This war on our youth is not just about violence but it is about education and how do we best equip them for tomorrow today. That is why we all need to understand that when the nation’s latest data came out showing that ACT scores show most students aren’t ready for college, it should have sounded the alarm for us as a nation in terms of where we are in our education system. The truth of the matter is that education is the key to the future but we must realize that all students in our country are not college students at least not 4 year institutions. Not all students will be prepared for college but what we need to make sure is that all students at least have the skills and the aptitude to not just survive in this nation but live and prosper.
The ACT data shouldn’t send us into panic mode in this nation but it should help us refocus our educational agenda in this nation to the point where we understand that we are not only failing to prepare our students for college but we are failing to prepare them for life so that they can prosper. We are not preparing our youth to compete globally because we are not teaching financial literacy or world history so that our youth can understand just how interconnected we are in this world. Thus the ACT data should signal to us as a nation that our educational policies are outdated and that we are not testing our youth properly. If nearly 70% of our youth aren’t prepared college than what does that say about our nation’s high schools.
Fewer than one quarter of last school year’s graduating high school seniors who took the ACT scored at the “college-ready” level in all four subject areas, a finding that prompted the nation’s highest education official to renew his demand that schools do a far better job preparing students for college. According to results released early this week, the proportion of tested graduating seniors who are “college ready” as defined by the ACT grew from 22 percent in the class of 2008 to 23 percent in the class of 2009. College-readiness levels remained within two-tenths of a percentage point of where they’ve been since 2005. “We need to increase the number of high school graduates who are prepared to succeed in college,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement released through ACT Inc., the Iowa City, Iowa-based nonprofit organization that designs the test. “The recent increase in college preparedness on the ACT is good news. But our students need to do dramatically better to guarantee their future success.”
ACT Scores and College Readiness go hand and hand because in a conversation I had with a friend recently, most of the teachers in high school are not preparing our youth for the ACT because they are too focus preparing them for other state sponsored tests. Thus is the problem we are facing and this is why we need our state sponsored tests for high school to be more geared toward ACT prep rather than worthless data and information that won’t help our youth prepare for college. Imagine if high school teachers were teaching material that prepared our nation’s youth for not just pointless and worthless state sponsored tests but rather for real lie and the ACT test which is an equivalent to college readiness, imagine how ACT scores would increase.
The average composite score across the four subject areas of the ACT has risen slightly since 2005. But fewer than one-quarter of the test-takers in the class of 2009 met college-readiness benchmarks on all areas of the test. The average composite score across all areas tested—English, mathematics, reading, and science—was 21.1 on a 36-point scale, the same as for the class of 2008. Leaders of ACT saw encouraging signs in the national test-score report. The pool of test-takers continues to expand and grow more diverse. There were nearly 1.5 million test-takers in the class of 2009, 4 percent more than in the class of 2008. Some of that growth is due to the fact that two more states—Kentucky and Wyoming—joined Colorado, Illinois, and Michigan in requiring all 11th graders to take the ACT. The number of test-takers grew more slowly this past year than it did between 2007 and 2008, when the pool expanded by 9 percent. The number of test-takers has grown 25 percent since 2005. Since 2005, participation by black students has risen 41 percent, by Hispanics 61 percent, and by Asians by 51 percent, compared with a 20 percent rise among white students.
