Though measures of long-term academic performance trends are valuable to education policy analysts and policymakers, they have been hard to come by at the state level, where most education policy is made. Such data are either nonexistent prior to 1990 or are unrepresentative of statewide student populations. A continuous series of state mean SAT…

The SAT is designed to measure the verbal and math reasoning abilities of high school juniors and seniors. These abilities develop over a long period of time and are independent of a particular school curriculum. The performance of seventh and eighth graders on the SAT is amazing, especially when considering their age. Although these students do,…