Johnny still can’t read all that well, but he sure can count. That seems to be the good news-bad news message from the Scholastic Assessment Test scores of this year’s high school seniors.
But happily, there’s more good news than bad, and the best of it is that students taking the SAT mathematics exam posted the highest scores in 24 years.
Education experts attribute the higher scores to the emphasis that has been put on math in recent years, with more students taking math courses and schools offering more advanced classes.
That’s a lesson schools must now apply to reading and writing, since this year’s average score on the test of verbal skills falls 25 points below the 1972 average.
Those scores have climbed a few points in the last couple of years, but they are still dismal compared to those of 25 years ago.
A spokesperson for the College Board, which administers the test used by more than 90 percent of the nation’s colleges in deciding on student admission, blamed a steady decline in the number of students taking four or more years of English courses for the lag in verbal scores.
Clearly, high schools need to become more rigorous in their reading and writing requirements, just as they have in math. Each is crucial to the learning process, and there’s no reason the average high school graduate cannot master the rudiments of both.
