The College Board, as always, hung a smiley face on it, but the latest SAT results are a real bummer.??Overall scores flat or down. Almost every sub-group flat or down. Gaps widening a bit by race, income, parental education. Indeed, the tidiest relationships and smoothest curves are those that continue--as they have for as long as anyone can remember--to show the steady upward progression of average SAT scores (pdf) as family incomes and parents' education rise. Also see here (pdf), especially Table 11.
Now recall edition after edition of NAEP results also showing 12th grade scores stagnant or declining.
Now recall the recent ACT report indicating that barely one in four of the high school students taking that organization's tests are fully prepared for college-level academic work.
Now recall our flat high-school graduation rate.
Now please sing out if you've spotted any good news regarding the readiness of American adolescents to face successfully the challenges of higher education, the workforce, adulthood and citizenship. I can't find it. (OK, OK, I found one: Asian-American SAT scores are up again.)
What does this say about 26 years of education reforming since A Nation at Risk? For starters, it says the reform efforts haven't seriously penetrated our high schools. Then it says that current moves (e.g., the "Common Core" national standards project of the governors and chiefs) to align high-school exit expectations to college and workforce readiness are urgently needed, indeed long overdue. But then it must cause one to ask what is going to give those expectations traction? Will real states use them to confer and withhold diplomas? Will real colleges use them for admissions purposes? Will real employers base hiring decisions on them? This is pretty much what did not happen with Achieve's praiseworthy "American Diploma Project."
If there's no traction from the standards, where will it come from? What will cause the typical U.S. high-school student to study harder and learn more? What is going to make his/her teachers more effective? School more demanding? Parents more engaged?
The College Board can smile all it wants to. Nobody else should.
Image from The College Board. See a easier-to-read pdf of it here.
