Study: SAT scores declining throughout Texas since 2007

The average SAT score has been declining throughout the state of Texas since 2007, according to new data.

Texas Public Education Information Resource learned that the combined college entrance exam score during the 2007- 2008 school year was 988 compared to 976 during the 2010-2011 school year.

“It's the massive amounts of testing the kids do,” said Tera Collum, executive director of the Travis Institute of Educational Policy, an education advocacy organization in Texas. “They're so drained from taking all these tests that I think they just don't care as much as we would like them to.”

In addition to taking the SAT, a college entrance exam, there’s also the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR), a state exam used to evaluate performance in reading, writing, math, science and social studies for 3rd- through 12th-grade pupils.

“There’s also benchmark testing to see how well students will do on the STAAR,” Collum said. “There are common assessments throughout the year to see how well students perform compared to other schools in the district and even assessments to compare student performance under teachers within their own school. A student could be tested 20 to 30 times a year in all subjects.”

It’s too much testing in grade school that ends up harming students in the long run, according to Collum.

“STAAR only tests for basic knowledge of a subject while the SAT is testing on a higher level," she said. "If you're preparing kids for a test that is minimum level, then it’s hard for them to transition to a higher level thinking if they haven't been doing it all along."

Within one year of high school graduation only 33 percent, or 93,576 of 280,520 graduates, enrolled in a four-year college.

“We spend all this time prepping students for the STAAR every year and then after sophomore year, they have to shift to perform well on the SAT and it’s a different more difficult mindset,” Collum told Education Daily Wire. “When testing actually matters to go to college, it's not transferring.”

Ethnically, at 1,057, Caucasians ranked second to Asians who scored a combined 1,109 on the SAT in the most recent tests while mixed-race students ranked third place with a score of 1,028 compared to Hispanics at 902 and African Americans at 856, according to Texas Education Information.

When asked whether STAAR prepares students for the SAT, Collum responded, “Absolutely not. They need to remove STAAR as the testing system.”