Usually we can thank the great States of Mississippi and Alabama (as well as Washington, D.C.) for preventing us from being dead last. [See State SAT Scores Drop in Tuesday's P&C.]
According to outgoing State Superintendent Jim Rex,
"More students taking the exam often leads to lower scores, and state educators need to figure out how to boost SAT scores while that happens, he said. Sixty-six percent of the state's students take the exam, making it the 14th-highest participation rate in the country, and its overall national ranking is 49th, ahead of Maine and Washington, D.C."Well, Mr. Rex, how did the other 13 "highest participation rate" states fare? Better than South Carolina, no doubt, at least for 12 of them!
On the other hand, Maine requires every high school senior to take the SAT, so its rate must be approaching 100%.
Try to imagine how low SC's scores would be under that circumstance!
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The Post & Courier headline should have been, "SC Has the Worst SAT Scores in the Country!" Maine, of course, doesn't count because all students are required to take the SAT in Maine. But we did worse than WV?
State standings are more accurately compared with other states having similar test participation. Take Washington state for example, it boasts a high participation rate (more than 50%) in the testing and still leads the pack for this catagory and for all states in its geographical region. Maine is an extreme that has no peer so SC can use them as a cover.
Babbie has it right, SC is last even among those states with similar rates of participation. The only explanation I can give is this is what happens when a state "teaches to the test" (i.e. core knowledge) and ignores fundamental concepts.
BTW, MGJ is being fried in Seattle over this same issue. And that's in addition to the overwhelming no confidence vote she's just received from the teachers' union there. Too bad she can't do what McGinley does. If Nancy Jane McGinley doesn't agree with the teacher alliance survey, she sends out her own and composes different questions which will produce answers more to her liking.
Hey, people, what if school leaders in SC started dumbing down the student tests to get scores more to their liking? Oops, they are doing that now. Gee, and they still come up next to last. Something is really wrong here.
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