Things have been heating up in the test-prep industry as more and more frenzied parents pay providers to help their kids boost their SAT or ACT scores. 

Yesterday it was announced that the College Board, the not-for-profit (but very profitable) organization responsible for administering the SAT (among other tests) is suing a Texas test-prep company for using “stolen” PSAT questions.

Karen Dillard, owner of the Dallas-area test-prep company, claims that the College Board is bullying her in an effort to put her out of business.  Dillard’s company charges over $2,000 for her test-prep package. 

There’s no question that the College Board has a sweet deal:  providing tests and test-prep materials to thousands of anxious college-bound students in an era of increasing competition and soaring college expenses.  They have every right to protect their product.  And though the College Board isn’t directly responsible for the burgeoning college prep industry, it’s certainly played a pivotal role in fanning the flames that have led to the test-prep wildfire that is raging throughout the country.

It will be interesting to watch this case over the next few months. 

I am getting tons of emails from parents and students asking me more about what I will include in the book I’m writing called The World Is Your Campus:  Skip the SAT, Save Thousands On Tuition, and Get An Outrageously Relevant Global Education.

They want to know what kinds of things I’m going to talk about.  They don’t want to wait for the book to come out, dang it–they want to know NOW. 

Well, I can’t spill it all here.  I’m sorry.  It’s a legal/contract thing.  But here’s my handy dandy list of the kinds of things you’ll learn about (and my apologies if this just makes you more impatient….)

A Taste of Freedom:

▄ Never worry about your GPA, SAT score, or class rank 

▄ Enter a top liberal arts university as a junior at age 18 

▄ Get paid to work virtually while spending the summer in exotic locations–and get credit for it  

▄ Graduate at the age of 20—even if you’ve studied in four universities on three continents 

▄ Get two years’ worth of college credits—during your senior year of high school  

▄ Get a degree from a top-ranked college at a total cost of less than $40,000 (No loans, no debt.) 

▄   Explore the ruins of Machu Picchu, go snowboarding in the Andes, sleep under the stars in a Chilean desert, dance all night in Buenos Aires, celebrate Carnaval in Brazil, hike the glaciers of Patagonia, become a cherished member of a family in another country, and develop a global perspective by sharing experiences with friends from around the world—as an exchange student at 16 

▄ Speak two or more languages fluently 

▄ Pay $1500 instead of $15,000 for the same study abroad program as your Ivy League peers  

▄ Start your sophomore year of college—at 16 

▄ Connect with accomplished mentors who can boost your skills, reveal your talents, and open the door to new levels of learning 

▄ Master the art of self-management 

▄ Travel widely, find meaningful and well-compensated work, and discover your place as a valued and valuable global citizen

My four daughters have done all of the above.  Really.  This book will show you how they did it and give you everything you need to get an extraordinary global education that doesn’t cost a fortune. 

You’ll have to be a bit of a rebel–or, more precisely, a free agent (don’t worry–I’ll show you how!)  You won’t be hanging on to old notions about how long it takes and how much it costs to get a great education.

You’re going to feel liberated–and a little pissed off, frankly.  Because what you’re going to learn is that there is a much easier, more effective, more engaging and more inexpensive way to get a college degree than the one most students know–and nobody is telling you about it.

I will.  I promise.  And I’ll provide as many tips and hints here as I can until  the book hits the shelves. 

Stay with me.

Sometimes the truth hurts.  And sometimes the truth is buried in colorful charts that happen to have glaring omissions.

Bob Compton, the executive producer of the education documentary, Two Million Minutes, posted on his blog about the recent release of test scores collected by PISA–Programme for International Student Assessment.

You can read about the US scores (brace yourself) here.

Bob’s post includes a colorful graph released by PISA that manages to exclude nearly one half of the world’s population in its data.  That’s right.  They forgot to include India (1.2 billion people) or China (1.3 billion people) in the data presented on the graph.

Wow.  Is this head-in-sand syndrome?  A simple oversight?  Manipulation of data? 

Well, we know this: it’s misleading.  And for an organization which is focused on its mission to test and  “facilitate an effective international dissemination of the results” this indicates a rather dubious attempt to investigate and inform.

It was bad enough when PISA had to announce prior to the test results release that they’d had to invalidate the US reading scores for 2006.   

Now, we’ve got charts missing huge chunks of the fastest-growing populations in the world. 

I must be missing something here.  How can a test lead to increased awareness based on country-to-country comparisons of standardized test results if the information is invalidated or not included in the graphs? 

I’m sad to think of the time US teachers and students spent preparing for and taking these tests which have yielded very little in the way of useful, relevant information.

Ah, it’s that time of year. Yes, it’s time for the US News & World Report annual ranking of colleges.  This year, they’ve added high schools to their special ad-packed issue. 

