The SAT Paper Chase pt. 1: SAT Data in the The District

SAT data are extremely important for suburban families. Yes, they're a blunt instrument. They don't tell how well a school district is doing. I believe that SAT scores are more linked to family income than anything else (unless you're in Prince George's County, MD). Yet parents want their kids to go to the most selective colleges, and SAT scores are a key ingredient in determining which students get into schools and how much these students have to pay.

So with that I unveil the SAT Paper Chase!

The goal of the SAT Paper Chase is to obtain SAT score data from all Washington, DC public, private, and charter schools. Families, should NOT use SAT scores or AP scores in isolation to help determine whether a school is right for them. Instead, they should seek to see how SAT and AP scores correlate with family income and reduced lunch percentage. Any time you have a positive outlier, a school that has strong scores with a large population of reduced lunch students, you know that school is likely exceeding national performance by means fair or foul. Any time that you have a negative outlier, a school that has weak results despite having few reduced lunch students, you can be pretty confident that you have a school whose reputation may exceed its results.

Read a breakdown of how three public school district, DC charter schools, and DC private schools handle SAT data transparency after the jump.

For two local districts, SAT data is pretty easy to obtain

• Prince George's County Public Schools earns the gold star for me on this issue. Despite the challenges of raising SAT scores for African-American students, they do not hide their scores. SAT data is a couple of clicks away from the main page. Parents who want to see how their children's schools are performing can easily find the chart. What's especially concerning to me is that Prince George's County's best school, Eleanor Roosevelt, has a combined Math/Critical Reading SAT score of 1064. The average score in Montgomery County Public Schools is 1105. This really hits home to me how far Prince George's County Schools has to go. A school filled with their most motivated and dedicated students has an SAT profile that would be below a school filled with average Montgomery County Public School students.
• Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) earns a gold star as well for not only having the data, but offering many tables for public use. They could choose to just release the school by school data that makes them look wonderful. Instead their data shows how some of their most successful schools can often have a significant racial test score gap on the SAT. For example on page 36 of the document linked, you can see how Bethesda Chevy-Chase seems to be doing well. They have a mean 576 Math score on the 200-800 scale and a mean 574 Critical reading for an 1150 Combined Score, well within range of the 1200 combined score that allows students to be in a competitive position for colleges. That's significantly better than the combined 1105 students have across MCPS. When you look at the racial data, however, things are a bit more unsettling. Black students have a 927 Combined Score, and that's below the 936 combined average for black students across the county. MCPS transparency in revealing this data reveals that the Achievement Gap is more pronounced at one of its "better" schools.
• District of Columbia Public Schools barely gets an honorable mention. To my knowledge, the only easily obtainable data on the internet doesn't even come from DCPS! It comes from a March 12, 2009 presentation that the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) made describing their overall vision. Buried in the middle of the document is a chart that breaks down school by school data for DCPS students. DCPS students had a combined Math/Critical Reading score of 803 back in 2008. I have been unable to find more recent data from DCPS, and I am currently reaching out to DCPS to see if it is possible to find out this information. I know DCPS has it, and I hope that I am able to obtain it and share it here.
• I have been unable to find SAT data for DC charters to this point. Charter advocates are really in a bind on these issues. On the one hand, they know that charters need to have data to justify the public funds they receive. On the other hand, many of the schools that these advocates work for don't want to be transparent with their SAT scores initially. If I'm a charter operator, I probably don't want the scores of my first graduating class or two revealed. That could provide fuel for anti-charter forces that would want to close my school if my students have lower SAT scores than their neighboring schools.
• Private school data can vary depending on the philosophy of the school leadership. All competitive private schools will have to provide some kind of profile to colleges, however. Many elite private schools have data released in private school guides. There's always info circulating among parents because that's part of the reason that they are paying astronomical tuition for their children to attend. There's a thread on College Confidential that has one man's guesses at prep school SAT scores. Much of this information is outdated, but Sidwell Friends (where the Obama children attend) has an estimated combined SAT of 1360. Any parent seriously researching a private high school should be able to get this data pretty quickly if they are going to pony up for a tuition.

Personally, I have a large civil rights and professional interest in these issues. As a civil rights issue, I find it completely unacceptable that suburban parent expect and receive transparency with SAT score data but urban parents often meet stonewalling bureaucracies. In an environment where testing determines so much of a school's reputation, all data should be shared. Sharing No Child Left Behind data like the Maryland HSA exams or the DCPS DC-CAS exams is nice, but these exams can have changing cutoff scores and content. The SAT or the ACT (which I prefer) is constant across the country and provides a flawed but comprehensible starting point to see whether students are competitive applicants. Even better are the SAT Subject Tests or the AP exams, which I plan to talk about in future posts.

As always, these posts are just starting points for discussion. Drop a line or a comment and I'll amplify whatever you've got interest in.

Professionally, one of the core values in my evolving sense of mission is to close the Achievement Gap between elites and underperforming class and ethnic groups. I can't work to close that gap if I don't know how big it is or who is suffering from it. We need to spend more time as educators praising districts like Prince George's County that transparently admit their flaws so that we can help minister to the needs of the students.