Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I have tutored for the SAT and ACT for about 8 years now, and I can give a few problems related to the changing high school curricula that will help explain this disparity:
1) Common core math does not teach the most efficient algorithms for anything. It teaches guesswork and estimation that help slow kids pass math classes. The SAT and ACT are timed tests that don't care about how well your kid's school preserved their self-esteem by having them perform division by drawing boxes and sticks and apples and kittens. The lower the income demographics of the area surrounding a school, the higher the chances there is common core, fluff teaching, pass_them_if_they_show_up_and_try metrics going on, and kids from those schools will perform worse because they were taught poorly or not at all.
On the other hand, private/prep schools exist to make sure the parents who fork over the money will see 30+ ACT and 1400+ (old score of 1600 max) SAT scores, and hopefully Ivy League or other top shelf university acceptance. Family income, education level and demographic does indeed dictate who attends which schools. My private school students are all sitting at 26-30 ACT and want 31+, and my public school kids are all at 16-20 ACT and want 24+. The private school kids know Trig, the public school kids don't. The private school kids can do efficient arithmetic with fractions (a huge chunk of all speedy algebra and trig computation), the public school kids cannot.
And again, these are timed tests that don't care who taught you or how. 60 questions, 60 minutes...go.
2) English/literature/vocabulary expectations are different between public and private schools. Simple volume of total material read differs wildly. The private school kids I tutor generally have summer reading lists of 10-20 books, starting in 5th or 6th grade. That's just summer. I tell every parent who knows I tutor that the best training for the AC/SAT reading and English sections is lots and lots and lots of reading starting as early as you can and doing so as often you can. There is no social media, computer/ipad or TV on the AC/SAT...just printed words. Public schools have much lower reading/vocabulary expectations than private schools. Once again, the ACT and SAT are timed tests that don't care how your kid arrived at that moment in time. Clock starts, you have to read, comprehend and answer questions quickly.
The SAT analogy section of old used to be the big scary, but because so many schools went away from serious vocabulary training, the scores on that section become very disparate depending on which group (public v private, poor v rich, etc) you were in, and then came the accusation of cultural bias, as big vocabulary words were deemed a tool of white supremacy or whatever.
-------------
The above can be torn down to differences in which races, cultures, economic quintiles, etc send their kids to which schools. Money will be labeled a culprit, but that will be a false narrative. Public schools routinely spend more than all but the most elite private schools, and do significantly less with the money than their private school counterparts. What it boils down to is expectation translated to curriculum. Schools with high expectations and the resulting demanding curriculum do far better on average where their students and the college boards are concerned. If you want your kids to do well on those tests, demand more from them, from their school and from yourself as parent. The more you demand academically all the way around, the better their scores will be, even before you call someone like me to help them.
Baloney. Lots of public schools teach beyond Algebra. All seven of the public schools in our district offer Calculus AB, and many students go beyond that to Calc BC --> Differential Equations --> Abstract Math/Linear Algebra. If a student finishes that track, and some do, they move to the Statistics sequence or Computer Science to fulfill the four credits of math for graduation requirement. Most other districts in my metro region offer those courses, too. The mean composite ACT score for last year's graduating class, btw, was a 25.9. Math was a 26.1. From. Public. School. Students.
Last edited by randomparent; 09-08-2017 at 10:00 AM..
FYI- As a little blast of irony, the private schools in my area are no better academically than the public schools, actually worse in some ways.
The average test scores might be a little higher at the private due to exclusion of poorer people but if you put John, Jorge or Wei into either one they'd probably come out of the publics around here better as they are large and have all the advanced curriculum and plenty of competition in the elite classes.
They're routinely sending kids to MIT, Brown etc. plus many that get academic full-rides to various Universities.
National Merit finalists average about 1 per 150 vs. the national average which is 1 in 200. One year they had 6 kids out of 450 get national merit finalist or about 1 in 75.
Just pointing this out as some people live in areas where the private schools take so many of the good students that the publics just don't have much left to work with. Some parts of the country that's not the case.
Your blogger is cherry picking. Some poor whites also score as highly as some wealthy whites and some poor and wealthy blacks score as highly as some wealthy whites. Also, your veiled attempt at hinting at a genetic cause throughout this thread is rather sad.
The Brookings Insititute has done extensive studies on this subject and this article is a great read for anyone interested in the entire debate around the test score gap. There are multiple factors at play and it is true that income alone does not change the test scores much. As I stated in my post it is an iterative generational process.
Upwardly mobile parents often raise their children the way they themselves were raised. Phillips and her colleagues find that racial differences in parenting practices are partly traceable to the fact that even when black and white parents have the same test scores, educational attainment, income, wealth, and number of children, black parents are likely to have grown up in less advantaged households. Phillips and her colleagues also find that this can lower black children's test scores. In other words, it can take more than one generation for successful families to adopt the "middle-class" parenting practices that seem most likely to increase children's cognitive skills.
Ultimately the gap is created by your parents, in particular your mothers, level of education. Your families income/wealth. The neighborhood you live in and in particular the resources at the school you attend, which can be heavily influenced by your families income/wealth. Finally, the actual parenting strategies that are applied to you.
