A school-by-school examination of SAT test scores released last week in Montgomery County reveals pockets of dismal participation and performance, especially within the county’s rapidly growing population of Hispanic students.
The results came as a setback to the district’s attempts to make achievement in the schools indistinguishable by race.
Throughout the county’s 25 high schools, just over half of the 1,600 Hispanic graduates took the SAT, the far more popular of two college entrance exams required by nearly all four-year colleges and universities.
Of those students, 440 of them graduated from 10 high schools where the average score on each of the test’s sections (reading, writing and mathematics) was below the average scores of Hispanic students statewide.
Only 20 percent of Montgomery’s Hispanic graduates earned the district’s benchmark score of 1650 (of a possible 2400), down from 24 percent in 2006. Sixty-three percent of white students hit the mark, and 58 percent of Asian students did the same.
“When you look at Montgomery County as a whole, it looks pretty good, but when you look at the pockets, you start to see really stark differences,” said Luisa Montero, managing director of Maryland Multicultural Youth Centers. “There’s this group of kids flying below the radar and whose needs are not being met.”
Montero’s group recently won a grant from the federal government to run an intensive tutoring and college-preparation program for 50 students from Silver Spring’s Wheaton High School and Einstein High in Kensington. They nearly missed out on the grant, she said, because its funders had a hard time believing there was a need in the county’s traditionally excellent school system.
Wheaton High provides one of the county’s relatively unique cases of mixed results: 79 of its 112 Hispanic graduates took the SAT, giving it one of the highest participation rates in the county. But its average score of 1237 was the lowest rate for Hispanic students in the entire district.
At Einstein, only half of the school’s 104 Hispanic students took the SAT. The average score of 1346 still fell below the average statewide, but ranked slightly higher than Wheaton and several other schools.
Superintendent Jerry Weast said the decline in participation was “a trend that we are determined to correct,” adding that the results reinforced the school system’s determination to get minority and low-income students in higher-level academic courses.
SAT performance by school in Montgomery County
Top-scoring high schools, by average score of 2008 graduates:
Walt Whitman (Bethesda): 1876
Winston Churchill (Potomac): 1820
Thomas Wootton (Rockville): 1784
Lowest-scoring high schools, by average score of 2008 graduates:
Northwood (Silver Spring): 1401
John F. Kennedy (Silver Spring): 1342
Wheaton (Silver Spring): 1314
