AUGUSTA – Some are hoping a legislative committee will recommend putting the brakes on a plan to replace the Maine Educational Assessment with SATs for 11th-graders this year.
But others, including the vice president of the College Board that oversees SAT testing, hope the plan will go forward.
A Jay guidance counselor, a principal and several legislators testified this week in favor of two bills, one that would require legislative oversight for any changes, and another that would delay any change to 2007.
The Education Committee is expected to vote today on the bills sponsored by Rep. Thomas Saviello, I-Wilton, and Sen. Michael Brennan, D-Portland.
“The MEAs need to go, but SATs are not the answer,” Saviello said at this week’s hearing.
Maine Education Commissioner Susan Gendron announced last year that the SAT would replace the 11th-grade MEA in April 2006, in hopes of increasing the likelihood that more Maine students would go to college. Most colleges and universities require SATs for admission.
Saviello argued that the change would come too quickly and without input from stakeholders. Jay High School guidance counselor Ben Milster, representing the Maine Counseling Association, said replacing the MEA with the SAT would be the wrong use because the SAT does not measure achievement.
Milster said that last year 55 percent of high school juniors and seniors took the SAT, “which means 45 percent didn’t.”
Some students don’t need the test, won’t take it seriously and may not show up on a Saturday when the test is given, Milster said.
“When a student comes to my office and says, ‘My father was a welder. His father was a welder. I want to be a welder,’ I don’t say, ‘Shouldn’t you study anthropology at the University of Maine?’ A lot of students don’t need to take the test,” Milster said.
Gendron defended the change as a way to raise expectations and promote equity in high schools. Requiring 11th-graders to take the SAT would help ensure that all high school graduates are ready for college, Gendron said. That higher level of knowledge is just as important for someone entering today’s work force as it is for someone going to college, she said.
Wayne Camara of the College Board agreed. The SAT is not a cure-all, but with the right atmosphere in a school it would encourage more students to take tougher classes. That, he said, would give them more career choices.
Statistics show students who have not completed algebra I by the ninth grade have no opportunity to take calculus in high school, thus no chance of going into medicine, mathematics or engineering, Camara said.
He added that high school students who have not taken algebra II have less than a 30 percent chance of going to and graduating from college.
Comments are no longer available on this story