College & Workforce Readiness

New SAT Results Show Little Improvement

By Catherine Gewertz — August 25, 2009 1 min read
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Results out today show little movement in SAT scores. Not that we’d expect big changes year to year. But they’ve been ticking downward ever since the College Board introduced the much-talked-about “new SAT” in 2006.

In the press release it issued with the score report, the College Board highlighted 10-year trends, noting that the mean math score is up 4 points, and the reading score is down 4 points. I’m not sure what made that decade’s results notable enough to warrant a mention in a press release. Too little else that fell in the category of good news?

But what really got my attention is the data correlating students’ scores with their family income and levels of parental education (Page 4 of the Total Group Profile Report, for you follow-along types). You could pretty much draw straight lines with arrows on this one; the lower the parental education and family income, the lower the scores, and the more money and education you ladle on, the higher the scores.

Again, it’s not like we didn’t already know this. But how widespread and well-resourced are the attempts to remedy it?

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A version of this news article first appeared in the High School Connections blog.