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9/22/15

American high schools are going to hell. Unless you’re Asian.

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Shutterstock.

Remember a few weeks ago when hands were being wrung about the decline in SAT scores over the last ten years?

Scores on all three of the SAT tests declined significantly — down 8 points on the reading test, 7 points on the math test, and 13 points on the writing test. The Washington Post’s headline read, “SAT scores at lowest level in 10 years, fueling worries about high schools.”

But the story was incomplete, because the College Board had embargoed the breakdown of scores by ethnicity until a few days ago. Now they can be published. Here are the 10-year changes in test scores by ethnicity:

CaptureMurray2

A little rewrite of the stories of a few weeks ago is necessary. The Post’s original headline needs to be changed to something like “Changes in SAT scores over the last 10 years vary radically by ethnic group.”

The new text should point out that the white change was small, just an aggregate of 6 points. That black scores fell by an aggregate 14 points is troubling because their scores in 2006 were already lower than those of any other ethnic group. That the scores of Latinos and American Indians fell by 26 and 28 points is even more troubling. But how about those Asians! Their aggregate mean score rose by 54 points.

There is also a big news story to be told about the magnitude of ethnic test-score differences. The gap between whites and the protected minority groups (blacks, Latinos, and American Indians) all grew modestly, despite the enormous educational expenditures intended to reduce those gaps. The gap between whites and the unprotected minority also grew—in favor of the unprotected minority.

In 2006, Asians had a higher math mean than whites, but trailed in reading and writing. The aggregate Asian mean in 2006 was 18 points higher than the mean for whites solely because of the large math difference. As of 2015, the mean Asian score was also higher than the white score on the writing test and only 4 points behind the white mean on the reading test. The aggregate white-Asian gap had grown to 78 points.

I’m sure that the mainstream media will be all over this story, and President Obama will announce a top-to-bottom reassessment of the administration’s strategy for narrowing ethnic differences in test scores. No question about it. Any day now.

Note: The College Board breaks down Latino scores by Mexican, Puerto Rican, and “Other” Latino. The Latino numbers in the table combine those means, weighted by the number of test takers.



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