AJC special report: SAT scores rise with family wealth. A notable exception in state: Norcross High
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The AJC education team looked at recently released 2013 SAT scores for metro Atlanta high schools and found something that critics have long said: Scores are closely tied to a factor beyond any student's aptitude: the amount of money their parents have.
For its special report, the newspaper matched high school average scores with an often-used index for poverty, the percentage of students eligible for federally subsidized school meals.
According to the AJC report:
The results were clear: The higher a school's percentage of poor kids, the worse that school tended to perform on the SAT. Indeed, the data show a line no poor school could cross: None with two-thirds or more of its students in poverty was able to match or exceed the state average SATscore of 1452 out of a possible 2400.
Every school with a poverty rate over 80 percent scored below 1400. Every school with a poverty rate under 20 percent scored above 1500.
The AJC's findings offer numerical support for arguments by critics who have long complained