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Appraising the Implications of the SAT for Educational Policy.

1985; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 66; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

1940-6487

Lala Carr Steelman, Brian Powell,

School Choice and Performance

Public policy has been heavily influenced by uncorrected and thus deceptive rankings of scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, maintain the authors. In recalculating the rankings, they urge the responsible use of data and ask that we reevaluate our dependence on SAT scores* THE EMPHASIS in American education has shifted in recent years. In the 1960s and 1970s the issue of equity, especially with respect to the opportunities afforded mi norities, monopolized the attention of ed ucators and public officials. In the 1980s the emphasis on equal opportunity has been supplanted by a resurgence of inter est in what has come to be called educa tional excellence. One consequence of the focus on equi ty in the 1960s and 1970s was the unprece dented rise in the numbers of women, blacks, and members of other minority groups attending colleges and professional schools. As the population of college stu dents and prospective college students changed, standardized tests, most notably the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), came under close scrutiny. Questions were raised about the potential for sex, race, and class bias in the content of these exams; about the efficacy of costly coach ing programs; and about the excessive role that the test scores played in the admis sions process at some colleges. Some crit ics pressed for a moratorium on the use of standardized exams as a means of select ing candidates for entry into postsec ondary institutions; others urged that the tests be refined. In the quality-conscious climate of the 1980s, typified by the strong language of A Nation at Risk, a preoccupation with quantifying educational productivity ha* developed. As a result, the credibility of standardized tests as accurate and fair measures of the quality of education has risen. Criticism of the SAT and of similar tests has diminished. Indeed, when candi dates hit the campaign trail in 1984, they made much of the long decline in SAT scores ? only recently halted.* The politi cians, at least, had accepted the SAT as the instrument for gauging educational ef fectiveness. Perhaps even more attention has been paid to state-by-state variations in SAT scores. The College Entrance Examina tion Board recently announced the SAT scores of high seniors for 1983-84, broken down by state. This report re vealed a wide gap between the ex hibiting the highest average combined SAT mathematics and verbal scores (Iowa, with 1,089 out of a possible 1,600 points) and the exhibiting the lowest average score (South Carolina, with 803). To place the variations by in perspec tive, the highly publicized decline in SAT scores since the mid-Sixties amounts to 86 points ? less than one-third of the gap be tween the average scores of the highest and lowest-scoring states. Nor was 1984 an atypical year; the range of average scores has hovered around 290 points for a decade. The media put great stress on interstate differences in SAT scores, formulating what they call state report cards. Feder al officials have encouraged this practice. Take, for example, former Secretary of Education Terrel BelPs school score board, which listed SAT scores and a variety of other indicators by state. The response to the release of state-by scores has ranged from self-congrat ulation to alarm. Not surprisingly, many leaders from high-scoring states, among them Gov. Terry Branstad of Iowa, hailed the scores as evidence of the soundness and superiority of their states' education al systems. The comparatively high SAT scores for South Dakota, for example, were emphasized in a national advertise ment geared to attract business to that state. Leaders in the lower-scoring states, LALA CARR STEELMAN is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. BRIAN POWELL is a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. The authors grate fully acknowledge the advice of Joseph F. Steel man and L. C. St eel man. *We should note that 1982 was the first year since 1963 in which scores on both the verbal and quantita tive sections of the SAT increased. That increase was