College Board, Zuckerberg hope to boost access to college
Partnership to focus on motivation and student achievement
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the charity created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to give away their billions, is about to cut loose with an undisclosed amount of cash to get millions more students into college.
On Tuesday it announces a two-year partnership with The College Board to expand access to “unique, personalized learning pathways” that will help millions of students prepare for key college gateway tasks — tests such as the PSAT, SAT and Advanced Placement courses — that will help lay out a clearer path to college.
The effort is focused on students in lower-income and rural areas, the organizations said. It also will underwrite research on student motivation and achievement, a field popularized by work on “grit” and “growth mind-set,” which encourages educators to praise students’ effort, not their innate intelligence.
College Board President and CEO David Coleman said the CZI partnership would move the field forward, calling ongoing research on the topic “a Manhattan Project on academic motivation.”
In a way, the new partnership is the next logical step in a process, begun in 2014, that revamped the SAT, changing it from a gatekeeping “aptitude” test to what Coleman calls “a simple achievement test that measures math, reading and writing skills that you can improve through practice.”
The new test, he has said, more accurately tracks what students learn in school and gives them a fighting chance to improve. But with the chance to improve comes the opportunity to game the test.
“Frankly, it was a long time ago that we were ever seen as a source of advancing merit and fairness,” Coleman acknowledged in a recent interview. “Too many barriers arose in the way. Whoever believes any longer that the SAT is fair when some kids can buy expensive test prep? Who believes it’s fair getting into college when some kids have expensive college coaches and others don’t have good advice?”
Since practice improves students’ scores, he said, it’s only fair that The College Board make practice tools freely available.
The CZI effort builds on a 2014 collaboration with the popular online Khan Academy to provide what Coleman called “free SAT test preparation for the world.”
Salman Khan, the site’s founder, said the partnership would provide students with diagnoses of their abilities and knowledge, followed by activities, exercises and simulations custom-tailored to their performance. In 2016, the pair said more than 1 million high school students had used the materials to study for the revamped SAT — four times as many as the number who use commercial test prep each year.
This month, they released data showing that 20 hours of work on the Khan Academy SAT site was associated with an average score gain of 115 points. Of nearly 250,000 test takers studied, more than 16,000 had gained 200 points or more between the PSAT and SAT. An estimated 4.3 million students take the PSAT each year.
CZI’s Jim Shelton said the Khan Academy tool supplies “very granular data” about what kids have mastered and a way to match that to instructional content.
Shelton, a former deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and top education official at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said the data allow “a level of radical transparency that hasn’t existed before, where you can actually see at scale what’s happening and understand for individual students … what worked, what didn’t, and start to form hypotheses about why — at a level of scale that we’ve never been able to do before.”
The organizations wouldn’t say how much CZI is spending — Coleman called it “a multimillion-dollar grant” and said it’d reach millions of students.
The effort also will fund expansion of “near-peer advisers” in high schools, twentysomethings who supplement the schools’ stretched counseling staffs.
The idea was pioneered by College Advising Corps (CAC), which supplements schools’ counseling services by pairing recent college graduates — many of them the first in their family to attend college — with students in low-income high schools nationwide. CAC currently works in 600 high schools in 15 states, serving about 180,000 students. The CZI partnership will allow it to expand in four states: California, Michigan, Illinois and Texas.
“It’s a game-changer for us,” said Nicole Hurd, the organization’s founder.
Chan and Zuckerberg created CZI in 2015 to give away 99% of their Facebook shares, worth $45 billion. They’ve said they are driven by two goals: “advancing human potential and promoting equality.”