Kansas School District Partners With ACT on Education System Overhaul

Randy Watson wants to do more than just make sure students graduate. He wants them to leave high school ready for college and careers.

All McPherson High School students—about 750—participated in the “Big Event,” a community service activity held on a school day this past spring as part of the C³ initiative.

“Our goal is to have the doors to postsecondary education and jobs be open to 100 percent of our graduates when they walk out of here. We think it’s imperative to give our kids a future,” said Watson, superintendent of McPherson Unified School District 418 in McPherson, Kansas.

McPherson was the first school district to be granted a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education making it exempt from administering state assessments under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Instead, the district is using ACT assessments as part of a new curriculum and assessment initiative called C³, which stands for Citizenship, College, and Career Readiness.

“We sought the waiver because we wanted to reach a new academic standard that goes beyond the expectations of the Kansas state standards and assessment system,” said Watson, who oversees a district of 2,400 students.

Here’s how C³ works.

Citizenship Readiness. Students build skills in two overlapping areas: character education and service to the community.

• They develop confidence, motivation, and life skills with a character-building program, created by Quantum Learning, which is integrated into the curriculum.
• They complete community service projects with area organizations.
• Teachers rate student progress using rubrics, and students create portfolios that contain examples of how they met the rubrics and information about their community service.

College Readiness. Students are prepared to succeed—without remediation—in an introductory-level course at a two- or four-year institution, trade school, or technical school.

• The district uses ACT’s College Readiness Benchmarks and College Readiness Standards™ to prepare students for the rigors of college coursework.
• EXPLORE^® is administered in grades six, seven, and eight. PLAN^® is given in grade ten, and the ACT^® is offered in the fall to twelfth graders.
• Students in grades nine through twelve take ACT’s QualityCore^® end-of-course assessments in English, Algebra, Geometry, Precalculus, Biology, and Chemistry.
• The district is using ACT’s CoreWork^® Diagnostics, a Web-based school improvement program that enables schools and district leaders to continuously diagnose, implement, and monitor the school improvement process throughout the year.
• ACT’s ENGAGE™ is administered to all students in grades six through twelve. By combining ENGAGE with the ACT assessments, the district is able to significantly increase the ability to identify students who are at risk of not being prepared for postsecondary education.

Career Readiness. Students are equipped with the skills necessary to be good workers and have vibrant careers.

• Counselors help students identify potential career interests and plan their secondary courses based on the results of the interest inventories in EXPLORE, PLAN, and the ACT.
• Ninth and twelfth graders take three WorkKeys^® assessments—Applied Mathematics, Locating Information, and Reading for Information. The scores on the assessments determine which certificate levels students earn. Students must achieve at least a silver-level Kansas WORKReady! Certificate to graduate.
• The district uses the Targets for Instruction, which helps educators develop curricula and instructional strategies for the WorkKeys skills areas.
• Students participate in activities, such as job shadows, internships, and work-study programs, that are relevant to their career interests.

The academic culture of the district has changed since C³ was implemented last fall. More students are taking rigorous courses and electives, and enrollment in some vocational and technical education programs has doubled or even tripled.

“We’ve had career programs in place, but students have never showed much interest in them. Now that we have data from the ACT assessments that identifies students’ career interests and aptitudes, they are seeing the relevance of these programs to what they want to do in the future,” said Angie McDonald, director of instruction.