about teaching 21st century skills in our public schools, not enough time is spent on this basic element of  school work.  What’s going on?

Here’s an infographic from HackCollege that offers basic search tips.  If teachers even spent a few hours on this every year, high school graduates would be better prepared for college and for life.

CLICK IMAGE TO GO TO INFOGRAPHIC

…
I need to use these tips more regularly:

Beware of schools pitching lots of after-school help

Our local public school touts the teachers’ availability for after-school help sessions as a wonderful benefit.  But I’ve grown cynical.

If a school’s pitch to parents is: We have tons of Extra Help, that is a very bad sign.

It sounds like the school is saying: Your child will have lots of personal attention with his teacher, one on one.

But what is really being said is: your child will have trouble learning what the teacher is teaching.

I’m not saying that a young student seeking out personalized extra help from his teacher isn’t wonderful.  I just think that blithely telling a struggling youngster to go for after-school help is often not the most helpful advice.  It makes me think something is missing in the classroom, and it’s not being addressed.

I’d like to see the top five canned comments that are used in our school district’s report cards.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this one showed up on that list.

Should attend extra help sessions more often

Using the Internet is ‘supereasy’, but ‘deep reading, advanced math, scientific reasoning’ is hard

‘Digital Literacy’ Will Never Replace The Traditional Kind

I would like K-12 schools to focus more on teaching background knowledge and traditional competencies instead of spending so much time teaching so-called 21st century skills.

… But that’s not how an increasingly powerful faction within education sees the matter. They are the champions of “new literacies” — or “21st century skills” or “digital literacy” or a number of other faddish-sounding concepts. In their view, skills trump knowledge, developing “literacies” is more important than learning mere content, and all facts are now Googleable and therefore unworthy of committing to memory.

Students need a broad base of knowledge before they can become critical thinkers.

Indeed, evidence from cognitive science challenges the notion that skills can exist independent of factual knowledge. Dan Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is a leading expert on how students learn. “Data from the last thirty years leads to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not only because you need something to think about,” Willingham has written. “The very processes that teachers care about most — critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving — are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).”

iPads are not a prerequisite for innovation, collaboration, and evaluation.

There is no doubt that the students of today, and the workers of tomorrow, will need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the “21st century skills” so dear to digital literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you have to know what came before. To collaborate, you have to contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information against knowledge you’ve already mastered. Nor is there any reason that these skills must be learned or practiced in the context of technology. Critical thinking is crucial, but English students engage in it whenever they parse a line of poetry or analyze the motives of an unreliable narrator. Collaboration is key, but it can be effectively fostered in the glee club or on the athletic field. Whatever is specific to the technological tools we use right now — and these tools are bound to change in any case — is designed to be easy to learn and simple to use.

Using the Internet is “supereasy” compared to “deep reading, advanced math, scientific reasoning”, which are hard.  Schools need to focus on providing expert instruction for the hard stuff.

Related:  Wikipedia co-founder says we need to memorize things, not just ‘Google it’

New York public school mandate relief petition launched by BEST4NY

Westchester County taxpayers are letting legislators know that escalating state-mandated costs are eroding educational opportunities for our children.

A coalition of tax watchdog groups from 16 Westchester school districts is setting its sights on an elusive target: the complex web of state rules and regulations that force districts to spend tax money.

The new coalition, calling itself BEST4NY, is launching an online petition for local relief from state “mandates.” It is holding a public rally at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Greenburgh Town Hall.

“We felt like people who are concerned about the neighborhoods and villages and towns should be involved in this,” said Roger Scheiber of Hastings-on-Hudson, one of five executive committee members running the new group. “We realized that these school budgets are so complex and that once the tax cap got passed, the big issue, the really big issue, became mandates.”

BEST4NY, with the tagline “ Better Education and Smarter Taxation for New York”, is modeled after NYSUT, the New York teachers union and political lobbying organization that is a statewide organization with local chapters in different school districts.  In this way, BEST4NY could be viewed as a union for taxpayers and parents.

Widespread agreement that we need mandate relief

Growing numbers of school, municipal and business officials — not to mention Gov. Andrew Cuomo — are calling for the state Legislature to remove some of the hundreds of state rules that force communities to spend money. But the Legislature has been slow to reach agreements because there are so many mandates, great and small, and most are supported by special interests.

School districts say that mandates account for 15 to 20 percent of their overall budgets, dictating spending on everything from data collection and curriculum changes to pension contributions and construction.

Pensions are out of control

I’m glad to see that pension contributions are included in this petition since skyrocketing public pension costs are “the single biggest threat” to local schools’ ability to deliver educational  services for New York children.  In our local district, pension costs have risen more than 50% over the last two years and now account for 7.2% of the total budget, up from 5.1% in 2010-11.  This has meant ongoing cuts in student services as taxes are diverted to pay for pensions.  The trend is up, and by 2015 pension costs are expected to eat up 35 percent of property tax collections.

The Wicks Law and the Triborough Amendment are two other burdensome mandates

… the Wicks Law, which requires districts and local governments to use multiple contractors for construction projects; and the Triborough Amendment, which requires that public-employee union contracts stay in effect until a new contract is reached, perhaps reducing the incentive to negotiate.

