SAT Scores in Decline

September 21, 2011

There's a new report just out letting us know that the class of 2011 has the lowest SAT scores on record. Naturally, there is a call to action for *gasp* educational reform. Nevermind that we've been operating under new and 'revolutionary' educational reforms for the past several years. It's something new every year, mostly centered around testing, testing, testing. Perhaps if we spent less time testing and spent more time actually reading real texts--literature and expository texts--the scores wouldn't be so disheartening. I'd love to see how many educational minutes have been wrested from our kids and devoted to testing. I think it would be alarming, actually, if we broke it down. Benchmarks, SAT 9s, CAHSEE, Common Assessments--we seem to be all about quantifying what the kids are learning, but doing it at the expense of time to actually teach our kids. I'm not opposed to testing--really, I'm not. But if we are realistic about how we're spending our minutes, I would think people would be alarmed at the amount of time we do not have available to us to actually teach the kids. Maybe THAT'S the reform we should look at.