Month: June 2019

Will SAT Adversity Score Help Close the College Opportunity Gap?

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By Matt Zalaznick 

High school administrators say it’s still too early to tell if the 3-year-old “SAT adversity score” will substantially expand college access for underrepresented students.

About 50 colleges and universities—including Yale, Florida State and Trinity University in Texas—have been piloting The College Board’s Environmental Context Dashboard in efforts to further diversify their campuses. The system attempts to calculate the impact of factors such as neighborhood crime, high school quality, median family income and local property values on a student’s academic performance.

Since Trinity University began using The College Board’s Environmental Context Dashboard—which some call the SAT adversity score—leaders of the Texas liberal arts institution say they have enrolled two of its most diverse and academically accomplished classes.

“If it means students with more diverse backgrounds are going to be considered for higher ed opportunities, then that’s what we’ve always been about,” says T.J. Vari, assistant superintendent for secondary schools at the Appoquinimink School District in Delaware. “But other than that, it’s not a tool that we would be looking at.”

LINK: District Administration

We Are Verbs, Not Nouns

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By Austin Leon

In Keep Going, I have a chapter called, “Forget the noun, do the verb,” and after seeing it on the poster, a reader asked if it was inspired by Stephen Fry. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I did a little googling.

 

In 2010, Fry was interviewed by “14-year-old Eden Parris in an interview for a Radio Times feature that enabled young readers to meet their TV heroes.” During the course of the interview, he “warned Parris that language could shape and limit people’s ambitions”:

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

Of course, this would’ve been perfect for the book, but that is one of the universal laws of writing books: once you finish them, you find all the stuff you should’ve included but left out based on your ignorance.

 

LINK: con’t Austin Leon blog