ACT scores expose state’s unwillingness to act
Education reform in South Carolina suffers from a tragic lack of imagination: new standards and new tests, but the outcomes remain disappointing. This year’s ACT scores offer the latest disappointment. Only 14 percent of test-takers were ready for college, and the race gap is even more alarming: Just 2 percent of black students met standard on the four sections of the ACT.
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South Carolina also appears to compare poorly to the other 20 states requiring all students to take the ACT.
However, I urge caution about interpreting ACT scores since South Carolina has recently adopted Common Core standards and tests, dropped Common Core, adopted yet new standards and then chosen the ACT for annual testing. Like all standardized tests, ACT scores remain more strongly correlated with race, social class and gender than the quality of the schools or teachers. And one year of data after a new test is adopted is always inadequate for drawing hard conclusions.
South Carolina has a long history of having low, if not the lowest, tests scores in the United States (notably our residency in the basement of the discredited practice of journalists ranking states by SAT scores), but the most important lesson from these data is that South Carolina has yet to address the equity gap in the lives and education of vulnerable children.
To persist with labels such as the “achievement gap” is to keep our eyes on the outcomes while ignoring the root causes of those outcomes.
South Carolina has spent three decades changing standards, tests and accountability, but refuses to address directly the race and class inequities facing our state and those same inequities reflected in our schools (both traditional and charter).
We did not need more data from a different test to tell us what we have known and ignored for decades: Social and educational inequity cheat black, brown and poor students, and our obsession with changing standards and tests fails to address the root equity problems reflected in low test scores.
The real failure in education reform lies in the inability of education reformers to deal with anything besides accountability, school choice and charter schools — none of which addresses problems directly and all of which increase those problems.
What we need to understand is that weighing a pig doesn’t make a pig fatter. The way to do that is to feed the pig — that is, to address the root causes of our low test scores.
Recent research suggests that even when schools can raise test scores, those higher scores do not translate into benefits once students enter the real world. In other words, if education is to have real life-long positive consequences, we must confront a wide range of complex root causes and school practices in order to ensure equity of opportunity — which unlike raising test scores is likely to produce life-long benefits.
Instead of changing tests and increasing test-prep, which disproportionately hurt our vulnerable student populations, we need to erase food, health and work insecurity, and we need to addresses equity of opportunity (access to experienced and certified teachers, challenging courses and then affordable college).
No one needed the latest ACT scores to demonstrate that our schools, like our society, are negligent with black, brown and poor students. The real question is, who is willing to do something different and directly about the inequity those test scores represent?
Dr. Thomas is an education professor at Furman University; contact him at Paul.Thomas@furman.edu.
This story was originally published September 18, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "ACT scores expose state’s unwillingness to act."