Record-low SAT scores a wake-up call

>Since when has diversity and more students taking the test become a legitimate excuse for bad scores?

Actually, diversity is a very big factor. Especially language diversity. Bilingual households have proliferated dramatically in the last few decades, and bilingual students have placed enormous strains on already resource-poor public schools trying to push standardized curricula on increasingly large classes of students. And you'd fully expect to see English test scores declining, on average, as more English-as-a-second-language students start entering the test-taking population.

>A conservative certainly could not get away with blaming falling test scores on diversity. Imagine the outcry.

Ugh. Here he's conflating "diversity" the political buzzword with diversity the demographic measurement.

No one is "blaming" diversity for declining performance, or claiming that we don't want diverse students to succeed. Diversity is a great thing. But it can have a very real, though hopefully corrigible, effect on test metrics. You're going to see some lower median scores as we wait for ESL/bilingual populations to acculturate over a generation or two. That's a fact of our demography, not a value judgment on said demography.

>As the United States increases education spending, our students' scores should not be getting worse.

Perhaps, but this begs for further analytical consideration. First of all, is educational spending actually increasing year over year, accounting for inflation? If so, where is it being allocated? Bear in mind that population is also increasing, and as it increases (and as its demography shifts), it's going to place increasing strains on the public schooling system. Has the school system grown in accordance with population growth? I would find that very hard to believe, especially with all the budget cuts at the national, state, and local level over the last five or six years.

>"The solution, Brill says, is to overhaul the public school education system in order to motivate and inspire better teachers."

That's a fine and dandy solution on a case-by-case basis, but is it scalable? Do we have the resources, and will the demographics support, a scaling up of the Harlem Success I story? Do we even have enough great teachers to ensure that every student in a growing population is served by great teachers? The school system needs thorough reconsideration, and perhaps even an "overhaul." But what's the rollout plan? Theory is great, but what about implementation? What's the halfway point between naively idealistic and depressingly pragmatic?

> Since when has diversity and more students taking the test become a legitimate excuse for bad scores?

Um... if the top 20% of students took the test in 1995, and now the top 40% of students take the test, then we've made incredibly good progress if the average score in 2011 is the same as it was in 1995. (Note: I made up the percentages, as I don't know the real numbers, but undoubtedly it's increased.)

The author of the article is either an idiot or pushing an agenda. Probably the latter.

The author - who was a drug czar, which hardly makes him an expert on anything education-oriented [edit - whoops, he was the sec'y of education, my bad - I just saw "Drug" and freaked] - complains that conservatives couldn't say that diversity is at fault. As though the College Board were made up of flaming liberals, apparently; the entire piece is full of righteous indignation at the vast sums of money Americans are forced to spend on liberal teacher's unions, which are clearly at fault.

This is the other half of the one-two punch. NCLB makes it impossible for schools to function, then assholes like this one say, "See? Public schools are a waste of our hard-earned money!" This is no different from drowning any other part of government in the bathtub, and it's truly dismaying not only to see CNN print it as though this guy were qualified or in any way disinterested, but for it to appear here on HNN where it can raise my blood pressure.

Unfortunately, due to globalization US kids, whatever their thoughts about education are, are up against Indian and Chinese competition, who went through the testing machine.

It's unfortunate, because some really great data about how well students in the US are doing, adjusted for measures that would allow longitudinal comparison would be, you know, useful.

As it is, all we learned is that this guy hates teacher's unions, and liked "waiting for superman", but I could have guessed that from his Bio.

There's also a push that "every child could/should go to college" as opposed to the old days when vocational and trade programs were more prominent. As a result more kids that have no interest or ability to succeed in college are taking the SAT. It's simple -- with a larger sample size, you'll have more low scores. However, one critical area that is being ignored is that the College Board routinely re-centers scores. The real question isn't what the reported scores are -- it's the difference in the raw test scores that are the key. I would argue that the raw scores are probably just the same as they've always been -- however if more people score "above average" then of course, the College Board will have to make the "average" score more average. One might be able to make the case that scores are actually higher now than they were in 1995 and as a result the scaled scores have been adjusted to reflect this new average.

I am a high school teacher in Shanghai and do private SAT tutoring and have been studying and dealing with SAT scoring and preparation for many years -- I'm not noticing a decline in students as much as I'm noticing an increased reliance upon test prep -- which would skew the averages to be higher and result in the College Board adjusting the reported score/raw score in order for the test to maintain validity in the eyes of the colleges.

In reality, the SAT is not a valid test of anything other than the ability to take the SAT. I could teach almost anyone to "beat" the test. It really isn't a function of intelligence as much as strategy. But the College Board is in the business of selling tests and so they must create some score distribution as a means for universities to short-cut their admissions process. It's much easier to compare 20000 applications on basis of SAT/GPA than it would be to consider GPA and the full range of other indicators. While universities do consider those indicators -- it's usually only after making their private cuts based on some numeric rubric. That's the real tragedy -- not that the SAT scores are going down, but that the SAT scores are still being used at all. It would make much more sense to use Advanced Placement results since those are actual college level courses. The SAT II is also more valid since those tests are actually subject matter exams rather than some arbitrary gauge of critical thinking skills. However, the SAT has been adapting someone with more emphasis on real academic skills, but it's still a very beatable, very trainable test. It would be much more difficult to coach someone on beating the AP exam, since those test actual knowledge and application rather than just simple strategy. An increase of the AP program would cost hundreds of millions for schools and there's no way they'll do it because they're too busy teaching 10th graders how to read and making sure that kids learn plenty of political correctness.