South Carolina Young Adults Count
A comprehensive report on the lives of South Carolinians ages 18 to 29
A comprehensive report on the lives of South Carolinians ages 18 to 29
According to Geoffrey Holtz:
"A great deal has been written about the three-decade plunge in SAT scores. What caused it? How can we reverse it? Does it really even matter? The first reaction to the drop was that the increased diversity among the test takers - more minorities, women, and low-income students - was the likely cause. Unfortunately for this simple explanation, the mix of students taking the SAT has remained essentially stable since 1970. Furthermore, the number and proportion of high-scoring students has fallen even more precipitously. The decrease in high scores is certainly unrelated to the overall composition of test takers.
Answering other claims that the SAT itself was an inaccurate and incomplete gauge of student achievement, researchers Annegret Harnischfeger and David E. Wiley analyzed other standardized tests, including the American College Test (ACT), the Iowa testing program (used throughout Iowa and in other states), and the Minnesota Scholastic Aptitude Test (administered to nearly all high-school juniors in the state). Studying these exams from the sixties and seventies, they found a pattern of decline consistent with the SAT drop. What Harnischfeger and Wiley also discovered was that the higher grade levels showed steeper declines than lower grades, indicating that students weren't necessarily coming to school less equipped than were previous generations; they were falling further behind the more they moved through the school system. While the two researchers were careful to allow a variety of contributing causes for the overall drop, they nonetheless concluded that substantial enrollment declines in traditional subjects 'parallel closely the test score decline pattern.'
A survey released in the late eighties showed that 8 percent of seventeen-year-old white children were functionally illiterate in the U.S. as well as an astonishing forty-two percent of black children of the same age...The consequences of the poor education the Free Generation received reaches beyond U.S. borders. When the first International Mathematics Study was conducted in the early sixties, American educators were proud to find that the strongest 5 percent of our students were as proficient as the upper 5 percent of students anywhere in the world. When the second such test was given in 1981, the results showed a sad development. The highest-scoring 5 percent of the new generation were now in the bottom fourth of the international sample." (G. Holtz, pp. 120-121).
Acconding to David Berliner:
"Although the decline in average scores on the...SAT is real, it actually represents a triumph for American education. Former Education Secretary William Bennett and other conservatives repeatedly cite the decline in SAT scores as "proof" that students are dumber, teachers don't deliver, business is doomed to failure and our nation is at risk. But Bennett...has not been completely honest with the American people. He has neglected to mention that the SAT is an aptitude test, which predicts the future (in this case, college grades). The SAT does not assess the past, that is what an achievement test does.
Bennett has used the SAT as if it measured school achievement on a representative sample of high-school students, but it isn't designed for that. The SAT simply predicts the likelihood of success during the first year of college. There are no scales assessing social studies, history, art or music, and none on science. The test does not measure what kids have studied in school. By calling the test an achievement test Bennett violates the guidelines issued by the test developers and all the experts in assessment. But uninformed critics continue to interpret the test in an invalid way.
The conservative critics also say the average scores dropped 90 points between the early sixties and the mid-seventies, and that certainly scared a lot of Americans. However, those were not raw points but "scaled" points. Think of it this way: When a hockey team gets four goals, it gets a score of 4, when a football team makes four goals, it may get a score of 28, but it only scored four times. So the SAT didn't really go down 90 points, it dropped about seven raw score items, a loss of 5 percent over more than 30 years. That's not nearly as scary as a 90-point drop, and it seems unlikely that America has been ruined because of this small drop in correct answers to multiple-choice test items.
In fact, the drop is remarkably small, considering the fact that the graduating high-school students of 50 years ago, whose scores set a benchmark for the scores of today's students, were not ordinary people. They predominantly were from wealthy families living in the Northeast. Almost half of them had attended private schools, and most of them wanted to go to the Ivy schools such as Yale and Harvard. This elite group took the first SATs in 1941, a year when fewer than 40 percent of ordinary American youth graduated from high school. When America democratized higher education by opening up the doors of the universities to millions of middle- and working-class people, to black, brown, poor and rural people, SAT test scores dropped only 5 percent below those of the wealthy elite. It's a miracle how well ordinary American youth performed against the 1941 privileged classes. Its something for which Americans should be proud, a triumph for public education.
