Good News on a National Scale

I don’t know about you, but I become weary with all the negative news that is reported about education on multiple fronts. Katie Couric’s journey across the nation as she prepared for her news anchor position unearthed a widespread craving for positive as well as negative news, so there must be others like me who don’t want to wear rose-colored glasses but do want to hear about what is going well.

Today, August 16, at noon ACT released information about students in the high school graduating class of 2006 who took the ACT test. College readiness improved in all four subject areas with an average national composite score of 21.1, up from 20.9 in the past two years. As ACT reports, “Scores were higher for both males and females and for students across virtually all racial/ethnic groups.” ( policycenter@act.org) The fact that the scores were higher across subgroups in the high school population is particularly heartening.

Of particular interest to NCTE members, nearly 70% of students met or exceeded the college benchmark score for English/composition—much higher than the share achieving the reading (53%), science (27%), or math (42%) benchmarks. This suggests that K-12 teachers are making real progress in teaching English language arts. If you are interested in your own state results, ACT’s website shows complete score information for each state.

Even though the ACT Writing Test is a less authentic writing sample than most NCTE teachers would wish for, that is students write for 30 minutes to a given essay prompt, this first year of the test sets a baseline for the future. Because the writing score is not in the composite, it’s worth noting that students earned an average score of 7.7 (on a scale of 2 to 12) on the exam. “On the combined English Test/Writing Test score, the average score was 22.0 (on a scale of 1 to 36).” Females outscored males on the Writing Test by .5 with racial/ethnic groups having a spread of 6.8 for African Americans to 8.0 for Asian Americans.

Although the ACT report comes with calls for more rigorous requirements for courses and for course taking, the report opens with the good news that “national ACT scores rose significantly in 2006.” It’s encouraging to hear these results about those in our most recent high school graduating class who took the test. Of course, many students did not take the ACT, and we have much work to do to increase college readiness in all subject areas. I am glad, nonetheless, that the public has heard today that the hard work of students and teachers, especially in English language arts, has yielded results in this one of many indicators of educational accomplishment.