SAT scores fall again in Georgia

By Dorie Turner

The Associated Press

ATLANTA — Scores on the SAT college entrance exam dropped for a second straight year in Georgia, pushing a state that has struggled to rise from the bottom of the rankings back down one place.

Georgia now ranks 47th compared with other states and Washington, D.C., with a mean score of 1,466 on the standardized test out of a possible 2,400. That’s a six-point drop from last year’s mean score of 1,472 and an 11-point drop from 2006.

The state ranked 46th last year, up from its last-place ranking two years before that.

Georgia test takers fared worse on all three SAT categories this year. The mean scores were 491 in reading, 493 in math and 482 in writing, down from 494 in reading, 495 in math and 483 in writing last year.

State education officials say Georgia is still introducing its revamped, tougher curriculum, which will mean better test scores down the road. This year’s ninth-graders are the first of Georgia’s high school students to try the new math curriculum, and the reading curriculum is just a couple of years old, said deputy superintendent Martha Reichrath.

“I won’t tell you we were excited,” she said about Georgia’s SAT scores. “We are also aware it’s going to take time for the curriculum to take hold.”

The test’s administrators, the College Board, discourages the use of the test scores to compare education from state to state because the percentage of students who take the test varies widely.

Nearly 63,000 — about 70 percent — of Georgia’s seniors took the SAT. Typically, states with larger pools of test takers fare worse in the rankings.

For example, the top five states in the ranking all had fewer than 6,000 students take the SAT this year. Top-ranking Iowa — where the ACT is the more common college entrance exam — posted a mean SAT score of 1,797 and had just 1,330 students take the test this year.

Still, Georgia also ranks low among states where the majority of students take the SAT. Georgia is eighth among the 10 states with 70 percent or higher participation rate on the test, just ahead of Washington, D.C., and Maine.

The state must focus on poor and minority students getting the extra help they need to do better on the SAT and other tests, said Jeff Hubbard, president of the Georgia Association of Educators, the state’s largest teachers union. That includes helping low-income parents find ways to improve their education level with adult training programs so they can be more directly involved in their children’s education, he said.

“I think it’s just going to take time to totally reinvent public education in the state of Georgia,” Hubbard said.