Episode 96- Rich Helppie Sean-Michael Pigeon
Welcome to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge. The fiercely nonpartisan discussion that seeks policy solutions to issues of the day. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children.
Rich Helppie:
Hello and welcome to the Common Bridge. This is the fiercely nonpartisan podcast and YouTube TV channel, where we talk about the issues of the day, the opportunities of the moment. And most importantly, what some policy solutions might be. Today we have our guest, Sean-Michael Pigeon. We’re going to talk about something that doesn’t often get discussed and that has to do with standardized testing and their role. So Sean, welcome to the Common Bridge. I’m so happy that you’re with us today.
Sean Pigeon:
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Rich Helppie:
So standardized testing was the gold standard for college admissions for many, many years. Now in recent years, there’s been claims about discrimination bias in the test itself that disadvantages minorities and students from less economically prosperous areas. Some colleges have dropped standardized testing as a means of measuring college aptitude entirely. Some school systems are following suit. So today our guest, Sean Pigeon, is going to discuss this from his perspective. And this is an angle that you probably haven’t considered yet. I anticipate some education and perhaps some policy ideas. Sean, our audience at the Common Bridge likes to know a little bit about our guests. So just tell us a little bit, where were you born? Where’d you grow up and what were your early days like?
Sean Pigeon:
Thank you so much for having me. So I was raised in Texas. I was raised in a relatively low income family and my father was a teacher at a local private school. So I was able to go there. But there’s been a shift towards, I’m talking about the standardized testing that we currently use, which is the SAT or the ACT for college admissions that we’ve been using since 1926, that they disadvantage minorities or they disadvantage low income individuals. And part of something that I’ve written in USA Today recently, was arguing that while these disparities do exist and they are real, and there are some barriers that eliminating all of these sort of hard metrics from the admission process would disadvantage people like me and would disadvantage low-income individuals because those metrics give people a chance to succeed and they do give it a chance for there to be economic and social mobility. So that’s really what I’m trying to get at with some of this.
Rich Helppie:
That’s wonderful. What area in Texas were you from?
Sean Pigeon:
I’m from Dallas-Fort Worth. So in the Northern region, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump away from Dallas.
Rich Helppie:
Where are you going to college right now?
Sean Pigeon:
Right now I’m a senior at Yale University. I’m studying political science there.
Rich Helppie:
Wonderful. So, tough to get admitted, and tough to make it to your senior year. And I’d imagine some sharp elbows being thrown in those political science classes.
Sean Pigeon:
Very much so, very much so. I like to say there’s a lot of politics in the political science department.
Rich Helppie:
College is supposed to be fun too. So what are you doing for fun? You’re playing any sports or music, or what’s your social life like?
Sean Pigeon:
Yale has a very robust political realm. So I’m involved in that and involved at the Yale Political Union, for instance. And there’s a lot of friendships that are made there. I will say, off campus, I do a lot of weightlifting and that’s quite-it gets some of the stress out, you know what I mean? Because there are a lot of sharp elbows.
Rich Helppie:
And it was leg day for me today, I’m just sitting here basking in it.
Sean Pigeon:
Leg day’s always tough.
Rich Helppie:
So you did write a very interesting opinion piece in USA Today. What caused you to write the piece? And I’m going to try to bring it up here and I know we’ll have a link to it at RichardHelppie.com. The title of it is Don’t Blame The Test: Getting Rid Of Standardized Testing Means Punishing For Students. And I thought it was a great piece and that’s what caused us to reach out to you. But what caused you to write it?
Sean Pigeon:
So about a year or a year and a half ago, I got involved with a local magnet school in New Haven called East Rock. There I teach elementary school kids about journalism and writing, and that’s really where I got interested in the politics of the education system. Because those kids are wonderful and I love working with them, but there are a lot of difficulties that they face in achieving academic potential. And one of the common refrains that I hear at at Yale, particularly, is the idea that the standardized testing and the way in which we’re doing admissions process is fundamentally flawed. And therefore we need to scrap the whole system. Whenever I hear the phrase “scrap the whole system”, or we need to revamp everything, my ears sort of perk up. And I think that, using my own background and the place that I come from, that I wanted to put out a different perspective. That instead of blaming the tests or blaming the students themselves, that there is a real chance for people like me and for people from those communities to reach up and get their social mobility. Because there’s sometimes some fatalism that occurs where people feel like because the system’s rigged or they’re told the system is rigged, that they can’t move up. And I think that itself is kind of a dangerous [cross talk].