An interesting article in The New York Times describes the US News venture in branding itself as the ranking mag.  Great idea, huh?  After all, every year is a new year for rankings.  There is money to be made–lots of it–in cranking up the Anxiety Index for parents and students considering college.   Sure, it may be helpful to provide information about colleges but make no mistake–there is money to be made.  And many colleges are refusing to play the game, choosing to opt out of the magazine’s rankings. 

I know.  This probably sounds like I am being very cynical, but actually, I’m just very aware of how the media is tied into the quest for a top college education.  To a large degree, the way we prepare our kids for college is directly related to what we read in the papers and magazines about how difficult it is to get in. 

The Anxiety Index must be cranked up in order to perpetuate the frenzy.  It used to be that students applied to only three top schools after careful consideration.  Now, many students are applying to over ten schools.  This ends up skewing that all-important selectivity ratio (number of accepted students over the number of those who applied) and makes parents and students even more likely to apply to a larger number of schools in order to increase their chances of getting into a good one. 

Media groups are developing interesting alliances.  Take a look here at the website for The Washington Post Company.  They own The Washington Post newspaper, of course. They also own Newsweek magazine.  Oh, and look at this:  they own Kaplan, the makers of those SAT and other test-prep courses.  So, if you pick up a copy of the Post or Newsweek and read about how competitive it is to get into top schools, you’re likely to head on over to Kaplan to sign up your kid for an SAT prep course to boost his scores and increase the likelihood that he’ll get in.   

I understand about business.  Really, I do.  Anxiety sells magazines.  And newspapers.  And SAT prep courses.  In fact, anxiety–in one form or another–sells a whole lot of things.  I get that.

But I think it’s important for parents to understand how these things are tied together.  Sure, read the US News & World Report rankings if you’re curious, but then make sure you understand that the stats don’t tell the whole story and the rankings are a sales vehicle. 

Don’t let the rankings crank up your personal Anxiety Index.  There are loads of good schools and many ways to get an outstanding education.  And it doesn’t have to cost a fortune. 

There will be a lot more about this in my book, The World Is Your Campus.

I found this heartrending and very articulate post at the Teacher In the 408 blog about the challenges, frustration and helplessness of newish teachers who are longing for clear evaluations and a sense of greater possibilities.  The author is a teacher in California. 

Here’s an excerpt:

You get up on the ledge as a young teacher when you realize that there is no formal system of accountability anywhere. The evaluation process is an outright joke, your intern advisor calls you exemplary, and your BTSA lady pops in so you can fill out some forms. If you’re coming out of an alternative credentialing program, you’re used to having folks in your class daily, dropping those + / ∆ forms like they’re hot, but that’s done now, and trying to find/ build the culture of observation in the typical urban school is like drinking the damn ocean dry. No one is making sure you do your job well. You’re relatively new to all this, and things can be uneven. Instructional quality tends to fluctuate, but no one’s around to praise the times you bring it, and worse still, there is no one to suggest that uh, you better step it up if you want to make it round here.

You’re up on the ledge when you want to know how to get better, but there’s nothing there. The vast store of practical strategies you took from your alternative or traditional route credentialing program seems to be running a little dry and district PD is either non-existent or an exercise in futility. There is no formal plan for post-competency-acquisition development, unless it is in the areas of technology, and you already know how to use PowerPoint. You do, however, have the opportunity to be told occasionally how great you are because you demonstrate basic competence in the context of repeated failure, and that tends to have the opposite of its intended effect.

Wow.  We hear a lot about teacher quality, teacher training, and teacher shortages.  There’s talk of performance pay, merit pay, and other rewards for good teaching, but we’re more likely to hear the arguments about why this might undermine the public school system.  In no other profession is it considered subversive to pay those who do exceptionally well in their work. 

Teachers need support in a very big way, and I’m not just talking about money.  They need mentoring.  They need training.  They need experienced and engaged teachers who can talk them down from that ledge and give them hope–and advice–to move them forward in their careers in such a way that they, too, become experienced and engaged teachers who love what they do. 

How can we do this?  How can we focus both on teacher training and our children’s education? 

 Well, if you ask me, we need to focus on the teachers FIRST.  If we have hard-working, innovative, passionate teachers who are well-trained and supported, and if we get out of their way by reducing the emphasis on standardized testing, then our kids are going to get an amazing education.  We’ve built layer upon layer of structure in an effort to guarantee a uniformity of educational standards.  The result?  We’ve sucked out the passion dried up the creativity.

Yes, we need to have some kind of measures to know how our kids are doing, but what if we focused on same-school, same-class, same-student improvements and let the teachers really dive in? 

