CURMUDGUCATION: More Evidence That Tests Measure SES

CURMUDGUCATION: More Evidence That Tests Measure SES:

More Evidence That Tests Measure SES

Want more proof, again, some more, of the connection between socio-economic status and standardized test results? Twitter follower Joseph Robertshaw pointed me at a pair of studies by Randy Hoover, PhD, at the Department of Teacher Education, Beeghly College of Education, Youngstown State University.

Hoover is now a professor emeritus, but the validity of standardized testing and the search for a valid and reliable accountability system. He now runs a website called the Teacher Advocate and it's worth a look.

Hoover released two studies-- one in 2000, and one in 2007-- that looked at the validity of the Ohio Achievement Tests and the Ohio Graduate Test, and while there are no surprises here, you can add these to your file of scientific debunking of standardized testing. We're just going to look at the 2007 study, which was in part intended to check on the results of the 2000 study.

The bottom line of the earlier study appears right up front in the first paragraph of the 2007 paper:

The primary finding of this previous study was that student performance on the tests was most significantly (r = 0.80) affected by the non-school variables within the student social-economic living CURMUDGUCATION: More Evidence That Tests Measure SES:

The Free College Problem

Allison Schrager is an economist who writes about retirement and how to hedge risk in more unconventional situations. But in this article, she addresses the question of free college and whether or not it addresses the bigger problem.

Her arguments echo several being brought up as free college emerges as a Democratic platform item.

The first, largest issue is college completion.

Poor students are far less likely to finish college than their rich counterparts. And that includes poor kids who are smart and get high scores on, well, anything. Here's a chart that lays it out:

Poor students apply to less selective schools, and their are fewer poor students who rank as high achievers (which is unsurprising since "high achiever" means "good standardized test score-getter" which we know doesn't correlate closely with poverty).

It's possible that tuition costs are part of what forces poor students out of school, and that free tuition might help. But there's also a strong case to be made that poor students take all of the problems of poverty to college with them. It's not just that it costs money to pay tuition to go to college; it costs money just to be there, to live in a lifestyle that is in many ways upper class. It's The Free College Problem