School Reforms Backfire? SAT and ACT Test Scores Stagnate or Decline

The last decade has been filled with school reform. So, how are these reforms working? Our leaders in education—I mean people who give advice rather than teach—have been pushing standardized tests! Yep, our leaders love them. 

The testing companies love them too.

Thirteen years have passed since Congress enacted No Child Left Behind. Remember that great law! One bold promise wrapped in 1,100 pages of jargon and buried in bureaucratic detail. You know the promise: Every child would be proficient in reading and math by—well—2014. Remember all the tests tied to that law? Okay, those tests are gone. No problem! We now have Common Core and another round of fresh tests coming our way.

By now we might be excused for expecting the ripe fruits of reform to be ready for picking. Let’s see how America’s college-bound kids are doing.

First, consider American College Testing (ACT) scores for the last two decades.

Um…average reading scores for the 2012 graduating class were no higher than scores for the class of 1995. In science the class of 2012 did no better than the class of 1994. The average English score in 1999, three years before passage of No Child Left Behind, was the same as today. Only math scores are up in any statistically significant way.

How about writing? Writing ability seems to be plunging, perhaps because “standardized writing” is hard even to imagine.

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Maybe testing helped close the gender gap. Nope it hasn’t. The gender gap has been consistent for years, hovering just around .2 annually. Males had an average composite score of 21.2 in 2012, females 21.0.

What about a secondary promise of No Child Left Behind? That a focus on testing would eliminate the racial gap?

Also not working!

The average score by race in 2012—which correlates almost perfectly with average poverty rates by racial group—is as follows:

African-American:                            17.0

American-Indian:                              18.4

White                                               22.4

Hispanic                                           18.9

Asian                                                23.6

Pacific Islander                                 19.8

Two or More Races                         21.4

No Response                                   21.3

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What do the figures for the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT’s) show? Huge gains you figure. All these great reforms! Let’s check those gains out.

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Well, isn’t that depressing! You almost get the feeling reformers who push standardized testing don’t know what learning is really about.

Math scores for seniors interested in attending colleges and universities are down 9 points since NCLB was made law. Reading scores are down 5. Writing scores again seem to be falling fastest. The writing test was new in 200d and scores are down 9 in six years.

How about the “racial and gender gaps” that No Child Left Behind was supposed to fix? What does the latest evidence show? Good news, I guess.

Male and female students are getting worse scores, but doing it equally. Total scores for both sexes are down 20 points.

With the exception of one racial group, all are performing equally. That is:  scores are in decline.White kids are down (-6 points). So are African-American kids (-13), Mexican American kids (-16), Puerto Rican kids (-9) and Other Hispanic kids (-17).

It’s a debacle.

Only Asian, Asian-American and Pacific Islander kids (all one category for SAT) are doing better. Oddly enough, their scores have increased, in the three tested areas, by a combined 45 points.

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How are all the reforms working? Well, terrible, I think you might say. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing adds this note of warning: “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.”

See also:

http://www.act.org/newsroom/data/1998/tsum.html

http://www.act.org/newsroom/data/2002/pdf/tsum.pdf

http://www.act.org/newsroom/data/2012/trends.html