It turns out that the improved ACT college-readiness test scores I wrote about last week were not a fluke. Scores for the SAT, another college-readiness test, came in slightly improved for Virginia high school students this year, bucking a downward trend nationally.
Said Superintendent of Public Instruction Steven R. Staples in a press release today: “The performance of Virginia students on the SAT during the last five years provides additional evidence that the efforts of teachers and other educators to help students meet Virginia’s high expectations are producing real gains in learning and achievement.”
Also encouraging was that Virginians’ stronger-than-average performance extended to all racial/ethnic groups. Virginian Asians out-performed Asians nationally (except in math); likewise, whites, blacks and Hispanics consistently out-performed their racial/ethnic peers, as seen in this chart:
What’s remarkable about this chart is the degree to which Virginia Hispanics out-performed their national peers — by 122 point across all three tests. That compares to blacks who racked up 27 more points, whites with 22 points and Asians with 18 points. That is a huge difference. The difference cannot be attributed to the fact that Hispanics live disproportionately in Northern Virginia, which tends to have better schools. The same could be said of Asians. I’m guessing that Virginia Hispanics have a different socio-economic profile than Hispanics nationally.
The racial/ethnic divide remains as before: Asians are the top performers, followed by whites, Hispanics and blacks in that order.
— JAB
