On Thursday of last week, HISD sent out a press release that stressed the following news about SAT scores in the district:
Scores of HISD students on the important college readiness test the SAT improved strongly this year while national and Texas averages fell, a new report from the College Board shows.
HISD’s average SAT reading score increased five points while the Texas average score fell two points and the national average score fell five points.
In math, HISD’s average SAT score was up five points, while the national average fell two points and the Texas average rose four points.
[snip]
HISD’s average reading score was 469, up from 464 in 2005. The average math score was 478, up from 473 in 2005. The Texas average reading score fell to 491, and the national average reading score fell to 503. The Texas average math score rose to 506, and the national average math score rose to 518 [bH note: According to the New York Times, it actually declined to 518].
HISD’s average SAT writing score, 468, was below that of the state, 487, and the nation, 497. At HISD, 4,401 students were tested, down by 373 students from last year.
The Houston Chronicle, which sometimes appears to have an antagonism towards HISD that goes beyond journalistic skepticism, framed the news in the following manner:
Students in the Houston Independent School District made a strong 10-point gain on the SAT this year, increasing their average score for reading and math to 947.
Yet, though HISD students narrowed the large gap separating them from the national and state averages, their scores still lag far behind. And the percentage of HISD graduates who took the SAT dropped from the year before, a possible indication that fewer applied to four-year universities.
HISD’s scores trail the state average of 997 by 50 points. They’re 74 points behind the national average of 1,021.
Still, said Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra, the scores are encouraging.
“Clearly our effort to improve teaching and learning in HISD is working,” he said in a written statement. “We are definitely headed in the right direction and I’m excited for our students and their schools.”
Saavedra was so pleased with the performance that he used the school district’s new $600,000 phone system to call HISD parents with the news at dinner time. The message boasted that HISD’s scores improved at a greater rate than the state and nation, but didn’t mention that Houston’s scores remain below average.
Houston students earned a 468 on the new writing test that debuted this year, compared with the state’s 487 and the nation’s 497.
With regard to the italicized excerpt — Chronicle readers wouldn’t know how to judge HISD’s year-to-year performance (gains) relative to state/national year-to-year performance (mostly declines), because the newspaper chose not to emphasize that metric. Rather, the newspaper chose to emphasize the fact that HISD average scores are still lower than state and national averages (true); that the district used an automated phone system to notify parents of the news (somewhat understandable, given the sort of skeptical/antagonistic reporting on HISD that frequently appears on the pages of the city’s only major metro daily newspaper); and that there was a lower SAT participation in HISD. With regard to the third — the newspaper intimates that HISD’s gains may be a result of lower SAT participation among its students (“Lower participation rates typically equate to higher average scores,” Jennifer Radcliffe wrote), which doesn’t explain why national SAT scores (unlike HISD scores) declined significantly this year from last, even though fewer students also took the test nationally.
The context of HISD’s SAT score improvement is, of course, a part of the news story that should be told, as one doesn’t expect the newspaper simply to reprint a press release from Terry Abbott emphasizing HISD’s good news. However, in emphasizing the negative aspects (bolded above) as heavily as it did, the newspaper effectively has framed a story that buries HISD’s good news and moves beyond straight news coverage to news analysis — and, in the case of the speculation that lower participation drove up scores within HISD (but strangely, had the opposite effect nationally), less than useful or ideal news analysis.
BACKGROUND: SAT Reading and Math Scores Show Decline (Karen Arenson, New York Times)
