The College Board, which released the scores Wednesday, said the results reflect the record number of students from the high school class of 2011 who took the exam and the growing diversity of the test-taking pool -- particularly Hispanics. As more students aim for college and take the exam, it tends to drag down average scores.
Roughly 27 percent of the 1.65 million test-takers last year had a first language other than English, up from 19 percent just a decade ago.
When you have more than a quarter of the students taking the test with other than English as their first language, does anyone think that reading scores would be unaffected. And note that in just a decade the percentage has gone from 19% to 27%.
They can demonstrate a statistical correlation, but that doesn’t prove causation. Many students from Spanish-speaking households have been in US public schools since kindergarten. If they’re not competent in English, what have the schools been doing all that time?
I went to high school in the 80s with students from China and India who had been in the US a much shorter time, and they developed English competency to a high level, starting from native languages much more different from English than Spanish is. I was competing in spelling and English competitions with students from India and Korea, just like so many of the contest winners today.
They’d have a much better chance of making the case that the culture of most Latin American immigrants - like the culture of most American black people - is less conducive to intellectual achievements than some other cultures ... but that would open a can of worms that liberal don’t want opened.
When immigrants were coming to this country from Viet Nam, the very next generation were winning the spelling bees. Both of my parents had a background of people who came to this country from non-English speaking countries. When I asked my father why we didn't speak any German, he explained that he once asked his father that and was told "We live in America, you speak English".
Two lessons: the first, that the Vietnamese (and most Asians) understand that education and being able to speak the language well, are steps up the ladder of success. Two: When you come to the United States, you should learn the language in order to fit in and then success follows. Simple lessons that we now actively work against in this society because we allowed the lefties to be in charge of education and the media.