The change in the types of people who took the SAT accounted for most of the decline in scores that began in 1963. But the drop was predominantly in the verbal part of the test, which reflects the advent of television. The average young person raised after 1950 watched about 20,000 hours of TV before high-school graduation. In 1963 the first students raised with television began graduating from our high schools. Increased TV watching resulted in less reading and, consequently, some decline in verbal test scores.
America does, however, have valid tests to measure school achievement, notably the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, average NAEP-test scores are rock steady or show gains in reading, writing, science and math.
More importantly, however, the test scores remained steady or rose while the quality of life for American youth was going down. Currently, one in four young people lives below the official poverty level—the highest rate for all industrialized democracies. Increasingly, American mothers lack adequate prenatal care, so more American babies suffer from low birth weight. These same children receive less postnatal medical care than is available in other industrialized democracies. Increasingly, youth in this country live in single-parent households or families in which both parents work, making it more difficult to raise high-achieving children. Increasingly, American youth suffer the effects of violence and drugs in their neighborhoods. More youngsters than ever before have their values distorted by a media that promotes consumerism and sexuality. In spite of these deteriorating social conditions for youth, America's schools miraculously have maintained or improved achievement during the last 25 years. America should be proud of its teachers and public schools and ashamed of the inhospitable conditions created for raising children.
Scores on all major commercial standardized tests of achievement have risen in recent years. Tests such as the respected Iowa Test of Basic Skills, or ITBS, showed all-time high scores in the 1990s, and American youngsters busted through to even higher scores in the 1990s. Apparently America has been on a rising tide of school achievement. And no wonder—this spring the nation graduated from high school the largest number of students ever that had taken advanced placement (college credit) courses, the highest number ever to have a full academic schedule while in high school and the highest percent ever that planned to enter college. Not too shabby for a system reputed to be in disarray.
There is good news as well about average test scores for entrance to graduate school - either the general Graduate Record Exam or the specialized tests for law and business. Democratization of graduate education in the United States since the 1960s has meant that the number of college graduates taking these tests has risen by hundreds of percentage points. Nevertheless, the scores on all these tests went up. To open up educational opportunities in graduate school to millions of citizens with no loss of academic quality is another miracle. Apparently, the young people leaving college are smarter than the people who come to campus to interview them for jobs. Even IQ-test scores are up—with today's youth scoring about a 15 IQ points above their grandparents and about 7.5 IQ points higher than their parents. Today's youth apparently are more intelligent than the adults in their families.
Finally, in the international assessments of educational achievement (financed in part by the U.S. government), America is not nearly as bad off as the school critics would have you believe, though it is not likely that the nation will win Olympic gold for its academic performance. One of the problems is that Americans have decided not to work their children in school as hard as do parents in other nations, including a decision to have many less days of formal schooling (180) per year than either Japan (240) or South Korea (225). Furthermore, the United States has a higher rate of youth employment than many countries, including Germany and Japan. And often forgotten is that American youth start dating earlier and with much greater intensity than is true in most other nations. Less time in school, more time at work and incredible amounts of time allocated to dating preclude America's youth from winning the gold.
Nevertheless, in an international reading comparison conducted by the International Evaluation of Educational Achievement in 1992, America's 9-year-olds placed second, while America's 14-year-olds tied for second. The United States placed behind little Finland, a homogeneous nation with government supports for its families and little variation in wealth and poverty. While the United States did not perform as well in math and science, some states (Minnesota, North Dakota and Iowa) matched the top performing nations (Taiwan and South Korea). Nationwide, students from advantaged homes, white students and Asian-Americans all performed at world-class levels. Interestingly, Asian-American students outperform Asian students in Asia, suggesting that American schools work well for some of their students. Not surprisingly, the poorest states (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana) and the poorest American students (Hispanics, the urban disadvantaged and African-Americans) performed poorly.
These findings demonstrate that America has two sets of public schools. One set provides world-class education for the advantaged, for majority children, for Asians and the students in our homogenous, well-supported, populist, Midwestern states. America's other public-school system operates in poor Southern states, in rural areas and in the neighborhoods of the urban poor in which most of the ethnic and racial minorities reside. America's public schools as a whole have not failed to deliver, but they have failed to deliver to certain families and certain communities.
There is indeed a crisis of achievement in some of our schools. But the conservative critics of the nation's public schools wrongly have pointed the finger at America's educators. The nation's school problems are rooted in the culture of America. And there is no little irony in the fact that the cultural problems are worsened by the very economic and social policies espoused by Bennett and his vocal friends..." (Berliner, 1996, p. 26(4)).