Parents’ fault. Period.
However, how are they going to do this for $7 per student?
That’s great, and I wish them well. I hope they realize this means they still have to study, not to mention show up for the classes in the first place. That was how we got good scores on the SATs in the bad old days in NY about 40 years ago: we went to class and we studied.
When I worked in a law firm in NY, we had a certain group that could never pass the bar exam, no matter how many Bar BRI courses we paid for. That was primarily because they were too busy making phone calls, chatting with political honchos here and there and making passes at the female associates to even attend the classes...
The schools that all of us tax payers pay for get a huge F at prepping, er I mean EDUCATING students so now the City is pouring more tax dollars into prepping students by going to more schooling!
shaking my head.
Good luck fixing a decade of poor education with a SAT prep course.
Teaching to the test. Why not just give them the answers?
TEACHING FOR WISDOM IN OUR SCHOOLS
I believe it is that, for the most part, we are teaching students to be intelligent and knowledgeable, but not how to use their intelligence and their knowledge. Schools need to teach for wisdom, not just for factual recall and superficial levels of analysis.
http://www.cdl.org/resource-library/articles/teaching_wisdom.php
Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid
But what I discovered over the years, especially when teaching students at Yale, is that some students were very gifted in traditional memory and analytical skills, but never good at making ideas of their own. They were good if you told them the paper topic, if you told them what exactly would be on the test.
New and Emerging Theories of Intelligence
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/emerging.shtml
Teaching for Successful Intelligence
If you ask a Harvard professor who is making $100,000 a year and had high 700’s on the SATs and has an IQ of 145, he will say “Yeah, it’s a pretty good system. Look at me – I’m a Harvard professor, pretty hot stuff!”
But then you ask a guy who dropped out of school and is making 100 million dollars a year as an entrepreneur whether he thinks if tests scores are more important than money, he’ll say money. A Harvard professor who makes $100,000 a year is peanuts to him – he makes that in a day. Who do you think is smart? Who do you think is giving money to both parties in order to get legislation passed in his favor – the entrepreneur. So for him, money shows how smart someone is, not test scores...
My point is this, in every society you have some targeted groups for whom you have low expectations. It can be low test scores, the wrong color, the wrong gender, the wrong religion – whatever. As a result of those low expectations, at least in part, you get low achievement. You are all school psychologists, you know about self-fulfilling prophecies. There is just a new book by Ronald Weinstein that is a summary of the literature on self-fulfilling prophecies. You get low achievement, then a funny thing happens, you get a reward. To give you an example, what happened to me, I got interested in intelligence because when I was a kid, I did poorly on a group IQ test. They gave me the Coleman-Anderson IQ test almost every year and I was very test anxious. When the school psychologists came in and gave it, I just froze. So I did poorly, in fact I did so poorly that in sixth grade I was sent back to a fifth grade classroom to take the fifth grade test because they thought the sixth grade test was too hard for me. So I was targeted for low expectations, I was a dummy. And I gave the teachers what they wanted, low achievement. They were rewarded because they thought I was a dummy and they were right. Good. Everyone likes to be right. They were happy and I was happy because I wanted to make them happy. Everybody was pretty happy and it cycled around. Their expectations went down and my achievement went down. This is what happens to a lot of kids. As you know as a psychologist, the more you keep getting fed low expectations the lower your achievement goes. In my case I got out of the cycle by having a fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Alexa, who for whatever reason believed I could do better. But what if you don’t have that teacher? What if the other kid for whom the expectations are low – could be the test scores, could be the gender, the height, the weight – whatever it is that is targeted, and they get into this vicious cycle. And that is what I see as the problem with much of traditional education.
http://www.indiana.edu/~futures/SternbergTranscript.doc.
I’m torn on this one. I went to an *extremely* good public school (it was actually better than all of the private schools I could have attended), but the SAT prep class I took was invaluable. On the other hand, the prep course didn’t really teach me anything I should have learned at school. It was more of a ‘this is how you take the test to maximize your score’ kind of thing. I’m not sure how much these courses will help if the students aren’t showing up to class in the first place... it’s great if you’re actually driven and pay attention, but in my experience those kinds of kids are in the minority.
I’m afraid they wasted our money again.