Still there are troubling signs with the ACT test and the results. ACT officials saw troubling signs in the data as well. Jon L. Erickson, the organization’s vice president for educational services, said that while it is welcome news that more students, especially those in traditionally underserved populations, are taking the college-entrance and -placement test, their performance on the college-readiness benchmarks illustrates the need for better preparation, especially in mathematics and science. While 67 percent of the test-takers in the class of 2009 met college-ready benchmarks in English and 53 percent did so in reading, only 42 percent did so in math and 28 percent did so in science, according to the test results. “With all the focus now on STEM, it’s a concern that we see far fewer students meeting those benchmarks in science and math,” he said of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
It’s clear that our nation is falling more and more behind in math and science. The ACT results show this but what is even more startling is the fact that we continue to speak about improving math and science in this nation but we are losing this battle. We have to change how we prepare our youth for math and science in this nation by making sure we are giving them the proper techniques as well as resources they need to learn math and engage in real life scientific experiments while they are in elementary, middle and high school. This is where we can impact our youth and get them all more intoned with science and math so that they don’t just see it as another worthless or pointless class to take. We need to engage in our youth in how math is more than just about counting numbers but it is about building and construction as well as robotics and how science is more than just about the weather, instincts, and animals but it is about research, experiments, creations such as cures and technological advances.
The ACT, which is a key partner in a national, multi-organization effort to design common academic standards, determines college readiness by surveying thousands of high school and college instructors every few years to glean the knowledge and skills students need to pass entry-level, credit-bearing courses in college. Its research has pinpointed test-score cutoffs, or benchmarks, that predict a 75 percent chance of earning a C or better in such courses. Mr. Erickson said a number of factors contribute to students’ falling short of college-readiness benchmarks. Too many high schools lack a focus on college-readiness skills, he said, and don’t “zero in” on key standards that need to be mastered. In some cases, high school students are not taking the right courses, and in others, the courses themselves are not sufficiently rigorous to impart college-level skill and knowledge, he said.
ACT data showed that students who took what the organization defines as a “core curriculum”—four years of English and at least three years each of rigorous natural science, social science, and mathematics—scored better on the test than those who did not. Seventy percent of the test-takers said they had taken a core curriculum. Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a Cambridge, Mass.-based testing watchdog group known as FairTest, said the “stagnant” ACT scores reflect a failure of the promise of the federal No Child Left Behind Act to boost achievement and improve college readiness.
“Politicians can make all the claims they want that it is raising achievement, but even when there are improvements in state test scores, they don’t show up in college-admissions test data, or on [the National Assessment of Educational Progress],” he said. “So where is the beef?” Mr. Schaeffer also noted that a FairTest analysis of ACT score changes between 2008 and 2009 shows little narrowing in the gaps between racial and ethnic minority students and their white peers. The ACT scores show only 4 percent of black students and 10 percent of Hispanic students meeting college-readiness benchmarks in all four subject areas in 2009, compared with 28 percent of white students and 36 percent of Asian students. Now another college readiness test is set to be released August 25 by the College Board which conducts the SAT.
Still our nation is failing our youth when it comes to preparing them for college. This is not a political issue and no matter how many political policies we come up with, what is missing is not just funding but people who care about our youth. Our youth need passionate and compassionate teachers who are willing to teach them the wealth of knowledge they have in a way that makes learning fun. Our youth are not being prepared for college and as a result many of them don’t pan out during their first two years of college or struggle to graduate within 4-6 years because of the fact they were not prepared for the general college courses they need to take before they can even take their main courses for their major. This is why we must fight to win this war on our youth not just in violence prevention but in education because education is the key to the future. Our youth need help and we must be there to provide that help for them.
This battle with education is one that we been fighting year after year and it seems as if with every solution we come up with, we continue to see little change year after year. Education reform is needed because no matter how we cut it, as a nation both public and private educational facilities are not preparing our youth for college. Youth all across this nation are not prepared for college so how can we believe they are ready for the world we live in. College readiness is essential to the debate on education but that preparation begins not while students are in high school but while they are in elementary. We can’t expect our youth to succeed in education if we don’t have enough foreign language teachers and if we are making teacher certification methods that are outdated and unnecessary for what our youth have to deal with today. Our youth need better math, science and social studies teachers because they have to know where we have gone not just as nation but as a world.
If our youth can’t speak another language yet alone know about other cultures than we are going to continue to fail at preparing our youth for the real world. Our youth need us and we must begin now to prepare them for the real world. The ACT results are startling but we can change this to make sure our youth are prepared not just for college but for the real world we live. We must do and we must do this because education is essential to our youth succeeding in the future no matter how we look at it. We must save our youth now by making sure they are prepared for college and beyond. The future of America starts right here, right now.
