Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Virginians’ SAT Scores Improve, Ethnic Gaps Persist

—

by

James A. Bacon
in

Image source: Virginia Department of Education

by James A. Bacon

The good news from the College Board data on the 2019 SAT scores: Virginia public school graduates out-performed their peers in other states: 54% met or exceeded college-readiness benchmarks compared to 45% nationally. The bad news: the gap between Asian students and all other racial/ethnic groups remains wide.

“We now have a clear trend of higher overall achievement and increased college readiness on the latest version of the SAT,” Superintendent of Public Instruction James Lane said in a press release issued today. “But when we view the results through an equity lens, we see wide disparities in performance among students. Closing these gaps and making sure that all of our students are college, career and life ready when they graduate must be the number-one priority every day in every school division and school in the commonwealth.”

But on the equity front, here’s some consoling news…. Virginia Asians out-performed Asians nationally, Virginia whites out-performed whites nationally, Virginia Hispanics outperformed Hispanics nationally, and Virginia blacks out-performed blacks nationally.

Table source: VDOE

As can be seen in the table above, Virginia Asians, whites, and blacks racked up average SAT scores roughly 50 points higher than their ethnic counterparts. The difference for Hispanics was almost twice as great.

All such comparisons must be used with caution. Average SAT scores vary depending on the percentage of students taking the college-readiness tests. When test-taking is limited to top students, average scores are higher. When state and local school systems encourage widespread test-taking, encompassing more marginal students, average scores decline.

The VDOE press release provided no information regarding the percentage of high school graduates overall, or broken down by race/ethnicity, who took the SAT exams.

Share this article

ADVERTISEMENT

(comments below)

ADVERTISEMENT

(comments below)

Comments

9 responses to “Virginians’ SAT Scores Improve, Ethnic Gaps Persist”

  1. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    What would be useful would be to see these scores on a school district even a school basis. I’m suspecting that there are few if any Asians in the rural schools nor in underperforming schools in general.

    The problem with looking at these scores from 10,000 feet – is they do not really inform us whether a majority of the Asians are actually grouped in the urban areas of the state and within those urban areas – high-performing schools.

    Conversely, for the lower performing students – the same info.

    Why?

    Because if we continue to “analyze” these things in a primarily race context – we don’t learn nor can we really formulate changes that are understood AND effective.

    It’s not hard to get to that data these days, how about it?

    1. djrippert Avatar
      djrippert

      Here are some number for you. Not exactly what you asked for but it gets across a point. The list is of Asian population as a percentage of total population by “city” in Virginia. I put city in quotes because these are not really cities in the warped Virginia definition of cities. Anyway, 20 of the top 20 are in NoVa. Apparently there are some Asians in Richmond. Maybe the new head of Richmond’s public schools ought to give some thought to busing those Asian-American students to all of the public schools in Richmond.

      http://zipatlas.com/us/va/city-comparison/percentage-asian-population.htm

  2. TooManyTaxes Avatar
    TooManyTaxes

    “Closing these gaps and making sure that all of our students are college, career and life ready when they graduate must be the number-one priority every day in every school division and school in the commonwealth.”

    If experience shows that college doesn’t work for everyone, why would the state say all Virginia students should be college ready? And “yes,” based on the sentence structure, that’s what being said.

    As Larry has correctly noted on many occasions, we need a lot of trained new workers that don’t need a college degree but who do need post-high school education. So why doesn’t the state DoE understand?

  3. James A. Bacon Avatar
    James A. Bacon

    The Virginia House GOP is claiming some of the credit for Virginia’s high SAT scores:

    Republican efforts to improve our educational system continue to bear fruit. We have increased funding for public education by nearly $4 billion since the Great Recession. We are putting more money into the classroom, sending 40% of all lottery proceeds back to local schools with no strings attached.

    We provided funding for a five percent teacher pay raise in 2019, the fourth teacher pay raise in six years. Virginia’s high school graduation rate is nearly 95%, our standardized test scores are above the national average, our college admissions rates are some of the best in the country, and CNBC ranked Virginia’s education system the best in the country in 2019.

    That $4 billion figure is a big one. I wonder how it squares with the data published by the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, which says that adjusted for inflation on a per-student basis, education spending is still lower. And I wonder how the figure squares with the frequent demonstrations by John Butcher that there is little correlation between per-student spending and SOL scores.

  4. Steve Haner Avatar
    Steve Haner

    TMT – the phrase was college and career ready. Requirements can be very high for some of the better technical positions that do not require a degree. Think about the medical technicians, advanced manufacturing operations, financial operations….not jobs where you wan’t people who cannot read, communicate or do at least high school level math. The trig behind the crane operations at the shipyard is astounding (way beyond me).

