The Nation : Bell Calls SATs Bad News
Former Education Secretary Terrel H. Bell called failure of the high school class of 1986 to improve on predecessors’ Scholastic Aptitude Test scores “the worst news we’ve had in education in a long time.” “The entire nation ought to feel bad about it,” said Bell, now an education professor at the University of Utah. “What’s wrong with us? If you see how far down we’ve gone, we ought to be jumping up now.” Bell commissioned “A Nation at Risk,” the caustic 1983 report that is widely credited with sparking the national school reform movement. The 1 million seniors who completed the SAT in 1986 scored an average of 906 (431 verbal, 475 math) on the SAT scale of 400 to 1600--the same as the class of 1985.
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