Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.
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[Find out The Truth about Black Students.]
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The latest aggregate SAT scores were recently released. Journalists, once again, failed to understand that the SAT is not very accurate for making group comparisons or for comparing groups over time.
The SAT vs. The long-term trend NAEP
Not everyone goes to college. Of those who do go to college, not everyone takes the SAT. Some take the ACT. Some do not take the SAT or the ACT, because it is not required by their college. For this reason, it is incorrect to think that the SAT provides a good picture of the academic achievement of all high school seniors.The types of students who take the SAT have changed over time. Children of high socioeconomic status have the longest history taking the SAT. Over time more students of more modest socioeconomic backgrounds have taken the SAT.
This changing SAT demographic matters because socioeconomic background is correlated with SAT scores. (See the relationship of parental education to SAT scores.) As the composition of the students taking the test changes, comparisons to earlier groups of test-takers become less valid. It is difficult to know whether changes in SAT scores over time are due to the changing demographics of the test-takers or to changes in academic achievement.
As if this wasn’t a big enough problem, the SAT has been redesigned recently. These redesigns also make comparisons across time problematic.
For all of these reasons and more, the SAT is a bad measure for trying to assess the academic achievement of students and trends in student achievement. Nonetheless, year after year, journalists continue to use the SAT in this way.
A far better tool for tracking students’ academic achievement over time is the long-term trend scores of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The long-term trend NAEP tests are given to nationally representative samples of 9 year olds, 13 year olds, and 17 year olds every four years. Unlike the SAT, NAEP scores for 17 year olds really do allow us to make conclusions about high school seniors nationally.
There are several versions of the NAEP tests. There is the national, state, urban district and long-term trend. The long-term trend, like its name suggests, is ideal for making assessments of black student achievement over time. The test does not change and the sample is always nationally representative of students.
Over the last 30 years, black students at all three age levels have increased their long-term math and reading NAEP scores. Over the last 10 years, only black 9 year olds and 13 year olds have increased their NAEP scores. The 17-year-olds’ scores have been flat. (White 17 year-olds’ NAEP scores have been flat too.) During this time period, however, the black math SAT scores have improved. While the black students who take the SAT appear to be doing better academically, black seniors in general have stagnated since the mid-1990s. If we want to know how black students are progressing academically, the long-term trend NAEP is the far better measure.
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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.
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