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The High Stakes of Stakeholder Engagement: A Plea for Careful Planning from Public Agenda
This post was written for the 20 community colleges participating in Completion by Design, a five-year Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative that aims to significantly increase completion rates for low-income students under 26. As a “National Assistance partner” for Completion by Design, Public Agenda provides direct assistance to the colleges to help them build capacity for solutions-oriented dialogue among faculty, staff and administration. Here, Public Agenda's Alison Kadlec discusses best practices for authentic internal stakeholder engagement. While the post is geared toward Completion by Design planning teams, the principles are useful for any authentic engagement process.
***You Can't Do It Alone: A New Guide to Creating Sustainable Change in Education Reform
Far too often, throughout our work in the education field, we've seen even the most earnest and promising ideas from experts and reformers for improving schools and ramping up student learning met with confusion, anxiety or even anger from teachers, parents, students or community members.
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First of all, I see that these state-by-state scores are for '06. Anything more recent?
Also, how can I find out local SAT scores? By school District preferably.
Thanks.
Marion
I would love to have more recent scores. I use this data often proving Texas is dismal in educating it's children.
Yes indeed, thanks in large to then Governor G.W. Bush's 'Every Child Left Behind' and the current governor's unwillingness to do anything about it for the past decade.
You mean its, not it's.
it's = it is
"its children" does not equal "it is children"
It would be informative to know what percentage of students in each state take the SAT or ACT. One would assume that if a greater percent took the tests, the average score would go down.
Where are Puerto Rico students scores in SAT or ACT for 2006
Where are the participation rates? Not knowing the participation rates pretty much makes these numbers meaningless.
There are 5 states that have made collective bargaining illegal: Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. In 2006, none of these states ranked above 34th (Virginia) on any of the SAT Reading, Math, or Writing subtests, or ACT composite.
If the commenter is trying to make a correlation between collective bargaining and SAT scores, it seems like a rather weak relationship. New York, with lots of money spent on students, and unions flush with cash, scored only 6 points higher than lowly South Carolina. The issue of student performance is much more complicated than this posting would suggest.
There are 22 right to work states/ridiculous arguement.
That's hilarious, about as accurate as saying there are 5 states that have consecutive vowels in their name and they all had poor scores.
None of these scores mean anything without the underlying causes of such scores being compared. Look at the percentage of students in the 12th grade that took the SAT/ACT first, then break down the demographics. All of the border states have double to triple the number of mexican & hispanic test takers vs the national average (both groups of which score over 100 points lower than the national average.
My point is that you have to compare apples to apples and if you don't have similar ratios of test takers to seniors then you are already starting out with apples and oranges. Imagine if a large district such as Atlanta ran a huge initiative for all 12 graders to take the SAT but the other 49 states had no such initiatives in any of their districts. You can no longer compare GA with the other states easily.
Next one would have to compare the the smaller groupings within the demographics to see a more accurate picture. Take the blacks compared to blacks, whites compared to whites, break those down to parental education level and income level which I would expect to be closely tied.
Of about 5 states in the south and north that I compared, the broken down comparison reveals extremely close scores by equal groups. The differences in those 5 states as a whole appears to be attributable to the ethnicity first, income levels/parental education second and native language third.
If one had more time than I do one could put a very revealing spreadsheet together.
I find it very suspicious and political all the scores are so close. I smell a rat.
State-by-state results are here: for SATs:
http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/cb-senio... (no summary... just results for each state)
... and here for ACTs:
http://www.act.org/news/data/10/states.html
The SAT and ACT data can be copied and pasted directly into a Google Docs spreadsheet and immediately be usable (but not so for Excel). And this very site can be faulted for posting the data in image format that prevents it from being transferred directly to a spreadsheet for further analysis. (Raw Data Now!)
Why are most of the ACT among states so similar but the SAT scores are so varied? I would be curios as to the % of students from each state taking the applicable test. In the midewest, where the SAT scores are generally high, I believe that most students only take the ACT. Are the school in some of these states offering a class to boost up the scores?
There are what 7 states that use the ACT test as their high school achievement measure. So near all student take the test. This skews those states scores lower compared to states where students only take the ACT when they are trying to get into a college that requires the ACT.
I still say the ACT shows a better overall education knowledge than the SAT test.
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