[Brent Calvert 03969-030]

There is some sort of disconnect going on in Texas education. They may have a great graduation rate, but they rank very near the bottom on SAT and ACT scores.

I can’t find the participation rates for Texan SAT and/or ACT takers, though. So, at best, Texas has a very high participation rate, with the poor performers dragging the average score down. At worst, Texas has lax graduation standards, which explain the terrible college entrance average scores.

I have personally met adults who are functionally illiterate even though they have a high school diploma. They were schooled in Chicago.

[Zhang Fei]

There is some sort of disconnect going on in Texas education. They may have a great graduation rate, but they rank very near the bottom on SAT and ACT scores.

The high graduation rate is a red herring. The real problem with the Texas education system is that it has too many Hispanics. And I say that in an ironic way to mean that Texas's standardized test scores are dragged down by the roughly half of the student population that is Hispanic. By ethnic group, Texas has decent test scores. TX's whites, Hispanics, blacks and Asians do better than CA's and NY's equivalents. The problem is that TX's Hispanic + black population is greater than CA's and NY's. Ultimately, we are constrained by our God-given abilities, and God seems to have, on average, given more smarts to Asians and whites in the area of test-taking than blacks and Hispanics. And that has affected TX's test score stats.

[Zhang Fei]

Here's an example from the TEA website:

Grade 8 – Scale Score
Score Range 0-300

Student Group	National Public	Texas	State Rank
All Students	151	153	29th
White	163	167	8th
African American	128	137	4th
Hispanic	136	146	6th
Asian	159	172	na
ELL  ( English Language Learners)	106	118	na
SD ( Students with Disabilities)	124	121	na

   

Bolded numbers = statistically significantly higher than national public

The "all students" rank is in the bottom half because TX has a lot of Hispanics and blacks in its schools. But TX's Hispanics and blacks are in the top 10 (out of 50 states) nationwide. Political correctness obscures a lot of truths, and this is one of the truths that peeks out at the energetic researcher if he cares enough to look for it.