What if we got serious about getting rid of those teachers who are neither engaged nor up to the task of continually innovating in the classroom?  What if we focused our efforts on nurturing and training the teachers who are truly excited to be there and love working with the kids? 

It pains me to think that there are so many frustrated teachers out there who would love to improve their skills and do a better job of teaching our kids but lack the support they need to do their best work.  It saddens me that our focus tends to be on implementing more testing to see if our kids’ scores are increasing (requiring countless hours of test prep in class) instead of looking for ways to support the teachers who are directly responsible for creating an exciting and effective learning environment in the classroom.  

We need to get these teachers off the ledge and lift them up to the next level.  They’ll pull our kids right along with them. 

Here we are! 

I’ve moved around a bit but now that the book title is firmed up (relatively), this is where the blog will stay.

Watch for an exciting announcement soon about the publisher of

The World Is Your Campus:  How to Skip the SAT, Save Thousands On Tuition, and Get An Outrageously Relevant Education.

Bob Compton, the producer of the education documentary, Two Million Minutes, has a blog in which he is posting about the publicity and responses to the film as well as other education-related news. 

In a recent post, he addresses the hullabaloo about state and national standards for education and creating and implementing testing in order to determine the rankings of US states.  He writes:

The time for National Standards has passed.  America needs to measure itself against a Global Education Standard - one that fairly compares our best and brightest with the best and brightest around the world and that compares our average students with average students in all nations.

I believe that if we start comparing ourselves to Global Education Standards, not only will our average students fair poorly, our best students will be behind the best students of India and China – and there are 7 times more of them than of US top students.

That has profound implications for our country’s economy in the decades ahead. America is behind the largest countries in the world in education standards and NEAP, TIMMS and State tests simply further mislead the American people.

Thanks, Bob, for telling it like it is.  This is indeed a numbers game and we’re not looking at the right ones. 

We need to recognize that comparing Iowa’s and Indiana’s test scores is not helping us gain a foothold in the global arena. 

We need to think bigger and pay attention to a sector of students that will be changing the landscape of the workplace in the next few years–the best and brightest from ALL countries. 

I have some ideas for helping the best and the brightest surge forward instead of languishing in the testopia of the last two years of high school.  My own four daughters have followed this plan, as have many other students. 

It works.  And if there’s anything we need at this point, it’s something that WORKS for those who need a new way to challenge themselves, clarify their ideas, discover their talents, and maximize their possibilities. 

Oh, and bonus:  it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. 

Bring on the creativity and innovation!

Oh, here’s a great post by Thomas Armstrong, one of my favorite thinkers and authors on the topic of learning. 

He lists his top fifteen(!) reasons why standardized tests are completely worthless. 

I couldn’t agree more.  Take a look at his post, which includes some excellent book suggestions.

Thanks, Dr. A!

Oh, wow. 

I just found this hilarious (and okay, disturbing) post on the Assistive Principles blog, an anonymous rant from an assistant principal of a high school in Southern California.

And though I am sure there were smart, competent students present (and wearing pants) among those taking the test that day, they were upstaged by the not-so-competent ones. 

As you know, I think the SAT is completely unnecessary and I encourage students to avoid it.  Seriously.

But this post shows that it’s also a supremely aggravating experience for proctors who have to deal with, well, stupidity.

Read it for yourself.

Just when you think the emphasis on Advanced Placement tests couldn’t get more ridiculous, here comes an article about a new program that will pay students (mostly black and Latino) to take the Advanced Placement test. 

That link above is to the New York Times article.  There’s also an article about it in the Washington Post (remember that the Washington Post Company owns Kaplan, which sells materials to those who are desperate to raise their AP/SAT/ACT scores). Big surprise.

Dang it.  I thought we were progressing.  I though we were starting to understand that whole thing about the power of internal motivation in learning versus external control and rewards. 

Guess not. 

I’m sure there will be some happy kids who make money by taking the AP test.  And I guess if they want to take the test, they’ll be taking the class, and they might actually learn something.

My fear is that the courses that will be offered will be dumbed-down and crafted for those who, well, wouldn’t take the test unless they were getting paid.  Has it come to this?

It appears so.

This is a lot more about school standing than about helping kids.  Why not pay kids to take community college courses instead?  Get them started on the college path directly instead of dangling a check for a course and test that aren’t necessarily going to lead to college admission.

Honestly.  We want kids to love learning, to get interested, to want to continue because they are excited about what they’re learning and not focused on what gadgets they will buy with the money they get for sitting through a test.  Getting a check might “inspire” them to take a class, but what about the class after that?  And the next?  Are we assuming that once they get started, the love of learning is going to kick in and then they will happily pay for subsequent classes in college?

Well, one can hope.