There are no easy fixes. In some cases we have closed the gap by addressing pieces of the puzzle by equalizing funding, desegregating, etc. However, the only way to really close the gap is to provide a path forward for families to have a self-sustainable income which will lead to natural neighborhood improvement. This will lead to gradual cultural change which, over time, will lead to the test score gap closing further over a period of multiple generations.
You can't "test prep" a junior reading at a 5th grade level (at best) into a decent ACT score. Can you get them from a 20 to a 22? Maybe...but let's not kid ourselves, the kids scoring 17 and the kids scoring 26 are *light years* apart in both ability and education, it's not "the test is unfair".
The biggest problem with the entire topics is that occasionally some racist will use it as some sort of weapon. Therefore, people get all thin-skinned about discussing the realities of it and try to dismiss it as some sort of unfair measure when it's not.
Also, there is a lot of free on-line test prep as well as school resources.
There are race based group differences though that appear stubborn. Is it unfair to discuss these realities since we're constantly asked to either fund various schemes to close the gap or engage in intrusive social engineering?
For example liberals were making a big deal about the lack of AP & Calculus classes offered at mostly black schools a few years ago. Never mind that most students at these schools couldn't do the work, liberals said it was a question of access.
Your blogger is cherry picking. Some poor whites also score as highly as some wealthy whites and some poor and wealthy blacks score as highly as some wealthy whites. Also, your veiled attempt at hinting at a genetic cause throughout this thread is rather sad.
The Brookings Insititute has done extensive studies on this subject and this article is a great read for anyone interested in the entire debate around the test score gap. There are multiple factors at play and it is true that income alone does not change the test scores much. As I stated in my post it is an iterative generational process.
Ultimately the gap is created by your parents, in particular your mothers, level of education. Your families income/wealth. The neighborhood you live in and in particular the resources at the school you attend, which can be heavily influenced by your families income/wealth. Finally, the actual parenting strategies that are applied to you.
There are no easy fixes. In some cases we have closed the gap by addressing pieces of the puzzle by equalizing funding, desegregating, etc. However, the only way to really close the gap is to provide a path forward for families to have a self-sustainable income which will lead to natural neighborhood improvement. This will lead to gradual cultural change which, over time, will lead to the test score gap closing further over a period of multiple generations.
Are you familiar with the concept of data, mean and standard deviations? Citing "some" as retort is not a response to someone citing a mean. No one is saying that no black person outscores any given white person.
We're shocked that poor kids who have uneducated parents and go to poor schools score poorly on the ACT? I'm shocked. The SAT and ACT measure how well you take the SAT or ACT, which is largely based on the amount of test prep you've had.
I spent zero time (not one second) preparing for the ACT, got drunk and stoned the night before and was really hung over and scored top 2% though I went to school in a poor southern town. I probably could have improved my score a bit if I had taken some time to prepare but the test is more than just about preparation.
Baloney. Lots of public schools teach beyond Algebra. All seven of the public schools in our district offer Calculus AB, and many students go beyond that to Calc BC --> Differential Equations --> Abstract Math/Linear Algebra. If a student finishes that track, and some do, they move to the Statistics sequence or Computer Science to fulfill the four credits of math for graduation requirement. Most other districts in my metro region offer those courses, too. The mean composite ACT score for last year's graduating class, btw, was a 25.9. Math was a 26.1. From. Public. School. Students.
I didn't say the schools didn't teach it, I said the kids don't know it. And in my experience, many public school kids just don't. They didn't need to. In many public schools, it is available, but not required. Conversely, in many private schools, it is available and IS REQUIRED. I was required to take 4 years of math that had to include Algebra, Geometry and Alg2-Trig.
And I was speaking generally, not absolutely. These reports/studies show a disparity in prep level, and by and large, more private school & well to do (geography and local income demographic, not per pupil spending) public schools have higher academic requirement and level of expectation than the average public school, and I am telling you, I see it when I tutor kids for these tests. Same goes for reading & vocabulary, science, etc.
The higher the school's expectation, requirements and adherence to rigor, the better those kids are at the college boards. Kinda makes sense, right? A school more dedicated to college prep will produce higher college board scores than a school dedicated to making sure everyone graduates. Generally, private schools are more dedicated to college prep than they are appeasing social narratives, while public schools must adhere to the whim of the political masses. Obviously there are bad private schools and wonderful public schools, but those are more exception than rule. And these disparities in test scores reflect that generality.
We're shocked that poor kids who have uneducated parents and go to poor schools score poorly on the ACT? I'm shocked. The SAT and ACT measure how well you take the SAT or ACT, which is largely based on the amount of test prep you've had.
Naw, bc the numbers skewed the same prior to the proliferation of test prep course.
I had far too many friends move here from foreign countries who didn't even speak English who ACED every single standardized test they were given. Countless. From various different countries.
If people don't wrap their heads around the idea that genetics and parental involvement emphasizing a culture of educational importance is the key to everything, nothing will ever change.
They already did the study years ago in England. They took kids from a poor school and kids from an excellent school and had them switch schools.
The high-performing kids stayed high-performing no matter what school they were at. Because of their parents.
And we've stated this in thread after thread after thread. Parents can be dumb as a rock. They don't need to understand the subject. All they have to do is make sure their child goes over what was learned that day and verify that their homework is done. follow up is not that difficult.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
