FairTest
National Center for Fair & Open Testing
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
cell (239) 699-0468
SAT SCORE TREND REMAINS FLAT;
TEST-FIXATED SCHOOL POLICIES HAVE NOT IMPROVED COLLEGE READINESS
EVEN AS MEASURED BY OTHER STANDARDIZED EXAMS
SAT scores for the nation’s high school seniors continue to stagnate according to data being released on Tuesday by the test’s sponsor, the College Board. Overall SAT averages have dropped by 21 points since 2006 when the test was last revised. Gaps between racial groups increased, often significantly over that period.
Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), said, “Proponents of ‘No Child Left Behind,’ ‘Race to the Top,’ and similar state-level programs promised the testing focus would boost college readiness while narrowing score gaps between groups. The data show a total failure according to their own measures. Doubling down on unsuccessful policies with more high-stakes K-12 testing, as Common Core exam proponents propose, is an exercise in futility, not meaningful school improvement. Nor will revising the SAT, as currently planned, address the nation’s underlying educational issues.”
Schaeffer continued, “At the same time, the number of schools dropping SAT and ACT admissions exams requirements has soared. This year at least 14 more colleges and universities have adopted test-optional policies for all or many applicants.” A list of more than 840 such bachelor-degree granting institutions is posted at http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional
2014 COLLEGE-BOUND SENIORS SAT SCORES — with score changes from 2006*
READING MATH WRITING TOTAL
ALL TEST-TAKERS 497 (- 6) 513 (- 5) 487 (-10) 1497 (-21)
* High school graduates in the class of 2006 were the first to take the SAT “Writing” Test. The “No Child Left Behind” mandate to test every child in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school went into effect in the 2005-2006 academic year.
More details on 2014 SAT score trends and an extended analysis will be posted at fairtest.org after the College Board’s public release of the results
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s no wonder that NCLB failed: it was based on flawed model of how literacy develops. Kids need to know things to have literacy. Unfortunately NCLB stripped “learning things” out of the curriculum. Instead elementary school became about practicing things –especially ineffectual reading strategies. We need to return to common-sense traditional model of schooling and carefully and continuously tweak it (a la Toyota and German manufacturers) to gradually improve quality, not disrupt it with another radical and ill-conceived experiment like CCSS.
Willa Cather on America’s penchant for rash experimentation and shabby construction:
“I happened to be in a sprawling overgrown West-coast city which was in the throes of rapid development –it ran about the shore, stumbling all over itself and finally tumbled untidily into the sea…I had come West in the middle of the year to take a position in the college –a college that was experimental and unsubstantial as everything else in the place. I found lodgings in an apartment-hotel, wretchedly built and falling to pieces, although it was new.”
I am finding more and more students with vacant looks in their eyes every time I ask a simple knowledge-based question. I find that year after year I have to keep lowering my expectations for what a 13 or 14 year old should know. This will be the legacy of the test-and-punish federal education regime.
At this point, the evidence is in and it is painting a very bleak picture of complete failure. NCLB should be repealed, not re-written. ABCC = Anything But Common Core.
There’s a sad & mystifying cluelessness among young folk. I asked a HS student what electives s/he registered for, and a college junior what summer school course she signed up for (ONE course!) and each blithely told me they didn’t remember. It makes me want to shout, “This is Your Life, dammit, what are you waiting for?!”
Our solons in DC decided that illiteracy and ignorance were both problems, but that the illiteracy problem had to be solved before the ignorance problem. There’s a surface plausibility to this, no? So we stopped teaching knowledge (solving the ignorance problem) and went full steam-ahead with mostly-ineffectual methods of tackling the literacy problem (e.g. “Find the main idea of this third rate, content-lite story that has no connection to anything else we’re doing in school”). The result? Minimal literacy and vast ignorance. Ironically, if Kennedy, Miller and the other authors of NCLB had decreed that we tackle the ignorance problem first, the literacy problem would have been solved too. The fault probably really lies at the feet of the education “experts” who advised our solons.
This class of SAT test takers are probably one of the first to have been “educated” under NCLB and RTTT.
Doesn’t that tell us something?
Okay, I’ll be the devil’s advocate. Have the number of students taking the tests increased? Are students who maybe didn’t take college entrance exams in the past now taking them? That could account for “stagnate”, could it not? A bigger group so more coming in lower?
It’s a press release. The only proper way to read it is as the devil’s advocate.
I agree: We could argue that more students are taking the SAT and because of this, it is a great accomplishment that the scores are flat. That’s a perfectly reasonable argument.
Wait a minute: Wasn’t the ACT flat as well?
I don’t know. I don’t know that it’s a great accomplishment and I don’t even know if more people taking the SAT/ACT is the right goal.
But, I read once that high school scores were/are flat because more people stay in high school and that seems to be true. If the very bottom were dropping out the scores would be higher.
I think both sides could use this. Ed reformers would say “Nation At Risk!”, “alarm bells should be clanging!” (that ‘alarm bells” is an actual quote) and Fairtest could say “no growth, so test-based reform failed”
Yes. Seems like good argument for eliminating the useless SAT.
I think standardized tests provide a good alternative way for students to demonstrate thier academic abilities.
I’ve also often wondered if democratization affects “scores.” The 21-point drop probably represents 3 multiple-choice questions out of 80 or so.
Elliot Eisner, Stanford professor, wrote about the decline in SAT scores from 1968 to 1980 in The Educational Imagination 2ed c1985 Macmillan: “the SAT is designed to measure aptitudes for college work; it was not designed to assess the quality of secondary school programs.”
“Therefore it is not surprising that the public is often in a poor position to interpret intelligently the meaning of the information it is given.”
Colleges are dropping the ACT and SAT requirement. This is simple dumbing it down. The kids are not as able to do it, even though they keep “recentering” the scores. Colleges simply want paying customers, and once they get them to college, it is all about retention. You should read, “Generation X Goes to College” or watch the documentary “Declining by Degrees.” The whole system (at least undergraduate and below) is becoming a joke. The graduate classes are mostly filled with foreigners from overseas. What does this tell you? American kids (except for a few outliers) aren’t able or or not willing to handle graduate engineering programs. Very sad.
More likely the overseas students contribute to the bottom line more than U.S. students. 20 years ago, Trig was an advanced course few took and Calculus had to be taken at a local college. Now, it is not unusual to find a calculus class at a high school. There is too much anti-youth ranting going on. I returned to college after 25+ years and found the young people much more focused on academics than in my beer swilling youth. The young students are paying MUCH more and under heavy debt loads. They were very disciplined and serious. The level of knowledge and expectations much higher. I know many students who can handle grad engineering, but lack resources or do not see a future when PhDs are making lattes at Starbucks.
MathVale,
Generally speaking resources and underemployment are not an issue for graduate students in engenering (or economics), at least at the Ph.D. level. All of my department’s Ph.D. students are not on ether a fellowship or a teaching assistantship which pays tuition and provides enough funding for a modest living. After graduation our students, at least, all take jobs for which a Ph.D. in economics is a stated job requirement.
1. Selective colleges care more about a student’s transcript than SAT/ACT scores.
2. What this tells me is that universities welcome foreign students who will pay “full freight,” and isn’t it great that the US still has programs that are world magnets?
3. Mike, I don’t know where you are, but colleges like Lafayayette are still developing fine engineers.
4. Many engineers pursue MBA degrees . . . What does that tell us?
“A SAT ACT”
Education reform
A SAT ACT to follow.
Stag nation’s the norm
And promises hollow