“There is no traction in either house to repeal the Triborough because the unions oppose it,” said Castelli, who has sponsored bills to reform and repeal it. …

The  BEST4NY online petition calling for mandate relief:
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/mandate-relief-now.html

Related articles

• Skyrocketing public pension costs are eroding educational opportunities for New York children (costofcollege.wordpress.com)

Some reasons for the explosive growth in tutoring

The “tutoring-industrial” complex has proven to be recession resistant, experiencing an increase in business of at least 1,000 percent since 2001.

Whether they’re seeking remedial help for their child or a leg up to the Ivy League, millions of parents are encountering a frustrating new homework project of their own: learning the intricacies of the tutoring-industrial complex. The “supplemental education” sector is now an estimated $5 billion business, 10 times as large as it was in 2001, according to Michael Sandler, founder of education-research and consulting firm Eduventures. Tutoring firms no longer offer just subject-specific help in, say, Latin or chemistry; increasingly, they’re marketing a dizzying menu of test prep, study skills, enrichment tutorials, scholastic summer camps and prekindergarten readiness programs….

Recession resistant

And while other industries struggled through the downturn, the tutoring sector has grown more than 50 percent since 2008, according to Eduventures. “We’re somewhat recession-resistant,” says Joe Nativo, chief financial officer of Kumon Math and Reading Centers, a chain that says it has taught more than 4 million children worldwide.

The article gives some reasons behind the increase in tutoring.

• Growing competition for entrance to elite colleges
• Increase in average class size.  (This is a dubious claim, considering the increase is minimal and that research tying class size to student achievement is weak.)
• Higher numbers of children diagnosed with learning disabilities
• “Hand-wringing parents” fearful that their children will fall behind
• More effective marketing that plays into parents’ fears
• The No Child Left Behind mandate that schools “in need of improvement” provide tutoring for students has lead to $900 million in federal money spent annually on tutoring

Is constructivism also fueling the tutor boom?

There is no mention that the tutoring boom may also be the result of changes in teaching methods and curriculum that have come to focus on fads instead of on research-based pedagogy.  But given that the explosive growth in Kumon Math and Reading Centers with their focus on traditional skills practice  has made it the largest franchise tutoring firm in the U.S., I believe this is a factor.   I’m also reminded of a local Chyten tutoring center that advertises a return to the basics.

Math Facts Boot Camp
Pre-Algebra; Algebra I; Algebra II; Geometry
With the new emphasis on “real world” or “integrated” math, many educators agree that the skills that go into solving math problems, pure and simple, are being lost.
Chyten’s Math Facts Boot Camps are comprehensive and intensive courses in which the ability to solve equations is brought back to its rightful position, front and center in a student’s math mind.

In the enduring words of Catherine at Kitchen Table Math:

 No parent hires a constructivist tutor

Differentiation places an unreasonable demand on teachers

Differentiating instruction in today’s mixed-proficiency classrooms is tough on teachers, and it’s certainly not always best for students.

83% [CORRECTED*] of teachers surveyed said that in practice, differentiated instruction is difficult to implement.

Malcolm Unwell explains it this way.

Perhaps there is a student who is just learning English in your class. And perhaps that student sits next to another who wants to have an in-depth discussion about Shakespeare. Should these two students prove difficult to teach at once, a normal person might consider what the root problem is — that they shouldn’t be in the same class. But the wise education bureaucrat knows that any problem here must be the teacher’s — he must not have differentiated his instruction enough.

Separating students according to ability is traditionally known as “tracking,” and it is frowned upon by the educational establishment.  Having students of varying ability in the same class is known as “inclusion,” and it is smiled upon.  While I was earning my MAT, I quickly realized that advocating tracking was simply not a valid position to put forth in education world, or “thought world” as E.D. Hirsch described it.  Tracking is unfair, and undemocratic.  It perpetuates the pattern of hegemony and domination present in the larger culture.

A local school administrator told parents that tracking students before 8th grade would permanently scar them.  Consequently, in our local district almost all classrooms up to 9th grade are mixed proficiency.  The elementary math program requires that the teacher spend the first part of class on a lesson geared towards all her students, with the expectation that everyone will learn something from it.  In reality, some struggling students still don’t comprehend it and some advanced students are bored.  After this whole group introduction, then the teacher is supposed to differentiate instruction for all proficiency levels.  Problems are “adapted for multiple ability levels”

These problems are sometimes referred to as “low threshold, high ceiling” problems because all students can understand the problem and solve some part of it (low threshold), but even the highest-ability students in the class will not easily complete it (high ceiling).

So teachers present adapted versions of the same problem, tailoring them to personal proficiency levels.  In theory it sounds nice, but in practice it must be much more challenging than teaching to a homogeneous group of students.  I always think of how inefficient it is, especially when reformers call out for longer school days.

It is now unacceptable to simply teach a lesson to a class, and assess the students according to how well he demonstrates his knowledge of the content.  Different students should have different lessons with different assessments.  Needless to say, this is completely unworkable  in practice.  It is doubtful, really, that any teacher actually does this.  If one did, it would likely be a chaotic disaster in which learning is incidental or nonexistent.

