It has been three years since the SAT replaced the Maine Educational Assessment as the assessment tool for the state’s 11th-grade students. The decision at the time was met with resistance by educators, who felt the SAT predicts a student’s chance at success in college rather than mastery of the Maine Learning Results.

The use of the SAT as a high school assessment tool was again assailed two weeks ago when the Department of Education released a list of what it called Maine’s “persistently low-achieving” schools, a group of 10 that included Lake Region High School in Naples.

Officials there immediately renounced the state’s assessment, which was based on the school’s lack of improvement through three years of math and reading scores.

Principal Roger Lowell said the assessment failed to take into account the socioeconomic factors at the school, and how many of the Lake Region students who are forced to take the exam are not college-bound and do not take the test seriously.

“There’s a real difficulty using the SAT as a form of evaluation. A high portion of our students are not interested in college. These students are made to come in on a Saturday,” Lowell said. “There are a lot of reasons for the poor scores, and I really don’t want to go there. But, suffice it to say, my job is now on the line because of these poor scores.”

The revelations that have come at Lake Region since the state’s announcement – that many students do not try hard during the SAT testing, that students are often given multiple chances to take classroom exams, and that expectations for the students at the school are frequently low – have pushed the school district into action. They are seemingly taking the first steps toward improving education in SAD 61.

And judging from the scores released Tuesday by the Department of Education showing how much of the rest of the state scored on the assessment tests, it is a process many other schools should be undertaking even if their names are not yet appearing in embarrassing headlines.

While the SAT is not a perfect assessment tool, and it does not take into account many of the things a school does to deliver a complete and well-rounded education, it is at least a serviceable way to judge whether a school is engaging students in the basics of math and reading. It is also a good gauge of whether schools are creating self-sufficient and motivated students who can rise to a challenge.

According to the state’s list, Lake Region High School exhibited a progress of 2.46 percent, behind the state median of 4.18 percent. Its three-year average for percentage of proficiency in math and reading is 34.33 percent, behind the state average of 59 percent. Here are some other southern Maine high schools for comparison: Bonny Eagle (0.21, 41.65), Cape Elizabeth (2.08, 82.78), Gray-New Gloucester (1.32, 43.09), Scarborough (0.46, 64.16), South Portland (7.01, 48.9), Westbrook (3.04, 39.99), and Windham (2.7, 43.06).

That less than 60 percent of the state’s students are proficient in math and reading shows both that standards are high and there is more work to be done. Our schools cannot simply brush off low scores by blaming the economy or students who have no educational aspirations beyond a high school diploma.

Instead, educators must accept the scores and move forward. They have to do their part by strongly encouraging higher aspirations for all students and, at the same time, figure out how to improve instruction so that the scores improve. That’s the important lesson to be learned.