Global Education: New Demands, New Requirements

“We are dealing with a world that has caught up to us and is moving on down the road,” said Roberts T. Jones, ACT director and president of Education and Workforce Policy, LLC, of Arlington, Virginia. “We keep acting like education is an opportunity, that it’s ‘cute.’ But it is now a requirement, not merely an opportunity.”

We must move to an outcome-oriented system, and that cultural shift will be traumatic, Jones said, speaking in a directors’ roundtable discussion session.

“Global competition is here today, and it’s an opportunity as much as a threat,” added Director Lutz L. Ziob, the general manager of Microsoft Learning. “Imagine companies just in Seattle, my town. Imagine Boeing, imagine Starbucks, imagine Microsoft—imagine any of them trying to be just a U.S. company without being a global company.”

Education leaders need to think the same way, several directors said.

“One of the reasons we lose traction in this country on education issues is because we talk about them in terms of segments of society. It is time to recognize that the systems that are working across the world have standard systems,” said Jones.

“ACT must play a policy role, and we’ve started to with Crisis at the Core,” he added. “All students have a right to succeed. It will only happen when organizations like ACT join the policy community.”

Human capital is the key to our nation’s success, said Director J. Theodore Sanders, executive chairman of The Cardean Learning Group, LLC. ACT knows what works in developing that human capital.

“We have to find ways to use the information we have in far more powerful ways,” Sanders said. “We sit atop a wealth of information that ought to be driving the formation of policy.”

Several directors suggested broader marketing of ACT’s messages about core curriculum and course rigor.

“Who is the target audience for our message?” asked Ziob. “Maybe it is the parents, or the students. We need to increase our marketing efforts so the messages get to the audience we want to affect, not just to the policymakers.”

In several states, the policymakers are paying attention, as was clear in a roundtable discussion with officials from Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and South Carolina.

In Colorado, officials are marketing directly to the parents.

“We have intentional, direct marketing to all eighth graders’ families about higher education requirements. And we do it again in eleventh grade,” said Jo O’Brien, assistant to the commissioner for the Office of Learning and Results. She is responsible for the statewide administration of the Colorado Student Assessment Program, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and the ACT. She is ultimately responsible for bringing achievement up in the state’s elementary and secondary systems.

Besides telling parents about what it takes for students to be ready for college, the state’s public colleges have set new entrance requirements that take effect in 2008.

“Those entrance requirements are the ACT core curriculum,” O’Brien said. “By setting them as college entrance requirements, rather than high school exit requirements, we preserve local control of the schools, but make clear what is now the standard for higher education in Colorado.”

The state’s efforts are paying off. Even with all high school students required to take the ACT, the Composite score is up a point.

Illinois is seeing similar success from its statewide administration of the ACT. Fifteen percent of students who said they had no plans to go to college actually enrolled after being required to take the ACT.

“More kids are getting options,” said Becky McCabe, division administrator for student assessment at the Illinois State Board of Education and 2004 Illinois principal of the year. “Now they all take the ACT and they all get a score, and that gives them options.”

With the highest average Composite score in the country—22.3—Minnesota faces a different dilemma.

“We have the No. 1 Composite score, but when you look at the data there are some gaps. We have one of the largest achievement gaps in the nation,” said Mary Ann E. Nelson, assistant commissioner of academic excellence in the Minnesota Department of Education. “Our challenge is to beat the perception that Minnesota is doing pretty well and close that achievement gap.”

South Carolina, on the other hand, needs to improve scores across the board.

“In South Carolina we are defeating deprivation, poverty, and decades of under-achievement, but we are not done,” said Suzette S. Lee, director of the state’s Office of High School Redesign. “The job before us is very simple: to make the existing infrastructure deliver for every student.”

In Chicago, a consortium called Project Align is doing just that. The group includes the Chicago Public Schools, the City Colleges of Chicago, Loyola University, Illinois State University, Northeastern Illinois University, Roosevelt University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. They came together to move students seamlessly from the public high schools to community colleges and on to four-year colleges. Their primary goal is to ensure that Chicago Public Schools high school graduates are ready for college.

“We have a very lofty goal in the Chicago Public Schools: a postsecondary placement for every CPS graduate,” said Edward T. Klunk, deputy chief officer of high school programs in the Chicago Public Schools.

In working toward that goal, the Project Align partners work together to define clear student learning outcomes (SLOs).

“The student learning outcomes in Project Align are really drilling down into ACT’s College Readiness Standards to better define the skills students need. The SLOs refine the College Readiness Standards. We hope to make ACT a more active partner in our development of the student learning outcomes,” Klunk said.

Partnering with educators—whether they are in schools or in industry—is really what ACT is all about. Trends toward lifelong learning and continuous training create more opportunities for ACT to help individuals succeed all the time. Workforce speakers from Toyota Motor Sales, Bayer Material Science, and the Parametric Technology Corporation moved seamlessly between issues in education and workplace throughout their presentations. All three have close ties to traditional education. Two of them are former teachers, and they draw upon their teaching experiences in their corporate jobs today.

“Knowledge: It’s got an expiration date just like a carton of milk. You’ve got to keep updating it,” said William Bergen, who works as the national dealer education manager for Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., and also serves as the chairman of the board for the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence (ASE).

ACT has worked with ASE to deliver its secure credentialing assessments for years. Nearly half of the auto technicians in the country have earned the basic ASE certification. Many have progressed to higher levels of the voluntary credentialing system. Besides providing informed consumers an assurance of quality, the system motivates technicians to learn.

“Your car is not just a vehicle that gets you from point A to point B. These are vehicles that keep our students engaged, that teach them science and physics and keep them in school,” Bergen said.

Fred Kendrick, director of corporate human resources for Bayer Material Science, finds a similar motivational quality in ACT’s WorkKeys^® assessment system.

“Sustained success depends less on physics and more on biology—the people. Managers must be able to inspire and motivate people,” Kendrick said. “With WorkKeys, employees feel they are in control of their learning. That means systems like WorkKeys are no longer a nicety, but a necessity.”

The connection between technological and human resources is very clear to Ralph K. Coppola, director of worldwide education for the Parametric Technology Corporation. His company provides custom software solutions to corporations worldwide.

“PTC recognizes that the welfare of its customers is tied to the pipeline of technologically literate students,” Coppola said. But concerns about the dwindling number of American students who become scientists and engineers should be a much bigger concern to all of us, he added. “It is a strategic issue for the United States.”

Right now, 56 percent of doctoral-level employees at the U.S. Department of Defense are ready to retire. Because many of the positions are classified, foreign-born candidates are not eligible to replace them, no matter how outstanding their qualifications are.

“No one entity can fix the problem, but collectively we can,” said Coppola, who is working to bring together a consortium of governmental organizations, corporations, and higher education groups to address the issue.

“I would suggest that there is a role for everyone you know in addressing this problem,” he said.

Again, it comes down to instilling a desire to learn.

“If you ask scientists and engineers why they got into their fields, they’ll tell you they get their motivational kick from discovery and exploration, which is what has been factored out of formal school programs. We need to add it back in,” he said. He cited his experience with teaching at-risk students how to use computer-aided design programs. “The kids develop something and they love it. It’s their baby. And they have to tell somebody about it. So they get the literacy skills out of it, too.”