Measure Carefully

Not to knock the work by the American Legislative Exchange Council, but one of its recent studies, reported on last weekend in Maine, could cloud the question of how this state’s students are performing. In the council’s report, it concludes that Maine placed a dismal 41st on its SAT scores and an outstanding second on its ACTs. Neither accurately reflects Maine student performance.

The two standardized tests showed wildly different results because of the percentage of students who took them. SATs are popular in the East, so about 70 percent of Maine students took them in 2003; only 2 percent of Maine students took the ACTs, which are popular among western schools.

The farther down the class ranking a standardized test reaches, the lower the composite score. So, for instance, Mississippi, which ranked 50th for its ACT scores (and 50th for its National Assessment of Educational Progress) nevertheless ranked a healthy 16th on its SATs. Why the disparity? Only 4 percent of their students took the SATs, while the majority took the ACTs.

Maine’s rank among states in which at least 60 percent of students took the SATs was middling – eighth of 15 in 2003; sixth of 15 in 2004. (Were the scores adjusted for race, as some suggest, Maine would have been less than middling.)

The council, which emphasizes free-market, school-choice answers to education challenges and issues its report card annually, wasn’t trying to hide any of this, but for those looking only at the one-page summaries of state scores and the council’s overall state rankings, an adjustment for the percentage of students taking the various tests could be lost.

It is important that it not be because, as the council notes, Maine has increased its education spending tremendously over the last 20 years. (Not lavishly on teachers, by the way, whose salaries are 39th in the nation.) Anyone looking at only the council performance rankings and the spending increases might conclude that their tax dollars are being squandered. Maybe they are, in some cases, but not based on that simplified picture.

Maine has plenty of education challenges without adding a statistics battle to its burden.