In this differentiated instruction environment, all students can be “successful”.  But parents should be aware that it may be at a “low threshold” of success.

* The percentage was off by 1 point before I corrected it.

Hat tip to Joanne Jacobs

Phonics instruction helps boys close the gender literacy gap

Phonics instruction helps boys close the gender gap on reading skills according to recent research findings.

The use of more traditional phonetics-based lessons helps boys catch up with girls – even doing better on some tests – and prevents some children from needing ‘special’ schooling, according to new research findings.

Better for low-income students

A study of synthetic phonics also found children from disadvantaged backgrounds do as well as those from better off homes.

Fewer students assigned to special education classes

“We found children were performing well who might otherwise have ended up in special teaching arrangements,” she added.

Learning sounds instead of guessing words
Beginning in the 1960s, synthetic phonics was replaced in favor of whole language and later balanced literacy instruction.  Instead of learning the sounds that make up words (phonics), students were taught to guess at words based on content and pictures (whole language).

This study was conducted in Scotland, and in January it was reported that thousands of primary schools in the UK have signed up to participate in an initiative to increase funding for phonics instruction.

UK Schools Minister Nick Gibb on the phonics funding program:

This is an open invitation to all schools to improve the way they teach systematic synthetic phonics – the tried and tested method of improving the reading of all our children, especially the weakest.

Some evidence from The Importance of Phonics: Securing Confident Reading evidence paper.

The importance of a systematic approach to phonics instruction

Recent inspection evidence from a sample of 12 primary schools supports this view….

In 2006, the Department for Education and Skills commissioned the Universities of York and Sheffield to conduct a review of the experimental research on using phonics to teach reading and spelling. Torgerson, Hall and Brooks found that systematic phonics teaching “enables children to make better progress in reading accuracy than unsystematic or no phonics, and that this is true for both normally-developing children and those at risk of failure” (2006)

In Australia, the committee for the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy produced the report ‘Teaching Reading’ (2005). The committee concluded: “The evidence is clear, whether from research, good practice observed in schools, advice from submissions to the Inquiry, consultations [...] that direct systematic instruction in phonics during the early years of schooling is an essential foundation for teaching children to read. …systematic phonics instruction is critical if children are to be taught to read well, whether or not they experience reading difficulties. [...] Moreover, where there is unsystematic or no phonics instruction, children’s literacy progress is significantly impeded, inhibiting their initial and subsequent growth in reading accuracy, fluency, writing, spelling and comprehension.”

In England, Jim Rose (2006) in his ‘Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading, Final Report’ emphasised that beginner readers should be taught using a systematic approach to phonics and cautioned that evidence submitted to the review suggested that, for almost all children, diluting the approach by using a mix of approaches can hinder children’s progress….

Related:

• Boy Oh Boy! by Malkin Dare (Society for Quality Education, 12/2010)
• Illiterate boys: The new international phenomenon by Dr Bonnie Macmillan (RRF Newsletter 51, 2004)
• Response to public consultation on the Year 1 phonics screening check (March 2011)
• Phonic teaching resources and funding for schools FAQs

‘Exploding pension costs are the single biggest threat to local government’s ability to deliver needed services’

It’s an issue that Democrats, Republicans and independents agree on: controlling skyrocketing pensions.

Politicians representing diverse constituencies are united under the umbrella of New York Leaders for Pension Reform, a group whose goal is cutting pension costs.  Members include New York City Michael Bloomberg, New Rochelle Mayor Noam Branson, and Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino.

“Exploding pension costs are the single biggest threat to local government’s ability to deliver needed services,” Astorino said in a statement released by the group Wednesday. “It will be impossible to provide any real property tax relief while operating under these debilitating labor costs that automatically increase every year at an unsustainable rate.”

In a small step to remedy this pension problem, last week Governor Cuomo won passage of Tier 6 reform legislation that he grandly labeled a sweeping pension reform plan that will save state and local governments and New York City more than $80 billion over the next 30 years.

Not so fast.

E.J. McMahon writing in The Torch calls Cuomo’s grandiose claims hyperbole, especially because taxpayers will see no benefit anytime soon since the changes only affect new employees.  And the “billions” in savings are based on the assumption that the Tier 6 structure remains unchanged for 30 years, a highly unlikely scenario.

Even using Coumo’s assumptions, New York City will only save 6% off the projected $359 billion in pension contributions over the next 30 years.  Clearly, this legislation only puts a small dent in the skyrocketing public pension costs that are eroding educational opportunities for New York children.  I foresee no change in time to help my child who is attending a public school where pension costs have risen more than 50% over the last two years and now account for 7.2% of the total budget, up from 5.1% in 2010-11.

The fundamental flaw in New York’s public pension system remains unresolved: like similar systems across the country, it exposes taxpayers to massive open-ended financial risks.  Pension accounting is incredibly arcane and opaque, setting up a proven moral hazard for elected officials who customarily have little regard for long-term consequences.  Unfortunately, the governor did not address this problem, or even acknowledge it.

You can read the entire LoHud.com article after the break.