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Here you go — Simpson’s Paradox.

“…statisticians call it Simpson’s paradox: The average can change in one direction while all the subgroups change in the opposite direction if proportions among the subgroups are changing. Early in the period studied, only top students took the test. But during those twenty years, the pool of test takers expanded to include many lower-ranked students. Because the proportion of top students to all students was shrinking, the scores inevitably dropped. That decline signified not failure but rather progress toward what had been a national goal: extending educational opportunities to a broader range of the population.”

This definition is from a long article by Tamim Ansary on Edutopia, which relates how Sandia Laboratories did a study based purely on scientific analysis, debunking the long-held notion that American public education is declining, but the study was suppressed by the George H.W. Bush administration due to the political need to promote the notion that U.S. public schools are failing.

I realize that we cannot make direct links from one set of tests to another, but it would seem to me that after years and years of soaring state scores, the rising tide would begin to lift SOME boats. It seems that the tide of inflated local scores is having the opposite effect – sinking the boat of knowledge and achievement.

Of course the exams make valid points….they show New York State exams are dumbed down and the “rising” scores that Mr. Klein loves to point to in order to show that despite his lack of qualifications for the job, the schools have improved under his watch.

He’ll point to the rising passing rates on the Algebra regents exam, for example but won’t tell you that years ago you need 65% of the credit to achieve a passing score…today you need 34% of the credit to be considered to have passed.

But then again, if that ever became public people would stop drinking Klein’s kool aid. The SAT scores are just another indication that Klein has to go.

The drop in SAT scores makes perfect sense if you give credence to the widespread anecdotal rumors that bogus “credit recovery” scams are in full force and/or that schools which grade their own students’ Regents exams inflate scores.

NYC DOE’s press spin, i.e., that scores are lower because more black and Hispanic kids are taking the SAT tests, is nothing short of reprehensible. The increase in black and Hispanic kids’ graduation rates in NYC – if they are to be believed – appears to be the result of a perverse kind of social promotion. They get promoted all right, with meaningless diplomas in hand, right out of school entirely. But what, pray tell, is the purpose of increasing minority students’ graduation rates if their underlying skills haven’t been upgraded in sync?

So now the Tweed spinmeisters crow because they’re giving the current generation of minority NYC high school graduates, who can mostly only get hired low-paying jobs as custodians, janitors, waiters and hairdressers because they really can’t read or do math very well, high school diplomas that will make nice wallpaper on the inside of their work lockers, but do precious little else for them?

What a colossal fraud! And what a miserable thing to do to these nice black and Hispanic kids who have summoned the motivation and gumption to take the SATs in the first place.

No wonder the NYC DOE has ceased its practice of publishing individual high schools’ SAT scores. Seems like a lot of them may really be Potemkin Villages. Let’s all push for more economic stimulus money for the CUNY community colleges’ remedial programs.

I totally agree with dissenter. Not to mention that a couple of points off the mean score is probably not statistically significant in terms of measuring performance, whereas the increase in the number of black and hispanic students (particularly given population trends Elizabeth cites elsewhere in the blog) is noteworthy. PSAT scores are also largely unchanged (I’d guess those #s are statistically insignificant as well) whle they’ve had a 2.6% increase in test takers despite declining enrollment. And, that’s probably after several years of increased # of test takers because of the free PSAT tests kids can take through the DOE. I would be interested to see test scores and number of test takers over the past several years, because I work in a high-need high school and in my experience a broader pool has been taking both the PSAT and the SAT. The key thing is not that there are more black and hispanic kids taking the test (though that’s a fact) it’s that the additional kids are lower-achieving than the pool of students that traditionally took the exam — the higher-achieving kids always took it because it’s a prerequisite for college admissions and they were college bound. So if scores are flat in that context, it’s a positive thing.