SATs don't make the grade

By Anna B. Mitchell  

JANUARY 7, 2009 1:36 p.m. (0)

Latin teacher Jeremy Spencer led his third- and-fourth-year Latin students at J.L. Mann High through a translation last week.

“Vilbia, tamen, que pulchra et obstinata erat, patrem flocci non faciebat …” the students read.

“What does obstinata mean?” Spencer asked.

“Abstinent?” one student answered and the class erupted into laughter.

“No, it means stubborn.”

“Katie, what does sorority mean?” Spencer asked after a few minutes.

“House of girls,” the student answered.

“So in Latin, ‘soror’ means ‘sister.’ Don’t you love Latin?”

Spencer is in his third year out of Furman University. He spends half his day teaching Latin; the other half teaching SAT preparation – classes he says complement each other.

“Seventy percent of English comes from Latin,” Spencer said. “Two-thirds of the SAT is writing and critical reading. We teach the stems as we go and by the time students finish the SAT prep class, they don’t need to pause to read directions.”

Such an effort by J.L. Mann students, years in the making, paid off with an average SAT score – at 1535 – that exceeded the national average of 1511 this year. District-wide, the average score was 1479, 18 points higher than the statewide average.

Still, the annual report of SAT scores, released about a month ago, is never South Carolina education’s shining moment.

An in-depth Greenville Journal analysis of all test scores nationwide, broken down by coursework, income, parent education and ethnicity of students showed South Carolina SAT scores this year were near the bottom among all groups and subgroups.

This runs counter to factors commonly cited as working against South Carolina – its disproportionately high percentage of test-takers, its high minority and low-income population and counselors’ inability to regulate who takes the test, regardless of whether the students have taken the courses necessary to answer SAT questions.

In other words, white students, well-to-do students, students taking calculus and students whose parents have graduate degrees all scored among the lowest in their subcategories compared to their counterparts in other states.

Lorin Anderson, professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina who has been studying the state’s education system for more than 30 years, said it has always been so.

“Even if you go with the numbers of courses taken – high level courses – generally that category of completion gets you the best and brightest from every state. Even at that level, our scores are lowest,” he said.

The good news is that some trends also emerged in the analysis that indicate ways South Carolina students could, over time, improve their scores. The bottom line: rigorous coursework.

“We have students going to Ivy League schools, MIT, leading universities in the nation,” said Oby Lyles, the spokesman for Greenville County schools. “They are doing as well as – and competing with – students across the nation. The academic rigor is so important.”

Some students – such as those in Spencer’s Latin and SAT classes – take the test very seriously. Maria Hesketh, a junior at J.L. Mann, is in her third year of Latin and has already taken the SAT once.

“I will take the SAT prep class next semester and then take the SAT again,” she said. “It’s a strategy.”

Similarly, junior Kaylee Seawright of Westside High in Anderson said she intends to take the SAT in December and is enrolled in as many honors and AP classes as she can sign up for. She knows she needs at least a 1200 on the SAT plus a 4.0 average to get a state Palmetto Fellows scholarship.

“Most of my friends are in honors and AP classes,” Seawright said. “They know it’s good for their future.”

Bill Berg, interim vice president for enrollment at Furman University, said his university has had no trouble finding highly qualified students to fill its freshmen classes – average SAT scores are in fact higher, he said, among in-state students than those coming from out of state.

The value of the SAT for admissions counselors, he said, is in its objectivity. Departments of Education in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina have all moved to a program of scholarships based largely on grades – a system that has inevitably led to grade inflation

“This has made grade information less useful in the college admissions process,” Berg said.

Since its inception in the 1920s the SAT was meant as an equalizer, Anderson said, between kids who got into elite institutions because of who their families were and kids who were smart enough to be there but had no objective way to prove it.

“Now the SAT in the 1970s and ’80s was criticized as being this test that’s biased toward the upper class people, which is ironic because that’s exactly opposite the purpose for which it was established,” Anderson said.

The Journal analysis revealed that the best predictor of success on the SAT in South Carolina is not the student’s race, income or parent education – rather, average scores were highest among students who took more than four years of a foreign language (with the best scores among Latin students), took AP English and took calculus. The average scores among seniors who’d taken these courses were 1674, 1665 and 1621 respectively (out of a total possible score of 2400).

The bad news is that while these were relatively high in a state where the average SAT score was 1461, they paled compared to counterparts in other states.

South Carolina students who’d taken more than four years of a foreign language ranked 42nd in the nation compared to their counterparts; those taking AP English ranked 47th; and those taking calculus were dead last at 51st.

Anderson said part of the problem facing South Carolina students is a culture of memorization that teachers have been reluctant to move beyond. The SAT tests a student’s ability to read and figure out meaning of words in context; similarly, math questions are generally geared more toward figuring out problems than applying set formulas.

“I’ve been in too many English classrooms where rather than teaching kids to analyze a poem, the teacher analyzes it, and the kids copy that down,” Anderson said. “That’s not going to help kids. Maybe with that particular poem, but that one’s not going to be on the SAT.”

Ashley Landess of the conservative South Carolina Policy Council said lawmakers ought to consider fundamental changes to the education system if they are to turn around the poor performance of the state’s college-bound students. Only competition among public and private schools in the form of vouchers, she said, would push educators out of their molds.

“Research shows, the more choices, the more competition, the better the school system,” Landess said. “Universal school choice is not about destroying the public education system. What has happened in other places is parents have more choices and public schools get better.”

Even students at the state’s private and religious schools, however, failed to perform at the level of their counterparts in other states – ranking 47th and 44th respectively. Still, the 2,400 seniors who’d taken the SAT at these institutions did raise the statewide average from 1451 (the average score at public schools) to 1461.

South Carolina’s relatively low overall score – 47th in the nation – isn’t helped by the popularity of the test here.

In 2008, South Carolina ranked 16th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in the number of seniors who’d taken the SAT – a total of 23,066, according to records released in late August by the College Board in Princeton. As the 24th most populated state in the union, South Carolina’s seniors are therefore taking the test at disproportionate rates.

“South Carolina is a very heavy SAT state; kids tend to gravitate toward it,” said Sheila Hilton, principal of T.L. Hanna High in Anderson. “In North Dakota, the only ones who take it want to go to an Ivy League school.”

Indeed, 256 kids took the SAT in North Dakota by their senior year in 2008.

Local and state education officials also say South Carolina schools place no restrictions on who can take the test; Internet registration, meanwhile, has made counseling students who may not be ready for the test – for instance, if they haven’t yet taken Algebra II – almost impossible.

Lyles said his system’s philosophy is to not set up any barriers.

“We are inclusive and encourage students to take the SAT,” Lyles said. “We don’t set a ceiling.”

Then there is the minority and socio-economic argument. Historically, correlations have been made between lower test scores and students’ income and/or ethnicity. South Carolina’s minority test-takers, most of them black, made up 36 percent of the testing pool. This was 13th highest in the nation.

Similarly, 30 percent of South Carolina’s test-takers came from homes with an annual income of $40,000 or less – only New York, California and Washington, D.C., had a higher percentage of test-takers at this low end of the income scale.

But while these statewide stats may explain an overall decrease in scores, they don’t explain why students from households with annual incomes of $200,000 or more ranking 46th in their SAT scores among their counterparts nationwide; South Carolina’s white students were also 46th.