SAVE OUR YOUTH!
The ACT data shouldn’t send us into panic mode in this nation but it should help us refocus our educational agenda in this nation to the point where we understand that we are not only failing to prepare our students for college but we are failing to prepare them for life so that they can prosper. We are not preparing our youth to compete globally because we are not teaching financial literacy or world history so that our youth can understand just how interconnected we are in this world. Thus the ACT data should signal to us as a nation that our educational policies are outdated and that we are not testing our youth properly. If nearly 70% of our youth aren’t prepared college than what does that say about our nation’s high schools.
Fewer than one quarter of last school year’s graduating high school seniors who took the ACT scored at the “college-ready” level in all four subject areas, a finding that prompted the nation’s highest education official to renew his demand that schools do a far better job preparing students for college. According to results released early this week, the proportion of tested graduating seniors who are “college ready” as defined by the ACT grew from 22 percent in the class of 2008 to 23 percent in the class of 2009. College-readiness levels remained within two-tenths of a percentage point of where they’ve been since 2005. “We need to increase the number of high school graduates who are prepared to succeed in college,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement released through ACT Inc., the Iowa City, Iowa-based nonprofit organization that designs the test. “The recent increase in college preparedness on the ACT is good news. But our students need to do dramatically better to guarantee their future success.”
ACT Scores and College Readiness go hand and hand because in a conversation I had with a friend recently, most of the teachers in high school are not preparing our youth for the ACT because they are too focus preparing them for other state sponsored tests. Thus is the problem we are facing and this is why we need our state sponsored tests for high school to be more geared toward ACT prep rather than worthless data and information that won’t help our youth prepare for college. Imagine if high school teachers were teaching material that prepared our nation’s youth for not just pointless and worthless state sponsored tests but rather for real lie and the ACT test which is an equivalent to college readiness, imagine how ACT scores would increase.
The average composite score across the four subject areas of the ACT has risen slightly since 2005. But fewer than one-quarter of the test-takers in the class of 2009 met college-readiness benchmarks on all areas of the test. The average composite score across all areas tested—English, mathematics, reading, and science—was 21.1 on a 36-point scale, the same as for the class of 2008. Leaders of ACT saw encouraging signs in the national test-score report. The pool of test-takers continues to expand and grow more diverse. There were nearly 1.5 million test-takers in the class of 2009, 4 percent more than in the class of 2008. Some of that growth is due to the fact that two more states—Kentucky and Wyoming—joined Colorado, Illinois, and Michigan in requiring all 11th graders to take the ACT. The number of test-takers grew more slowly this past year than it did between 2007 and 2008, when the pool expanded by 9 percent. The number of test-takers has grown 25 percent since 2005. Since 2005, participation by black students has risen 41 percent, by Hispanics 61 percent, and by Asians by 51 percent, compared with a 20 percent rise among white students.
Still there are troubling signs with the ACT test and the results. ACT officials saw troubling signs in the data as well. Jon L. Erickson, the organization’s vice president for educational services, said that while it is welcome news that more students, especially those in traditionally underserved populations, are taking the college-entrance and -placement test, their performance on the college-readiness benchmarks illustrates the need for better preparation, especially in mathematics and science. While 67 percent of the test-takers in the class of 2009 met college-ready benchmarks in English and 53 percent did so in reading, only 42 percent did so in math and 28 percent did so in science, according to the test results. “With all the focus now on STEM, it’s a concern that we see far fewer students meeting those benchmarks in science and math,” he said of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
It’s clear that our nation is falling more and more behind in math and science. The ACT results show this but what is even more startling is the fact that we continue to speak about improving math and science in this nation but we are losing this battle. We have to change how we prepare our youth for math and science in this nation by making sure we are giving them the proper techniques as well as resources they need to learn math and engage in real life scientific experiments while they are in elementary, middle and high school. This is where we can impact our youth and get them all more intoned with science and math so that they don’t just see it as another worthless or pointless class to take. We need to engage in our youth in how math is more than just about counting numbers but it is about building and construction as well as robotics and how science is more than just about the weather, instincts, and animals but it is about research, experiments, creations such as cures and technological advances.