Rich Helppie:
I can understand that. One of the charitable causes near and dear to my heart is the mentoring of students, many of whom have never had a family member go to higher education, heavily minority weighted, maybe 60%, but finding out that there are standards and with the right coaching and such that they can achieve. But in your article, you say activists argue standardized tests must be discontinued to dismantle white supremacy and look, it worked for you. But I think you’re making an argument along a class line versus a racial line. So what kind of feedback have you gotten? What kind of reception have people giving you a pro or con?
Sean Pigeon:
Well, unsurprisingly, I’ve gotten some people that have reached out to me that are in favor of what I wrote and are against it. It’s actually interesting. I got two high schoolers that messaged me. And one of them said that what I had said was really empowering to them and that they wish that they’d heard more of that when they were going through their admissions process. And then I heard it from another junior, who’s going through the process themselves right now, who said that they completely disagree with what I said. So I think that there’s split opinions even amongst high schoolers themselves. But one of the reasons why I think this is an important topic to discuss is because I do think that the overwhelming emphasis right now is on racial discrimination. And while I think a lot of that gets caught up in the kind of class problems that some people from low income communities have, I think that it’s evidenced by the numbers, at least, that the class distinctions here are the ones that are driving most of this difference. So for instance, the people who come from families from the bottom 20th percentile, so people making under 20K a year, historically score the worst on these standardized tests. Whereas people from families who make $200,000 and more score in the highest quintile. And that’s, in some ways, unsurprising because [inaudible] and people who have those kinds of means are able to spend more time learning the system. But I think that focusing too much on the problems of academic sorting, don’t allow us to look at some of the benefits of people not going, for instance, to the best schools, but they are going to, and they are raising, their standard and they’re raising their lot in life. And those are really important success stories to highlight.
Rich Helppie:
I understand what you’re saying, although I don’t think it can be denied that some of what the critics will say about standardized testing is that you’re trying to measure a student’s readiness for higher education, but their experience in life is going to impact that. So we have a young person that grows up in rural Montana. And part of that test is how to get around New York, riding the subway system, or you take an urban child out of Houston and you ask questions that someone that grows apples in the Pacific Northwest might know, I can see where the cultural bias in the test does come from where people originate. That seems to make sense doesn’t it?
Sean Pigeon:
Of course it does. And there’s a paradigmatic example of this in the SAT itself, which is that there used to be an analogies part of the SAT where they had this question that said “a runner is to marathon like an oarsman is to what?”, and if a person doesn’t know about rowing, so for instance, I don’t know anything about rowing. I’ve never been on a sailing team, it’d be very difficult to answer that. And in fact, we did see that there was a big disparity between people that were of minorities and people of color weren’t able to answer that question because they didn’t have that context. However, what we’re seeing is that, one, a lot of the SAT itself has been redesigned to try to minimize those effects. So there’s been, importantly, driven by the SAT and within internal reviews to make sure that those cultural biases don’t rear themselves as much in the test, but also that the majority of the disparity is driven by the math section and not by the vocabulary and not by the reading sections. And I think that at that point, we can start looking to what are the educational systems that people are having when they’re in elementary school and high school, that’s driving some of these differences. Rather than assigning the blame to cultural or to racial differences that I think sometimes obscures the problem.
Rich Helppie:
Well, I think that’s a very valid point. And I think you say that in your article in USA Today, you say that it’s less about the tests and more about high school’s failure to properly educate. I mean I can tell you something I’ve witnessed personally, Wayne State University, which is a state university in Detroit, Michigan, the number one class they had for students coming out of Detroit Public School System was remedial math. I’m talking basic arithmetic, and a couple of professors took it upon themselves to teach higher math to Detroit Public School students and give them the opportunity to learn and somebody motivated to teach them. They were amazing. They were blew past me and I’m above average in math. So what your point is, that I think you’ve made in your article, is that blaming the test isn’t helping anyone, and that math is math.
Sean Pigeon:
Yes, and I would also say that when we say the words “standardized tests”, we need to be a bit more specific about what we mean. Because there’s two different types of tests, there’s achievement tests, which are the kind of tests that we take in high school that is, have you read the book, what was the main character’s name, what was his mother’s name, things to that effect. And then there’s aptitude tests, which are like the SAT and the ACT, which are theoretically projecting performance. So it’s not about what you know, it’s theoretically about what you do, what you’re supposed to do, be able to do it in the future. But aptitude tests are built on achievement tests. You first have to have enough information about math to be able to assess a person’s ability to do it in the future. And so I do think that there’s a real lacking in those kinds of basic foundational work in order to be able, for the aptitude test to be able to work. We have to first address these achievement problems.
Rich Helppie:
Well, if I could draw the parallel then, an aptitude test might be more akin to measuring a student athlete and whether they can run and jump and have strength and vision and those types of things. They think that person would be a good athlete. And then how did they actually do when they competed? It is that kind of the parallel? Is that a good parallel?
Sean Pigeon:
Very much so. In the NFL, they have the tape, which is what you’ve done in college. And then they have the combine, which is where they measure how fast someone runs, their lateral quickness. And that’s very much more the aptitudes, which is how much can we predict this person going to the future. But if a person was poorly trained by their coaches and throughout time, it’s going to have an impact on their ability to run those drills. There was a very interesting piece that came out, a news article that came out, that’s to your point earlier about Wayne State, which is that a public school in Baltimore, the GPA of the students there was so low that a person with a 0.13 GPA, which is they had passed three classes in four years, was still in the 62nd percentile of students there. And that puts people at a real disadvantage when coming at to these aptitude tests for colleges, because it just doesn’t put them in a position to succeed. And I think that that’s really where a lot of our focus needs to be had.
Rich Helppie:
Right. And I think you’ve made the point in your article that tests aren’t designed to be pleasant. They’re stressful, they’re hard. And I know that my experience in mentoring young people is that those that work hard and achieve have a sense of inner satisfaction and build up a core system. But we do need to be attentive to great minds and great talent, no matter what their starting point is. And so I think, [inaudible] that’s reasonably easy to say, yep, that’s objective, unless things get really out of hand, two plus two is four, physics works the way physics works, the airplane flies because of simple math. Those are pretty inarguable, I would hope.
Sean Pigeon:
You’re not going to have an arguement from me.
Rich Helppie:
I actually tried to get people to agree one time on the law of gravity and failed. So anything can be said, we’re pretty divided. But then let’s look at things like geography. Is there a racial or a class way to ask where Russia is located on a map or what the capital of Kansas is? Is there really a difference? And is that part of the test, that kind of basic world knowledge?
Sean Pigeon:
I think that where we would find some of that coming up would be in the essay portions of the test, for instance. So the essay portions of the test are where a person’s general ability to write is being assessed. And there are certain, perhaps some metrics there that would be more difficult to quantify. And so having basic knowledge of geography, of basic knowledge of, for instance, the news or political events, would be useful. And in that sense, there could be a skewed bias by the reader if a reader, perhaps, doesn’t agree with what a person’s writing or doesn’t agree with the person’s writing style, that could creep up into the test. But I would mention that not only has the SAT taken measures to do so, for instance, they’re now canceling the writing exam or the writing portion of their exam. But this move towards saying the academic sorting doesn’t help minorities, I think is a difficult one to swallow in some ways. For instance, there’s evidence that if we have neutral race, neutral testing, that minorities actually do better. And there’s a new study from out in Florida, which said that when they had a race neutral testing of math and of linguistic ability and writing ability that the number of Hispanic and black students actually doubled because of it. I’m not willing to go down the route that all of these kinds of factors are things that minorities can’t master or that people from low income can’t master. Because taking away those opportunities just takes away the ability for people like me that came from low income areas. That we can’t go to Rome or [inaudible], we can’t go to summer in a foreign country or go through like expensive internships, those are really crucial markers for someone to be able to prove themselves.
Rich Helppie:
It’d be like, if you have somebody that could excel at track or wrestling, something that’s an individual sport, but they were denied the opportunity to excel because we’re not going to keep track of wins and losses and how fast you ran. People wouldn’t begin to get a sense of their own talents. And that’s, frankly, part of growing up is to figure out what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. If you, for example, go to major league baseball, you will not find my name in there.
Sean Pigeon:
I can look through them, but I’ll take your word for it.
Rich Helppie:
Figured out a long time ago, I lack the talent to do that. But Sean, one of the touchy areas really has got to be vocabulary, because different cultures, different ethnicities use different words, different slang. If you’ve ever been to Hawaii, you find they basically mix it all in there. It’s English and Japanese and Hawaiian and Chinese, a little Portuguese and some stuff that I don’t know where it came from, but it it’s a different way of communicating. So vocabulary, you’ve got to say that’s got some kind of class distinction or ethnic distinction or could it be argued, a dictionary is a dictionary and we all need to learn the same dictionary?
Sean Pigeon:
This is a very strong point. And I do want to say that there is certainly gains to be made and there are things that we can do better in the future. I don’t think that there’s a perfect system available, but there is certainly a more perfect system than the current one that we have. So for instance, I do think the SAT publishing a dictionary of the words that they’ll use and the words that they think would be likely to show up on the test would be a real step in the right direction. Because that would allow people to at least have a sense of what will or will not be on a vocabulary portion of the test.
Rich Helppie:
Does this spill over into advanced placement courses in high schools? And I know that in recent years it was determined that the top students in the United States, we could compete with anybody in the world. And we’ve had economic challenges from Japan, China, the [inaudible] countries, and so forth. And it was determined that our top students are among the best in the world. But on the average we didn’t do that great. Is giving up advanced placement, that I’ve read about like in New York and elsewhere, is that at risk of-even Bill Mahler says-not nurturing our best and brightest?
Sean Pigeon:
I do think that the situation regarding AP tests is emblematic of this larger problem, but sort of in a unique way. So AP tests are one of those achievement tests that I was talking about earlier, in which you try to assess whether a person is learning the material. And there’s been a move against advanced placement tests for that very reason, which is that they’re not evenly distributed across all school districts. And that it’s difficult for a school district like Baltimore, like I was just talking about, to have an AP test program at all. Which may disadvantage their chances of getting into higher education. However, there are private elite high schools that don’t use AP exams and they don’t use AP tests or they offer a limited selection of them because they already know that universities trust their regular programs. So for instance, Dell Barton is, essentially, a feeder school for a lot of Ivy leagues-Phillips Exeter or Andover. These are very, very expensive, very, very difficult to get into, almost university lite.
Rich Helppie:
High-end, private college prep schools.
Sean Pigeon:
Exactly. And they don’t offer every advanced placement test in the world or every advanced placement course. And if we were to take them all away, then schools like Yale and Harvard and a lot of these other places, even like Georgetown and schools like that would still trust Delbarton. And they would still trust Phillips Exeter because they know those schools, they know the people that come out of those schools. But if a place like where I come from in Texas, that I didn’t go to a school that anyone knows, the AP test is a real way for me to be able to show that I can do the material and I know how to study, and I know how to prove some academic excellence. So AP tests are actually a very good example, I think-and I’m glad that you brought it up-of the way in which they do kind of set a level playing field for even people that aren’t at those kinds of very, very elite university lite or university feeder schools, to prove themselves.
Rich Helppie:
I have never thought about it that way. And I think that is one of the compelling arguments right there, because I know the school system-it’s Wayne Memorial High School, Wayne, Michigan, that I’ve been involved with for many years-our students would not have a chance to distinguish themselves if they could not say, look what I did on my standardized testing and here’s what I did to take advantage of the advanced placement courses that were available to me. And through our program, we’ve had young men and women going to places like Stanford and Yale and Harvard and the University of Michigan and Penn State and so forth, as well as, we don’t force kids to go for college, but they’re graduating with real work skills or at least a better sense of being able to achieve a goal. I want to kind of shift a little bit here. You make a good point. And I think it’s a really powerful one, that rich parents, people that are connected, it doesn’t matter what the standards are, they’re coming. It doesn’t matter if it’s a test or holistic-in fact, I would think not taking the test, it might be an advantage if their child maybe wasn’t qualified.
Sean Pigeon:
I would say very much so. Yes. It’s a little bit like looping back around to schools like Exeter. 30% of people that go to Exeter go to an Ivy league college after they graduate. And it’s no surprise, I think, that in the recent years we’ve seen families get busted for literally bribing admissions officers. Literally creating false slots in like lacrosse teams or track teams in order to be able to slot these people in. It’s a natural parental urge to want to do well and have one’s children do well. And I’m not going to fault the urge itself, but those kinds of problems are going to crop up, I think. And I think they’ll crop up with more regularity if the entire system is based on a holistic, soft skills sort of measurement. The University of Los Angeles-UCLA-had over 165,000 applicants to their undergraduate program last year. I mean, that’s so many people that they’re looking for measurements that are kind of easy for the admissions council to look at. They’re looking for heuristics. And one of those is going to be whether one has gone to a prestigious high school, but if it’s not that, it’s going to be something else. I think that standardized metrics are a lot more of a firmer ground for people like me and for people that are even of a different minority or a different race than in the majority to grasp and get their feet on.
Rich Helppie:
No, that makes sense that UCLA could look at it and say, look, we have this student here who went to this great school and they graduated. So I know where they probably can be. They look at someone else here that maybe went to a disadvantaged place. They think, I don’t know, but whoa, look at those SAT scores, and look at the ACT, and look at this essay. I don’t know how they did it, but they’re ready for us. So I think you make a strong point for a way for a disadvantaged student to maybe get noticed.
Sean Pigeon:
I also want to flag a little bit that there are places in the University of California system that are thinking of doing away with the A through F grading system. I don’t think that it’s just about the SATs. I don’t think my piece is intended to be just about SATs or ACTs. It’s about the idea that academic sorting and having a way for say, advanced math classes around the country being considered for the chopping block. And I think that that’s also another concern, because it’s not just about one test, this isn’t just about giving students one essay to write. There’s an entire four years worth of work. And that really encompasses more of what a student is able to do in high school. But under the auspices of the same arguments that are being made against the SAT are also being made against A through F grading and saying that instead of having a 4.0 GPA or a 3.5 GPA, we should just do letters of recommendation or soft measurement of skills, which I think is also a dangerous way of setting a precedent going forward.
Rich Helppie:
Horribly dangerous in that if the philosophy of the instructor that you need the recommendation from differs from your point of view, that is a deadly collision. Also the thing with the A through F grades are tough, but it also helps people understand that if you’re having a hard time grasping mathematics, but your art teacher thinks you’re wonderful, that’s kind of a clue about where you might want to be spending your time. Similarly, if you’re a whiz at math and you’re like me, you can’t draw, but you’re pretty good at math and words, that kind of tells you, you might want to head in a different direction.
Sean, one of the things that you said when you closed your column, and I really liked this and I’m just going read it verbatim, if you don’t mind, because I think it’s so good. You say, “no, a student’s SAT or GPA is not the only thing that matters”. And this is what I really like, “character, leadership, and kindness matter far more in life”. I thought that showed a lot of wisdom. And then you go on and say, “just because a test doesn’t tell us everything about a person doesn’t mean it is useless, and it certainly doesn’t make us racist. But if schools abandon these important benchmarks, it will certainly become classist”. I think you’ve laid out a case for that. Sean, what didn’t we cover today that perhaps we should have discussed?
Sean Pigeon:
Well, the only other thing that I would want to put out there is that I think that there are ways for us to ameliorate the situation that we’re talking about. There are disadvantages that people that come from low income backgrounds, and there are disadvantages that people come from communities of color or minorities have. And there is, I think, a way forward that doesn’t just require us to accept the status quo system. I really think that grade inflation across the nation has happened in a way that is detrimental to a person’s ability to stand out. It’s pretty well-documented that people who used to be a C student-that used to be you’re an average student. And now if you’re a B plus student, that means you’re average, or if you’re a B student it means you’re average. So that kind of has been creeping up over time. And I think that that has devalued the grading system that we do have and made it so that these individual tests, whether it be the SAT or the ACT, are way more important than they used to be. I remember my dad talking to me about it and he said, I only took the SAT once and I just kept moving on. So I would say that there are ways of getting at this problem in a different way than some of the people that I’m pushing back against. And I don’t want us to also be fatalistic in the other way of throwing up our hands and saying, there’s nothing else that we can do, this is the best system that’s possible.
Rich Helppie:
No, I think that you strike a lot of balance there and we do at long last have a really good discussion about race in America and that we’ve covered, from a number of angles, and that there have been groups throughout our history that have been disadvantaged by law. During my lifetime, it was perfectly legal to deny a black man or woman public accommodations. You could do that and the law enforcement would back you up because that was the law. We were just horribly wrong, and these stains take a long time to resolve, but I’m hopeful that we can resolve that through coming together on common policy. We can resolve it by coming through on what we can agree is a fair standard and a fair shot for everybody to benefit from and participate in the society. And I think that’s what your column in USA Today said, if I’m not mistaken. I hope I’m not missing.
Sean Pigeon:
It’s very true. And I totally agree with all those points. I think that there is a common ground to be had on this issue. And I think that there’s a real way to move forward in ameliorating these differences over time. It will take some time, but it’s a part of a broader movement towards a greater equal opportunity, a more realized, equal opportunity.
Rich Helppie:
Sean, any closing thoughts for our audience today?
Sean Pigeon:
Only that I think that this issue is really important, even though I don’t think it gets a lot of media coverage. And that sometimes just having a sensible policy and thinking through these issues in a non-partisan way is a really important way to help our kids achieve the best that they can.
Rich Helppie:
Great. This is Rich Helppie. We’ve been talking today with Sean-Michael Pigeon. He was author of a column in USA Today talking about standardized testing and the negative impacts on disadvantaged students as they prepare for college. An interesting perspective, I’m sure will generate a lot of great conversation around it. So Sean, thank you again for being with us. And this is Rich Helppie signing off.
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