Good Data Can Help Address Education Woes

Good Data Can Help Address Education Woes
By: Jennifer Karan, Executive Director of SAT Program at the College Board

If you’re not already familiar – and most public school teachers and administrators are very familiar – the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card, provides an assessment of where our nation’s 4th- , 8th-, and 12th- graders are achieving – and struggling – and breaks down the data by various subgroups. NAEP measures what students across the United States know and can do in various subject areas including mathematics, reading, and writing. As the tests change very little from year to year, NAEP helps us to track student academic progress over time and better understand trends. I don’t know of a single parent who doesn’t pore through the results when they are published in the newspaper.

While not all students participate in NAEP assessments, the carefully selected representative sample that does is providing policymakers, teachers, and researchers with important information about the elementary and secondary education programs in America.

What you may not know is that the SAT, for which there is a great deal of rigorous research and analysis supporting its use for predicting college readiness and success, now offers a standardized benchmark that provides a highly useful metric of students’ academic preparedness for college. In fact, the SAT is currently the only college admissions test to which NAEP has been statistically linked to 12th grade NAEP assessments, and studies have concluded that the SAT and the NAEP mathematics and English Language Arts assessments include similar content and emphases.

Educators, economists, statisticians, politicians and a myriad of edu-centric organizations are all searching for answers to address educational disparities and the challenge of helping all students perform to their potential. Clearly there is no easy answer – no single solution; however, quality data available from both NAEP and the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark can help guide the conversation.

Both the SAT and NAEP provide valuable data that can help faculty and administrators actually see where students are struggling and where they are progressing. This kind of quantitative evidence is so important, particularly when it comes to reform. Further, the nature of the SAT is that all students are eligible to participate, offering educators an opportunity to regularly track progress across their own schools as well as use this information to inform curriculum and improve instruction from one year to the next.

Used together with NAEP data, the SAT can help schools, districts and states understand student proficiency and college readiness and with good use of good data they can take active steps to ensure that more students are truly ready for college.

The SAT and NAEP, in-and-of themselves, won’t solve our educational challenges, but good use of good data will go a long way. To adapt a well-worn phrase: Reform begins at home – or, more accurately, in each and every local school. There are good tools out there.

Please go to the Collegeboard website for more information about the SAT: http://sat.collegeboard.org/home.