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But the scores actually went down. The 2010 score does not show what happened in 1994, when the total had plummeted from 478 in 1963 to 419. At that point, the Board figured out how to make things look better. It added 80 points to the scores. It explained that the test needed to be “recentered” to reflect a study indicating that the decline was largely due to an influx of poor blacks and Hispanics during those years.

So if you subtract the 80 points from the 2010 score, you get a substantial decline from 478 to 420 over the fifty-seven-year period. Meanwhile, the Board has inflated the scores from before the “recentering” of the SAT, which it previously called “an unchanging standard.” Even the middle name of the test has been changed from Aptitude to Achievement, apparently to make it go down better.

As to the reasons for such poor student performance on the tests, the Board had a basketful of possibilities beyond those already cited, including changes in the national culture, lower scholastic expectations, a proliferation of nonacademic courses, and less homework.

But a Cornell professor contended that the overall decline was more likely caused by a sweeping simplification of schoolbooks over the earlier years.7 Donald Hayes said the idea was to describe more common experiences so that children could read and learn the language more easily. “But,” he added, “if you simplify texts, you deprive children of concepts associated with uncommon words.”

A PRINCIPAL ON THE FRONT LINES

Parents of students at the Middle School of Art and Philosophy in New York City got another type of clue as to why SAT verbal scores have dropped so much: an e-mail from Principal Andrew Buck in 2010 defending his attitude toward education.

It contained some imaginative uses of pronouns, syntax, and other signs of informal English. Parents had objected earlier to the lack of what they felt were sufficient textbooks. Now they wondered whether the principal himself knew formal English. He obviously was trying in his own way to prepare his students for the changes in social and linguistic standards that had occurred since the complaining parents had gone to school.

A sample sentence of his: “Text books are the soup de jour, the sine qua non, the nut and bolts of teaching and learning in high school and college so to speak.”8

MORE GRAMMAR SLAMMERS?

The war against formal grammar finally reached teachers of English as a foreign language (TEFL) in 2005, when they began considering whether to discontinue teaching the subject in their English classes. A British government study covering one hundred years of grammar research had concluded in January of that year—nearly half a century after the NCTE decision—that such classes did nothing to help students write more accurately or fluently.

The prospect of such a move inspired Luke Meddings, a British author and teacher, to comment in the London Guardian, “Grammar is becoming a sort of touchstone for our atomized 21st century souls. As we contemplate the end of civilization as we know it, without having really mastered it in the first place, it speaks to us of order and control.” He also offered some words from Geoff Barton, head teacher at King Edward VI School in Southampton: “There may be no evidence that grammar teaching has improved writing, but . . . no conclusive evidence that it hasn’t.”9

MAJORING IN REMEDIAL

Of far more concern than punctuation and grammar are the growing dropout rates in high schools, especially where black and Hispanic students predominate. The rates are often double the national average, which hovers around 30 percent. At some colleges, up to 80 percent of incoming freshmen wind up in remedial English classes despite the fact that almost all colleges have been forced to lower their standards to remain competitive in the market for students.

In an effort to improve student language skills, the educational establishment has intensified remedial courses that seem to be geared to a