As the Sun Sinks Slowly in the West So Do SAT Scores

The federal government has given so much “lip” to improving our educational standards, even as our national test results show us constantly slipping when compared to comparable tests, particularly in science and math, administered in other nations. We know China and India are producing an increasing number of very competent college and high school grads with proficiencies in those “hard” subjects that promise themselves and their countries an increasingly viable place in a very competitive world. The most recent foray into “improving education” – the relatively unfunded “No Child Left Behind Act” – left a whole lot of children in the dust; we are even failing when compared to ourselves.

The August 26^th Wall Street Journal noted that “High-school students’ performance last year on the SAT college-entrance exam fell slightly, and the score gap generally widened between lower-performing minority groups and white and Asian-American students, raising questions about the effectiveness of national education reform efforts.” Our scores represent the lowest in a decade, and the last three years pretty much reflected a zero-sum gain. Blame it on the Internet, but the reading scores haven’t been this bad since 1994.

It was one thing when the U.S. was clearly at the top of the economic food chain, providing the patents and inventions that made the world turn round, if a pile of our students didn’t cut the mustard, because we still rode at the front of the parade, and no one in the non-communist world was anywhere close behind. But in this post-Soviet/Cold War era, the number of U.S. patents is falling, just as the patents in India and China are accelerating – they’re no longer just building U.S.-designed “stuff.”

As the U.S. digs itself a budget deficit for future generations to pay back, it might be nice to equip those generations with the education necessary to create the skills required to implement the economic values we so desperately need to generate the huge revenue requirements we have set for ourselves. The Journal: “Many observers… view the flat results of recent years as discouraging in light of the more than 25-year effort to improve U.S. education. ‘This is a nearly unrelenting tale of woe and disappointment,’ said Chester E. Finn, Jr., present of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington , D.C. think tank [and a former education official in the Reagan administration] ‘If there is any good news here, I can’t find it.’”

The Journal reported the wide gap between minorities – Asians performed in math at a 572 average score, 72 points higher than the general population, while African-American students scored 429 on average on critical reading, 72 points below the national average. The Journal reported the College Board’s analysis of this reality: “[L]ower-performing minorities tended to go to school in poorer districts with fewer resources.” In short, we have betrayed our children, and we have forced under-performing students to succeed in under-performing schools. The great “equal access to education” – the backbone of our mobile and democratic society – has simply failed.

If we weren’t in an economic fight for our lives, we could be complacent, but the fact that so many students are applying to college tells you that our younger set is willing to try, willing to make the extra effort to receive that training and education – national value-builders than we cannot survive without.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.