Thats not fair! You didn't read the report. The scores are all normalized to reflect the new scoring. This is an apples to apples comparison. About 5 years ago, they changed the way they score the SAT, so the same performance would go up by about 100 points. So no, things aren't really better.
My understanding is as Koblenz indicates; a 516 SAT score today is not the same as a 516 SAT score in 1967. Today's students take a different test designed to get the same test results. i.e. - if the scores drop over the years, can't be the students - it's gotta be that the test is wrong. However, if you have data indicating how the scores have been normalized after they have changed the test- please post. Thanks.
I don't know why good news about education is getting all this negative response!
In the SAT link, it discusses the score changes and states that the scores were normalized to be consistent with past scores. Anyway, the scoring change occurred in 1995 and the SAT scores have risen consistently since then with the exact same scoring.
Someone asked about verbal. The SAT gains are smaller, but still there. This is from the DEA's website
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2003/section2/indicator10.asp and says that only 3 countries out of 38 were better than the US on international reading comparisons.
This is the newspaper article that turned me on to this good news:
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/cctimes/6621573.htm. It says in part "The nation's high school class of 2003 achieved the highest score on the math section of the SAT in at least 36 years - a gain attributed to greater enrollment in advanced math and science courses and the proliferation of high-tech gadgets and computers.
Students' scores in the verbal section of the test hit a 16-year high.
The College Board, which owns the nation's most popular college entrance exam, said Tuesday that this year's high school graduates had an average cumulative score of 1,026 points on the SAT, up six points from 2002.
Both the average math (519) and verbal (507) scores were up three points from last year."
(Note - previous scores I described were from 2002; these are even higher in 2003)
Again, this is positive news about America. We should be celebrating these recent gains.
They changed the scoring - look it up. Formerly very impressive numbers are just average today. Why did they change? I guess to not hurt anyone's feelings.