ACT Annual Meeting Focuses on Changes in Education, Workforce Development

Day 1 of the October meeting focused on education.

The pre-K to 16 system is full of transitions, Mark D. Musick, the president of the Southern Regional Education Board, told the ACT state representatives, directors, staff, and guests gathered in Iowa City. At each transition, the system suffers breakdowns, creating gaps in achievement.

“I’ll use a plumbing analogy,” he said.

“We don’t have a seamless system in most of the United States. We lose water, and we lose students where those pipes come together.”

Policymakers already are focused on those connection points—especially kindergarten to first grade, grade school to middle school, middle school to high school, and high school to college. Musick predicts their focus will become more intense.

“It’s not that we haven’t known that the educational pipeline is leaking,” he said, “but let me tell you, we’re going to be talking more about it.”

All of which is good news for an organization committed to providing information for life’s transitions.

“ACT could not be better positioned,” said Musick. “This fits right into ACT’s EPAS^® model of EXPLORE^®, PLAN^®, and the ACT Assessment^®.”

The three assessments are administered at eighth grade, tenth grade, and at eleventh or twelfth grade. Together they make up ACT’s Educational Planning and Assessment System, or EPAS, an integrated system of assessment that helps students improve skills and plan for college and careers. Used together with ACT’s Standards for Transition^® and Pathways for Transition^®, EPAS helps educators and students monitor progress and plan for success. EPAS supports an approach for which more and more distinguished educators are clamoring.

“Our mission is to reach all students,” said Allison G. Jones, assistant vice chancellor of academic affairs and student academic support at the California State University system, when it was his turn at the podium. “We believe the key to all this is early intervention and assessment.”

The challenge in California, as in other states, is to create a seamless K–16 system, to align the grade school and high school curricula with state standards and university expectations. “It’s key that we help students and their teachers identify skills and weaknesses as early as possible,” Jones said.

Jones serves education in a state that is on the tectonic edge of changes in the field. His colleague, Patrick S. Hayashi, is at the epicenter.

Hayashi is the associate president of the University of California, where President Richard Atkinson initiated shock waves nationwide recently with the call for a different approach to college admissions testing. Atkinson’s premise: Students should be tested on what they are taught. Hayashi talked about what that means in his presentation to the ACT audience (see related story).

“We all know that students start at very different places and have to take very different paths. Rather than a barrier, a curriculum-based test can be a road map. A curriculum-based test provides students with specific guidance on how to prepare for college. What the test covers is not a mystery or a secret. On the contrary, a curriculum-based test covers just that—the college-prep curriculum. The test itself tells students what to focus on,” said Hayashi.

Which is exactly how ACT thinks it should be.

“We believe President Atkinson was talking about us,” said Cyndie Schmeiser, ACT vice president of Development, pointing out that all of ACT’s assessment tools are curriculum based and instructionally sensitive. “What we test is no mystery. What we test is no secret.”

Schmeiser called for a common language in the national discussions of standards, and proposed that ACT’s Standards for Transition be that language.

“State standards have not been defined in terms of what people need to know or be able to do to compete in college,” Schmeiser said. “ACT has the data, and that data can inform the conversations between secondary and postsecondary institutions.”

As CEO Richard L. Ferguson said in his opening address:

“There is a growing realization that real, documented improvements in school effectiveness will only come from a well-integrated and well-articulated system of standards, assessment, and curriculum. Our programs reflect our view that students’ transition to life after high school, including college admission, is not a point in time but rather a process. As a process, students need to begin participating in it early.”

Early planning leads to greater success whether a student is going to college or directly into the workforce.

Day 2 of the meeting focused on changes in the American workforce. Presenters Daniel Walker, chief talent officer for Apple Computer, Inc., and Barbara Bolin, director of the Michigan Department of Career Development, delivered similar messages.

“People in business don’t have any written rules anymore,” said Walker. With the economy in a recession companies need to invest in their employees to survive.

“The primordial asset of companies is people,” he said. Successful companies going forward will be those that treat their people as well as they treat their products.

“There aren’t enough high-quality, high-performing people in America. There are a lot of people with high potential, but not enough high-quality workers,” said Walker. Businesses have been “waiting at the end of the trough with their mouths open,” he said, and that has to end. “They, in the end, are the ones who are going to benefit and they have to get involved.”

Bolin credited her department’s success to just such involvement.

“The bread and butter of the American economy is sitting in our schools even as we speak. Employers are interested in that educational pipeline,” said Bolin. Business and education just need a tool to help them communicate. In her program, WorkKeys^® fits the bill. “Using WorkKeys as a common language, alongside a high school diploma, alongside other credentials, I believe gives us more power than we’ve had for a long time.”

It is the power of information, a power that ACT understands. As Walker described it: “At ACT the brand is strong, the company is healthy. You’ve got a legacy in testing that gives you the right to take a leadership role.”