Record-low SAT scores a wake-up call

http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/21/opinion/bennett-education/index.html

by bconway • 15 years ago

17 20 15 years ago

> The results, they say, "reflect the record size and diversity of the pool of test-takers. As more students aim for college and take the exam, it tends to drag down average scores."

> 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.

Vivtek6• 15 years ago

Probably? The editor's note tells you straight up: William J. Bennett is the Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute. He was U.S. secretary of education from 1985 to 1988 and was director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George H.W. Bush.

His job is to push an agenda.

Vivtek6• 15 years ago

Oh, the Claremont Institute are real winners, too. "The Benefits of Giving Wisely": Did you know you can support the Claremont Institute with gifts other than cash that will allow you to increase discretionary income, eliminate estate and capital gains taxes, and redirect tax dollars to the Claremont Institute?

You can use your wealth to dodge taxes, give guys like Bill Bennett cushy Washington jobs, and make sure the deficit will bring the government down, all at the same time!

From their About page: To recover the founding principles in our political life means recovering a limited and accountable government that respects private property, promotes stable family life, and maintains a strong national defense.

So: pro-property, anti-gay, and pro-war. Those are the founding principles they most fervently like; the rest are inconsequential.

Also, they have two other sites; Victory Over Terror (avot.org, which seems to be down at the DNS level) and Missile Threat. So all in all, these guys are pretty much responsible for everything that's worst in American politics right now, and it really, really pisses me off that CNN publishes this screed as written by a "CNN Contributor" instead of "paid political shill for the oligarchy", which would be a lot more honest.

Grar!

Hyena• 15 years ago

I really wish people took this possibility, which is the College Board's position, more seriously before turning to whatever their favored educational hobby-horse is.

seagaia• 15 years ago

I really wish there would be some way that schools would stop having to worry about these stupid test scores. Hearing "Education" and "SAT" together makes me cringe.

byoung2• 15 years ago

I think the economy could be in part to blame for the drop in test scores. When the economy is good, parents tend to pay for SAT prep classes. Since 2008, with the downturn in the economy, fewer parents have been willing/able to shell out $1000 or more on SAT classes. Granted, this would only have a small effect on the overall test-taking population, but then again, we're only talking about a 13 point drop

mchusma• 15 years ago

There is also the increasing tendency for children to take the SAT a few times a practice. While this may help maximize one score, it may push the average down. Speculation on my part, though.

mquander• 15 years ago

That doesn't make much sense to me. If you assume that their score tends to improve when taking the test more than once, which seems reasonable, then taking it more would push the average higher.

Vivtek6• 15 years ago

Oh, good God, I have never read a more slanted article in my life. No mention whatsoever is made of the catastrophic No Child Left Behind Act, which eviscerates any attempt to teach children anything substantial. The fact that their reading comprehension scores are falling is no surprise at all - if they're left to simply read and learn to love reading (which is the only way to read well) their school is put on academic probation and federal funding is cut off.

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.

Jun82• 15 years ago

I think neither the ruthless testing culture glorifying route learning (as in Turkey, China, Japan) nor the, anything goes, "every child is special", "education is more than scores" approach is the correct or complete answer (I suffered through the first, entered a life-determining exam when I was 12, and experienced the second for 9 years in the US, while TAing during my PhD). If you haven't, please watch Waiting for Superman, the parts about the inner city schools is the main point, but there's a small section on how even suburban schools are falling behind.

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.

briandear2• 15 years ago

No danger from the Chinese kids. I tutor rich Chinese students in SAT and they routinely get hammered by the SAT Critical Reading and the Writing sections. They'll ace the math, but until their language and critical thinking skills improve, there isn't much danger there. The testing machine culture of China (and Korea, Japan) doesn't reward critical thinking, so as a result, those students are far behind their American counterparts once they get out of the memorization paradigm. Only 1 of my students scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT and she spent years in the US and didn't go through the Chinese educational system. Most of my Chinese students tend to score around 1800-1900 total, with scores in the 700s for math and the 500s for critical reading and writing. I don't have any data on the Indian students..

Jun82• 15 years ago

Good point, although I meant, perhaps a little tangentially to the post, kids getting schooled in China and India (i.e. 0'the generation, those coming to teh US for higher eductaion). In the tech sector, they are gobbling up jobs, as we all know. Yet in higher ranking positions, especially the number of Chinese fall off dramatically, most probably due to the factors you cite.

coreyo• 15 years ago

So they significantly change the scoring scheme in 2004/2005 and scores are different now! WOW!

vessenes• 15 years ago

Along with the handwaving around what broadening a pool of applicants does to the mean, (and surely around here we would understand that -- consider more homepage viewers lowering conversion rates), there is no mention of the change in scoring systems for SAT II; maybe these are accounted for (well not the first), there's just no way to know.

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.

jonnathanson2• 15 years ago

This article reveals a shaky grasp of statistics and demographics. For instance:

>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?

Vivtek6• 15 years ago

This article reveals a very questionable grasp of statistics and demographics.

This article reveals a great deal of skill exploiting the reader's questionable grasp of statistics and demographics - indeed, it's a masterful work.

Your point on increasing education spending is very well-taken! I hadn't even noticed how he slipped that in there.

Honestly, a point-by-point analysis of the rhetoric in this piece would be really informative.

jonnathanson2• 15 years ago

"This article reveals a great deal of skill exploiting the reader's questionable grasp of statistics and demographics - indeed, it's a masterful work."

Perhaps, but I'm not sure if that's intentional. From the tone of the writing, it sounds like the author simply consulted a bunch of subject-matter experts, then regurgitated their talking points. I'm not convinced he is fully aware of what he's doing.

EDIT: Interesting point, and well taken.

briandear2• 15 years ago

When you increase the test taking pool and there is an increasing number of ESL students taking the exam, average scores are going to drop. The problem isn't legislation like the Ted Kenney/GW Bush No Child Left Behind, it's that the important critical thinking and higher level reading skills required are being ignored in lieu of an increased focus on just getting kids to pass minimum standards. As a result, the majority of educational initiatives are aimed at the lower end of the educational achievement bell curve at the expense of the true "college bound" student.

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.

Vivtek6• 15 years ago

Why do you think NCLB isn't a problem, when it's specifically the cutoff of federal funding mandated by NCLB that causes that increased focus on getting kids to pass minimum standards in the first place? NCLB doesn't care about - or measure - critical thinking or higher level reading skills.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you on your larger point, by any means.

Incidentally, could you get in touch by email, if you have a moment? My wife is a physics instructor and has seriously been considering teaching/SAT prep in China or elsewhere abroad, and I'd be interested in finding out how you got into it.

Record-low SAT scores a wake-up call

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