ACT Scores Drop for Evansville Again.

Gina scooped me on this one. She's summarized it in the GazetteXtra. Click on the post to see our summary compared to our athletic conference, Rock Valley North. Our composite score is 3rd out of 6 schools behind East Troy and McFarland. By subject, we waffle between second and third. I guess Heidi's news isn't so good for the school board meeting on September 13th. But that's my take on it. I'm sure our administration will spin this as a good thing.

I evaluated the data by gender and Evansville's boys took second place in our conference, the girls took third for composite score. The girls took second in Reading, fourth (!) in English, third in Math and fourth in Science in the conference. The boys took 3rd in Reading, 2nd in Reading, 2nd in Math and tied with Jefferson for second in Science. The stereotypical gender differences have begun to creep back into Evansville's ACT results: The boys scored better than the girls in Math (1.9 points better) and Science (1.6 points better) and the girls beat the boys in Reading (0.7 points) and English (0.8 points). Just a few years ago, the girls were kicking the boys' heines by 2-3 points in English and Reading and had reduced the differences in Math and Science to less than 0.5 points.

Compared to the state results, our composite score is just 0.3 point above the average state result for composite score this year. In individual subjects, Evansville scored from 0.7 ahead of the state average(Reading) to even with the state average (Math). Wisconsin's average composite score of 22.0 compares favorably to the national average of 21, which stands Evansville High in pretty good company nationally, which is how the administrators likely try to spin the data. But our graduates are competing locally in Wisconsin. While average Wisconsin scores have fluctuated between 22.0 and 22.3 since 1997, Evansville scores have gone through fits and starts, most recently showing a continuing slide downward from a district high composite showing of 23.1 in 05-06 to this year's 22.3. I would argue that this indicates that our graduates are becoming less competitive in the local Wisconsin Education and the job markets. I look forward to how the administration presents this data in September. It sure would be nice if we would try to compete with McFarland's excellent results (they trounce the whole conference in every category, both boys and girls). But I'm sure the company line will be "McFarland is a much different community than Evansville and we can't compare apples to oranges." But it would be great if everyone would at least ASPIRE to their results.