game day!

i forgot until i opened google news this morning that today is my favorite day of the year! the georgia-clemson game!!! er…i mean, the college board’s annual release of average SAT scores. the atlanta journal constitution, atlanta’s sorry excuse for a newspaper, offers this priceless assessment:

The good news? We’re still not last in the nation.

yes, indeedy. all those years of fighting with south carolina for who would occupy the honored 49th highest average SAT score slot, and now we’re in the enviable position of expanding our news reporting to include not just the georgia-clemson game, but a no-holds-barred free-for-all between georgia, florida, hawaii, pennsylvania and south carolina.

the media obsession with state average SAT scores-as-grudge-match is completely misguided on more levels than i’ll rant about today, not the least of which is that in roughly half of the 50 states, most kids take the ACT, not the SAT, which means only giant geekmonsters trying to get into ivy league schools take the SAT in those states.

but the part of this story that boils my blood the most is that georgia’s low scores are, in fact, a testament to what georgia is doing right in public education. it’s getting more and more kids than ever before to go to college, especially students of minority races. one in four students who took the SAT in georgia in 2007 was black — the highest proportion in the nation. as the georgia department of education press release astutely points out, that’s one-tenth of all the black students who took the SAT in the US. this is reflected in college enrollments in georgia, and that is a wonderful thing.

it’s also reflected, though, in the state average score. this is the ugly truth part that the AJC doesn’t want to talk about. on average, black students score almost 300 points lower on the SAT than white students nationally on the now-2400 point test. in georgia, the gap between white and black students is gaping, but is, in fact, smaller than the national gap — 267 points versus 292 points. and, when average scores by race/ethnicity are ranked, all of georgia’s groups come in somewhere in the middle.

so, how is it possible that we’re rejoicing because we’re not the worst? even kids in georgia learn how this works in grade-school math. because black students’ scores are so much lower and there are so many black students in the test-taking population in georgia, the black students “drag the average down,” so to speak.

i’m all for working as hard as we can to close these achievement gaps and to get all kids in georgia and in the rest of the nation ready for college and careers. but the truth is, the problem is not that all schools in georgia suck; the educational deficiencies are not spread out evenly to every public school student in the state. if only it were as easy as that.

in order to fix this, we have to address these ugly truths and get to the bottom of how to reverse the relics of centuries of discrimination. hiding the institutional and societal inequities beneath the surface of the gaps ain’t gonna get us there.