There’s not a lot of evidence from the latest SAT scores that the various waves of education reform we’ve seen in Washington since the 1980s have generated much progress, particularly in reading. From the Wall Street Journal coverage:

Average scores for the class of 2009 in critical reading dropped to 501 from 502, in writing to 493 from 494 and held steady in math, at 515. The combined scores are the lowest this decade and reflect stalled performance over the past three years. The reading scores are the worst since 1994.
Many observers Tuesday viewed the flat results of recent years as discouraging in light of a more than 25-year effort to improve U.S. education. “This is a nearly unrelenting tale of woe and disappointment,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “If there’s any good news here, I can’t find it.”

Because of the changes in the test-taking population over the years, the SAT isn’t the best barometer of educational progress in the nation. That would be the, uh, National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP tests have been given in reading and math since the early 1970s. Among nine-year-olds, there was a modest gain in reading achievement since 1971 and a sizable gain in math achievement since 1973. But that’s not the most important measure of school outcomes. Those kids have years to go within the system. Unfortunately, when you look at the high-school NAEP scores, you see virtually no improvement in reading or math performance since the early 1970s, despite massive increases in taxpayer funding and reform fads galore.