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prelude to heresy
By audhill | August 3, 2007
Decline in student performance is easily documented. Average SAT scores, which rose in the 50s and 60s, began slipping in the 60s and have been in free fall ever since. Decline in scores shows no preference for gender or high and low performer. Surprisingly, not everyone worries about this trend.
Responses vary, although the most Orwellian approach is renorming and, when that is not sufficiently normative, simple negation. In 1996, the SAT was renormed, which according to the National Center for Policy Analysis consisted of giving 100 extra points to everyone’s SAT score (76 to verbal 24 to math). Negation goes the extra step. If the test is invalid or biased (inauthentic for any jargon lovers in the room) then the findings of those tests are also invalid. Therefore, decline in performance can not be measured until authentic assessment has been devised. Not surprisingly, authentic assessment would be hard pressed to report failure since an authentic assessment measures for every possible asset that a person might have so as to find a means for everyone to be successful. It’s a lovely, equity minded solution that blurs disparities and refutes an obvious decline in skills since the 1960s.
The problem with this thinking is that standardized tests should not have to measure everything that might be measured. They only need to provide a comparative baseline for evaluation of minimum preparedness for a particular task. If we were even to agree (which I would not) that the SAT is a poor tool for college entrance, it’s still a measurement of a set of skill that are in decline.
But the fact is that the SAT is only one of a number of measures of a person. It doesn’t measure life success, dogged determination, depth of character or creative abilities; it measures academic preparedness for advanced work….period. In that, it is just a ruler providing a bar for a range of skills that the average college bound citizen should have. More importantly, it provides a guide for comparison of standards across generations, states, districts, subgroupings and individuals.
If we agree that a documented decline in skills since the mid 60s is symptomatic of something other than bias, the next step is to consider why the decline? What has changed? There are many reasons that must play a factor. (tomorrow part two: heresy outright: reasons for a decline)
Topics: reasoned |