    Larry has a point that the Asian population is concentrated in some of the better-funded school divisions – the ones like Fairfax that put in plenty of extra local funds, etc. The deep dive on data would be to see how a minority student in Fairfax in a poverty household fares compared to a minority students in poverty households somewhere else. That’s a job for John Butcher!

    No two ways about it, that is actually depressing. Only students who took the test are in the results, and it’s possible large swaths didn’t even try. But the things measured by the SAT are the things the schools strive to teach, and 78 percent of the black students who took the test and 56 percent of the Hispanic students who took the test didn’t hit the SAT’s benchmark as “prepared.” (That appears to be 530 on the math part and 480 on the language part.) That has generational implications, given the historical legal barriers to opportunity were mostly removed at the time of their grandparents.

    1. TooManyTaxes Avatar
      TooManyTaxes

      Sorry, Steve. Reread the sentence. “college, career and life ready.” All three nouns are part of the goal. Any fair interpretation of the sentence means students graduating from public schools in Virginia should be college ready.

      The State wrote it. I didn’t. Maybe the State needs to rewrite its statement and republish it.

  5. Reed Fawell 3rd Avatar
    Reed Fawell 3rd

    I suspect that at base, this entire claim is bogus, a false claim manufactured by politicians in league with America’s corrupt education establishment. The base reasons behind these false claims are three fold:

    1/ Our kids SAT scores have not gone up. The SAT scores have been grossly devalued, a least three time now, if not several times more, since the 1970s.

    2. The claim that “Closing these gaps and making sure that all of our students are college, career and life ready … is also bogus in the extreme.” All serious studies I have read suggests that, at the most optimistic, no more that 30% of American kids can fruitfully take advantage of what constitutes a real college education. Indeed most such studies place that number at 20% of kids who are candidates to benefit from such an education. These facts are borne out by real life results over past 50 years, although no serious person suggests that these statistics limits the great majority of peoples opportunity for success in America. Of course, too, on the flip side a so called college education often does great harm to people. Academia (most members of the American Academy) are prime examples of that harm higher education has done to many American graduates.

    3/ Finally, in the great majority of cases, more money has nothing to do with solutions. In fact, far too much money is a great problem and obstacle to American higher education today, and to K-12 education as well.

    All these reasons are why education in America, and student achievement has been in sustained decline since the 1970s, over the past 50 years at least.

    The bureaucrats, and politicians, including the GOP in Virginia, should be ashamed of themselves.

  6. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    re: ” The deep dive on data would be to see how a minority student in Fairfax in a poverty household fares compared to a minority students in poverty households somewhere else. That’s a job for John Butcher!”

    Indeed except it is not in his interest! He has much more interest in focusing on the negative side of these issues. It’ s not really a motivation to find out but rather to affix blame for failures.

    So we spend time at 10,000 feet then deep dive to focus on where things are not good.

    My suspects are that many Asian parents are in NoVa and they are highly educated and drive their kids to excel whereas Hispanics and Blacks are much less so – and even in “good” School Systems like Fairfax – there ARE, in fact, neighborhood schools for low income neighborhoods with a lot of lower educated parents earning lower incomes who don’t even know how to motivate their kids much less help them with academics.

    But Fairfax also has many exemplary, high performing schools that serve neighborhoods of high incomes and college-educated parents.

    We are divided by income and education demographics and the schools are well prepared to educate the kids of higher income/educated parents but are not well prepared to educate kids of lower income/lower education parents – EVEN in places like Fairfax!

    They probably do a better job than Richmond but the demographic is both places is much harder to educate – takes more money for higher qualified staff that specializes in kids classified as “at risk”:

    At-risk students
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    An at-risk student is a term used in the United States to describe a student who requires temporary or ongoing intervention in order to succeed academically.[1] At risk students, sometimes referred to as at-risk youth or at-promise youth[2], are also adolescents who are less likely to transition successfully into adulthood and achieve economic self-sufficiency.[3] Characteristics of at-risk students include emotional or behavioral problems, truancy, low academic performance, showing a lack of interest for academics, and expressing a disconnection from the school environment.[1]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-risk_students

    some folks throw up their hands and say it’s not their fault and basically advocate abandoning these kids because it’s “too hard” and “too expensive” and too many fail anyhow.

    That’s not the Gig.

  7. TooManyTaxes Avatar
    TooManyTaxes

    Asians are all well educated. What an untrue statement. Living in Fairfax County and having the honor of having Asian kids has let me meet many people of Asian background. A lot have good educations and are doctors, engineers and professors. But a lot more operate dry cleaning businesses, landscape companies, small grocery stores, work in retail or restaurants. Many, but certainly not all, push their kids to study and take advantage of school.

Leave a Reply

Read More