I saw the the headline, Harley’s students lead area in SATs in the D&C recently, and I wondered aloud how the rest of the story would play out beyond the sound bite. Specifically, the narrative that schools are bad because they have over bloated budgets and are suing Maggie Brooks and her unFAIR plan and a private school leads in SAT scores.

Does the article make such a link? Nope - at least, best I can tell without my reading glasses. But a little analysis could help people to see beyond the headline.

So I’ll start -

Congrats to Harley on achieving high SAT scores -it is an achievement. The article says:

In the critical reading and mathematics portions, which are most often used by college admissions officers, the mean score for the 34 students in Harley’s senior class was a total of 1,250.

The critical reading mean at the school in Brighton was 628. For math, the mean was 622. The maximum possible score on each part of the test is 800.

Harley’s score was 45 points higher than students at Brighton High School, the top public school in the six-county region of Monroe, Ontario, Livingston, Genesee, Wayne and Orleans counties. Brighton ranked 12th among public schools statewide.

OK, first off, I think the math is off because Harley scored 1250 and if you add up the numbers in the second line, Brighton scored 1250 as well. For the sake of the article - I’ll concede that Harley was 45 points higher than Brighton.

Anyone know what they were last year? Or the year before? I don’t know because the article was all about 2007 - a single data point. It should be treated like a single data point. Not a data set. It would have been nice to know if this was a trend or simply a data point.

But, what is the headline? Private school scores higher than a public school. So, can you see how one can naturally jump to the conclusion that private works better than public? Well, does it? Remember - Public serves all, private does not. Like this quote buried in the article actually says,

Although about 30 percent get some financial assistance, most Harley parents pay tuition of $17,000 a year for students in grades nine through 12
Barbara Tomasso, an expert on assessment tests who works for both Monroe County Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, was not surprised to see how students at Harley and other private schools ranked.

“You have a very small school that has a very select population. You have a very high level of parent involvement because they’re paying their taxes and they’re paying tuition to go to that school, so you would have that expectation of those students,” she said.

Finally - Have a look at our public schools - Our local public schools. Yes, the same suburbs affected by the unFAIR plan.

For the group of private schools, the mean score for the reading and math portions of the test was 1,105, compared with 1,072 for suburban Monroe County public schools and 833 for Rochester School District students.

Six public schools in the region had SAT scores above the private school mean: Brighton (1,205); Pittsford-Sutherland (1,182); Pittsford-Mendon (1,140); Honeoye Falls-Lima (1,117); Fairport (1,111); and Victor (1,109).

As predictable in the D&C story chats - this is being used to validate vouchers and bash schools. Sorry guys, you have to do better than that.