ACT’s Annual Meeting: Celebrating Legacy and Embracing the Future

As participants gathered to celebrate ACT’s 50 years of helping people achieve education and workplace success, they agreed that we’ve come a long way since 1959—and we can go much further.

ACT’s board of directors, advisory board members, and staff, plus state representatives and distinguished guests, met October 19–20 in Iowa City for ACT’s 50th annual meeting. Presentations, discussions, and celebrations revolved around the theme of “ACT at 50: Celebrating Our Legacy, Embracing Our Future.”

“While today’s ACT is a much larger and more broadly engaged organization than the ACT of 1959, we continue to address many of the same issues that were the impetus for our founding 50 years ago,” said Richard L. Ferguson, ACT CEO and chairman of the board, in his opening remarks. “Our founders committed to an agenda of awesome magnitude: preparing all of the nation’s youth for a successful transition into higher education—and ultimately into a productive work environment. That commitment, which was neither conventional wisdom nor a national priority at the time ACT was founded, remains the focal point of our work today.”

Throughout the past five decades, ACT’s commitment to helping people achieve success has been anchored in research-based solutions to real-world problems—problems affecting millions of individuals and thousands of educational institutions and organizations. “We’ve seen a need, and we’ve responded. Our commitment to research-driven solutions has resulted in groundbreaking initiatives during the past 50 years,” said Ferguson.

ACT’s first program—the college admission and placement test—was developed with the belief that every student can learn and should have the opportunity to do so. Over the years, ACT has evolved to offer a broad array of programs and services that help prepare people worldwide for education and careers.

Today, ACT is focused on addressing some of the same issues that have been challenging us since the beginning:

• Inadequate student achievement in many of the nation’s schools and a corresponding lack of readiness for college and career
• U.S. competitiveness in an increasingly global economy
• The frequent disconnect between the skills possessed by those in and entering the workforce and the increasingly complex and demanding skills required by current and future jobs.

Ensuring that young people are ready for postsecondary education and training and preparing workers with the skills they need for the jobs of today and tomorrow continue to be ACT’s top concerns as the organization begins its sixth decade. ACT’s board of directors has outlined a number of priorities for the coming years:

• Expand efforts to address achievement gaps in individuals’ readiness for a next level of education and for a job that will provide a living wage suitable for a family.
• Establish ACT’s workforce development services as preeminent solutions to the nation’s workforce development needs.
• Promote the development of human talent worldwide by adapting existing ACT solutions in education and workforce for use in other countries.
• Facilitate current initiatives to establish common core education standards for the nation’s schools and to gain adoption of those standards by the states.
• Advance new learning paradigms and supportive assessment systems in the nation’s schools.
• Build on ACT’s research capability and outreach to inform decisions on important issues.

There is no better time than the present to tackle these priorities, said Richard W. Riley, former U.S. Secretary of Education and an ACT board member. “As someone who spent years in Washington fighting for every penny we got for education, I can assure you that having a president who cares about education—and who has dedicated stimulus money toward education—can make a difference. Now is the time for ACT to take a lead on national education and workforce development policy.”

Riley, the keynote speaker, talked about how far ACT has come since 1959, when the concerns of the day were different than they are now. “Fifty years ago, we lived in a much more secure and serene America. Today, we are living in a world that can be defined as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous,” he said.

“Who would have thought we’d be contending with terrorist attacks, pandemics like the H1N1 flu virus, the fall of Wall Street, high unemployment, climate change, global warming, and a growing distrust of our government and political leaders? There is a lot of unease and uncertainty that pervades our society today.”

To navigate through these unsettling times, people need access to education and training programs so they can acquire the knowledge and skills to be competent, capable, and confident in our increasingly competitive global society. Riley encouraged ACT to continue to build partnerships with secondary schools, two-year and four-year colleges, community organizations, and trade associations to promote academic rigor coupled with twenty-first century skills that prepare people for current and future career opportunities.

“The world we live in offers a lot of uncertainty. But it also offers the freedom to make new choices, to pave new paths, to develop new business networks, and to offer new solutions to make our country strong and secure again,” he said.

Four speakers discussed a variety of possible solutions—initiatives that build on ACT’s legacy. They presented internal and external views on “ACT Solutions for a Changing World.”

Martin Scaglione, president and chief operating officer of the ACT Workforce Development Division, and Bryan Albrecht, president of Gateway Technical College, addressed America’s shortage of middle-skill workers and the role of community colleges in dealing with this problem.

America has millions more middle-skill job openings than there are workers ready to fill them. Middle-skill jobs typically require some significant education or training beyond a high school diploma, but less than a bachelor’s degree. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, nearly half of all job openings in the next 10 years will be in middle-skill occupations. These jobs are growing faster—at about 12.7 percent—than high-skill jobs, which are expanding at a 7.8 percent rate.

“This growth creates substantial workforce opportunities. However, shortages of workers with middle skills will remain unless we, as a nation, address the problem,” said Scaglione.

Community colleges are uniquely qualified to meet the challenge of upskilling America’s workforce, he said. Many community colleges work directly with the public sector, employers, and other clients to provide training for specific occupations and industries. Gateway Technical College is one such example.

Gateway is working to ensure economic growth and viability through education, training, leadership, and technological resources all designed to meet the changing needs of students, employers, and communities. The college, which represents three counties in the Milwaukee–Chicago corridor, offers instructional programs from its campuses and through distance learning opportunities to approximately 29,000 students annually.

At the heart of Gateway’s mission are Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs that respond to area business needs. “CTE is at the forefront of our discussions about preparing people for jobs,” said Albrecht. “The American economy cannot and will not regain its footing without knowledgeable and skilled workers. It’s not one or the other—highly skilled workers without a knowledge base or a high knowledge base without skills.”

As more and more workers turn to America’s community colleges to develop the knowledge and skills they need, enrollment growth has been unprecedented. At the same time, students’ interest in career and technical education is growing rapidly. “We need to find new ways to bring workforce development and business together with education so we can best serve the needs of our communities,” said Albrecht. “These challenging times call for innovative solutions.”

Cynthia B. Schmeiser, president and chief operating officer of the ACT Education Division, and Charity Smith, assistant commissioner for the Arkansas Department of Education, discussed some of the issues and solutions being worked on.

“Despite the growth in knowledge and resources to help our schools, progress has been slow. Too many of our children are still dropping out of high school or are graduating from high school ill-prepared for college and workforce training programs,” said Schmeiser.

ACT’s research clarifies the extent of the problem and offers great insight into how to attack it, she said. One solution is Rigor & Readiness, a new multiyear pilot initiative to start preparing students for college and career readiness as early as sixth grade. A fully aligned and coherent college and career readiness instructional system, Rigor & Readiness provides school districts with a research-driven approach to college and career readiness designed to prepare students in three dimensions: academic readiness, academic behavior, and academic and career planning.

Smith knows a lot about preparing students for college and career. In addition to leading the Arkansas Department of Education’s Division of Public School Academic Accountability, which Education Week rated as one of the highest-performing state offices of academic accountability, she works closely with students at an “academic fitness center” that she helped found (see page 12).

“Too many times we focus on the kids who are doing well, and less on the students who aren’t doing as well. We must build a world where every child, regardless of status in life, can get an education. We must believe in the possibility of all children achieving the expectations we set for them,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter what your title is or what you do. It’s about the legacy you leave for those who will lead the future. When the results of our actions match the passion of our pronouncements, then we will know we have succeeded.”