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Show SAT statistics can be abused The educational community received an " unwelcome Christmas gift last week as journalists clamored to publicize results of Utah student scores on the Stanford Achievement Test V Mai Cyclops BRIAN GRAY Columnist Franklin's name may not have been mentioned for 24 months in a Utah classroom. And pity the poor teachers who aren't assigned to the affluent East Bench schools. Several readers have already signed that students at School A did not perform per-form as well as students at School B. "I always thought that faculty was weak," said one caller. "We have to do something about it. ' ' No we don't. The school comparisons have nothing to do with the quality of instruction. Students who have college-educated parents tend to perform better in school, and, not surprisingly, these parents often congregate in the more wealthy neighborhoods. That Bountiful High has a higher student average than Clearfield High is not surprising; the student scores in Palm Springs are also higher than the student scores in East Los Angeles. All the SAT scores reveal is that Utah students are doing average work and since average is not good enough, the parents should be nudging the students to do even better. . And maybe it shows one other thing. The one area in which all grade levels fell below the national average was language. As an employer can tell you, Utah students do poorly on capitalization, punctuation and the writing of a complete sentence. The poor performance stems from a lackidasical attitude at-titude toward written communication. Too many teachers feel that student creativity is more important than basic style. "Let your thoughts flow," says the teachers and the end result is gobbledygook. Drawing a happy face on a poorly-written assignment may do wonders for a student's self-esteem, but it's not helpfal when the kid has to fill out a job resume. The holistic approach to writing has tapped a vein of student energy but that energy is useless if not controlled through basic laws (in this case, commas, verbs and periods). Maybe the secondary teacher should put Robert ' Frost's poetry on hold until the students can master the spelling of common words. As always, the teachers are not totally to blame, parents seldom write personal letters, and most students' idea of communication is barking into a telephone or purchasing a Hallmark greeting card. So Utahns should not get too excited about the SAT results. The test scores will be out of the headlines and we can get back to pondering the more important issues f the cay: Is Ty Detmar really worthy of the Heismann Trophy? The gift also included substantial wrapping as education edu-cation officials searched for pretty bows and ribbons to highlight a generally average package. The official "spin" was that the test results were both encouraging encourag-ing and discouraging, that parents should not be enthralled en-thralled or disparaged, and that taxpayers should not take much stock in the school-by-school comparisons. But judging from the number of reader comments this week, the "spin doctors' are not succeeding, parents are not only reading the results, but also "reading into"them. That's the very thing school districts feared and it's the very thing the Utah Legislature ignored when it mandated that the results be publicized. Statistics, like alcohol, can be widely abused. As an example of abuse, several readers have pointed to the eighth grade student scores which are generally lower than the fifth grade scores. "Obviously," "Obvious-ly," said one reader, "the junior highs are not doing theirjob." Poppycock! The information asked of a student in the fall of his eighth grade year does not reflect at all on the eighth grade teacher (who, most probably, is still trying to learn the kid's name). If a student has difficulty in September, the problem can be traced to the two or three years prior. Furthermore, the national test does not always reflect the local curriculum. In the case of social studies, for instance,the average Utah eighth grade student did not do as well as his fifth grade counterpart. counter-part. But that doesn't mean his sixth and seventh grade teachers were on vacation. Any test question on American History, for instance, would be difficult since the seventh grade curriculum is based around Utah History and the sixth grade model focuses on the Eastern Hemisphere. In other words, Benjamin |