Troubling SAT Results Point to Urgent Need for Math Improvement
Today we have clarified yesterday’s tabular information about Hartford high school students’ performance on the new SAT, as you will see below.
The State Department of Education yesterday issued student performance data from the new SAT, which has been adjusted in light of the Common Core State Standards. Scores from Hartford and the other large cities, not surprisingly, were distressingly low.
[Clarification: The State database treats Achievement First as a separate school district, which caused us to omit its high school from our data gathering. When we recognized the discrepancy today, we revised the table accordingly and present it fully below.]
Students’ performance on the new SAT is rated according to four levels: those who did not meet, were approaching, met, or exceeded the achievement standard. The SDE news release is here; it includes a link to explore the data online.
As the table below now shows, only two Hartford high schools surpassed the total statewide average score – and the proportion of students citywide who met or exceeded the standard in Math was 14.8 percent, compared with the statewide average of 39.3 percent.
Looking further at the English Language Arts (ELA) and Math scores on the new SAT, the statewide proportions of Black and Latino students who met or exceeded the ELA standard on the new SAT were 36.4 percent and 39 percent, respectively. In Math, those statewide proportions were 12.4 percent for Black students and 15.5 percent for Latino students, respectively.
For Hartford, those corresponding percentages for Black and Latino students meeting or exceeding the ELA standard were 27.6 percent and 24.6 percent, respectively. In Math, 92.8 percent of Black students and 93.3 percent of Latino students did not meet the standard.