The ACT, which is a key partner in a national, multi-organization effort to design common academic standards, determines college readiness by surveying thousands of high school and college instructors every few years to glean the knowledge and skills students need to pass entry-level, credit-bearing courses in college. Its research has pinpointed test-score cutoffs, or benchmarks, that predict a 75 percent chance of earning a C or better in such courses. Mr. Erickson said a number of factors contribute to students’ falling short of college-readiness benchmarks. Too many high schools lack a focus on college-readiness skills, he said, and don’t “zero in” on key standards that need to be mastered. In some cases, high school students are not taking the right courses, and in others, the courses themselves are not sufficiently rigorous to impart college-level skill and knowledge, he said.
ACT data showed that students who took what the organization defines as a “core curriculum”—four years of English and at least three years each of rigorous natural science, social science, and mathematics—scored better on the test than those who did not. Seventy percent of the test-takers said they had taken a core curriculum. Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a Cambridge, Mass.-based testing watchdog group known as FairTest, said the “stagnant” ACT scores reflect a failure of the promise of the federal No Child Left Behind Act to boost achievement and improve college readiness.
“Politicians can make all the claims they want that it is raising achievement, but even when there are improvements in state test scores, they don’t show up in college-admissions test data, or on [the National Assessment of Educational Progress],” he said. “So where is the beef?” Mr. Schaeffer also noted that a FairTest analysis of ACT score changes between 2008 and 2009 shows little narrowing in the gaps between racial and ethnic minority students and their white peers. The ACT scores show only 4 percent of black students and 10 percent of Hispanic students meeting college-readiness benchmarks in all four subject areas in 2009, compared with 28 percent of white students and 36 percent of Asian students. Now another college readiness test is set to be released August 25 by the College Board which conducts the SAT.
Still our nation is failing our youth when it comes to preparing them for college. This is not a political issue and no matter how many political policies we come up with, what is missing is not just funding but people who care about our youth. Our youth need passionate and compassionate teachers who are willing to teach them the wealth of knowledge they have in a way that makes learning fun. Our youth are not being prepared for college and as a result many of them don’t pan out during their first two years of college or struggle to graduate within 4-6 years because of the fact they were not prepared for the general college courses they need to take before they can even take their main courses for their major. This is why we must fight to win this war on our youth not just in violence prevention but in education because education is the key to the future. Our youth need help and we must be there to provide that help for them.
This battle with education is one that we been fighting year after year and it seems as if with every solution we come up with, we continue to see little change year after year. Education reform is needed because no matter how we cut it, as a nation both public and private educational facilities are not preparing our youth for college. Youth all across this nation are not prepared for college so how can we believe they are ready for the world we live in. College readiness is essential to the debate on education but that preparation begins not while students are in high school but while they are in elementary. We can’t expect our youth to succeed in education if we don’t have enough foreign language teachers and if we are making teacher certification methods that are outdated and unnecessary for what our youth have to deal with today. Our youth need better math, science and social studies teachers because they have to know where we have gone not just as nation but as a world.
If our youth can’t speak another language yet alone know about other cultures than we are going to continue to fail at preparing our youth for the real world. Our youth need us and we must begin now to prepare them for the real world. The ACT results are startling but we can change this to make sure our youth are prepared not just for college but for the real world we live. We must do and we must do this because education is essential to our youth succeeding in the future no matter how we look at it. We must save our youth now by making sure they are prepared for college and beyond. The future of America starts right here, right now.
SAVE OUR YOUTH!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment