Self proclaimed education reformers and self-proclaimed voices of public education volley statistics back and forth to rationalize their position and agenda. Ultimately the only agenda that should matter should be that of the local community, but who’s asking them? On the issue that matters most, how we as citizens hope to benefit from public education, local communities must sort through the noise and rhetoric to establish their own accountability standards.
Emotional appeals often serve as the basis for change. By design, the reasons cited to bring about change are often presented for optimal emotional impact. But at some point, we need to set emotions aside and take a logical approach to move forward in a constructive manner.
Public education in America and in Michigan is receiving an unprecedented degree of scrutiny. Most would argue that we must change or at least evolve to deliver what society most needs. State and national policy makers state the mission of K-12 education is to ready students for college and increase the percentage who obtain degrees.
President Obama declared that the United States should, within ten years, increase the percentage of citizens with college degrees from today’s 40% to 60%. In our state of Michigan Gov. Snyder has made college degree attainment one of the dashboard statistics in his drive for increased accountability.
A simplified view of the trickle down effect looks like this:
- Increased college degree attainment rates leads to national prosperity.
- College degree attainment rates are a function of societal expectation, affordability, and individual student readiness.
- Individual readiness depends on skilled pedagogy, quality teachers, core course participation, aligned curriculum, and ultimately college course prerequisite knowledge attainment with associated rigor.
- Prerequisite knowledge attainment is measurable and standardized tests provide the means to measure.
This is important to recognize because policy decisions, both educational and financial, are now largely based on this premise and undeniably national and state policies affect local school districts. To emphasize, this is a simplistic view, but fairly represents the essence of our national and state direction. K-12 educational systems are viewed now as a means of getting students ready for college, to position them to obtain degrees, add value to society, and contribute to national prosperity. And the reform narrative leverages data to proclaim that the institution of K-12 education in America is failing miserably.
In his “Special Message on Education Reform” Gov. Snyder writes, “Michigan’s education system is not giving our taxpayers, our teachers, or our students the return on investment we deserve” as he makes his case for “reinventing” our educational system. Specifically, in the next breath, he cites statistics from the state mandated ACT standardized test that claim that “only 16% of high school students tested are college ready.”
This is a jarring statistic; one often repeated by those most eager for change. It’s also given a tremendous benefit of the doubt. What does that really mean to be “college ready?” What is a reasonable goal and therefore what is the gap and its source? Are other states doing much better and getting a greater return on investment? These are worthwhile question as we collectively work to bring about change.
According to the ACT company itself, the national percentage of test takers who are “college ready” is 24%. ACT also reports that this average is up from 21% in 2006. Interestingly, the ACT reports Michigan students who took the test had a 19%, not a 16% “college readiness” rate. So regardless, Michigan’s doing worse, right? Not so fast.
That national figure reports on a data set reflecting only 47% of students even took the test. Michigan is one of only six states in the country where 100% of students took the ACT. Among the top five states with the highest average composite score, the highest percentage of students tested was 27% (New York) meaning Michigan tested proportionally nearly four times as many students, include all those with special needs. Among the six states with 100% participation of students, Michigan ranked third in “college readiness”.
Let’s provide more context. The high school generally cited as one of the best in the state, if not the nation, is Bloomfield Hills Public Schools International Academy in Oakland County Michigan. It has at times been ranked as Newsweek Magazine’s best public school in the country. US News, using their own metrics, declared 100% of all its students were “college ready”. However, according to the ACT test and the State of Michigan, in 2010 only 73% of the International Academies students were deemed college ready. This, too, ranks them first in the state. The second place school drops all the way down to 50.9% (Ann Arbor’s Community High School).
The International Academy is part of a district, Bloomfield Hills Schools, that spends nearly $15,000 per pupil, ranking among the tops in the state. Bloomfield Hills Public Schools, as a whole, by the same college readiness standard that yields the 16% statewide figure, can claim only 50.3% of its graduates to be college ready. To their credit, that percentage ranks Bloomfield Hills schools number one in the state out of roughly 600 traditional public school districts and charters schools with high school students. No other school district is above 50%, only eight are between 40% and 50%, only 18 are between 30% and 40%.
In total, counting even fictitious fractional students, if the ACT measures were reliable, do we think only 6,950 graduates statewide annually are college ready? Consider that the University of Michigan’s 2009 freshman class accepted nearly 9,400 state of Michigan high school graduate applicants alone.
Are the University of Michigan’s standards sliding so rapidly such that they would undoubtedly be accepting so many students deemed not ready for any college? Ask the many students (and parents) who work their tails off to gain acceptance there and wait for them to laugh in your face. Most would argue competition to gain acceptance to Michigan is at an all time high.
So what does it mean to be “college ready”? The ACT test consists of 75 questions in English, 60 in Math, and 40 each in Reading and Science. As a result of these magic 215 questions spanning four hours, representing eleven or twelve years of formal education, the people at ACT can deduce the following based on those multiple choice answers:
The minimum ACT test scores that indicate whether high school graduates are likely ready for entry-level college coursework are: English (18), Mathematics (22), Reading (21), Science (24). These Benchmarks reflect the level of preparation needed for students to have at least a 50 percent chance of achieving a grade of B or higher, or at least a 75 percent chance of a grade of C or higher, in entry-level credit-bearing college English Composition, algebra, social science, and biology courses. (The maximum ACT score is 36.)
So what this means is that in order to count among the oft-mentioned 16%, a student must demonstrate fairly significant proficiency in all core subjects regardless of whether the student has any inclination whatsoever to take all such classes in college and obtain at least a C grade. Let’s agree that we should all establish high standards, but let’s also agree that it is not uncommon for students who excel in math and science to perhaps be less inclined in the liberal arts, and vice versa.
Speaking just for myself, upon graduating from Grosse Pointe South, I never again took a physical science or math course and managed to make the Dean’s list and graduate from the University of Michigan. I am sure that story repeats itself tens of thousands of times every year.
My point in all of this is not to eschew accountability, but rather to understand some of these statistics cited in proper context. Policy makers and citizens need to sort through shock value and get practical. Using standardized test results, such as the ACT, has its place. But the over-reliance on standardized tests is a dangerous trend that continues to gain momentum.
As an institution, public education needs to embrace accountability. As it stands now, the self-proclaimed voices of the establishment spend too much time arguing against the proposals of the self-proclaimed reformers and not enough time delivering their own.
For as marginalized as the voice of the local school district and its citizens have become, this is the opportunity in chaos. This is where the unique interests of the local citizens can provide real value. But this takes disciplined effort, collaboration, and open dialog.
I have previously written about how as a local community we must commit to our own continuous improvement methodology. Using lead and lag measures, standardized test results would undoubtedly be part of the equation, but so many other wonderful options are available to us. What about:
- Local public school participation rate. How many local residents opt to send their students to our schools?
- Course selection. What percentage of students opt into college preparatory courses?
- College application and acceptance rate. Where do our students wish to go to college and are they gaining acceptance? How is this trending over time?
- Practical, fine and performing arts participation. Our community values all these, yet standardized tests do not even recognize them. What is our student participation rate? What does this tell us?
- Consumer satisfaction. Almost every business polls their consumers to gauge their satisfaction in services rendered. Free market advocates should place a significant premium on such a measure, even well ahead of standardized test scores.
- Traditional summative and common assessments. These locally developed instruments would provide a far broader measure that would more accurately map to our locally developed curriculum and instruction standards.
- Local student graduate college readiness measures. For all the talk of “college readiness” and the ACT’s dubious standard, what about asking our own graduates? By maintaining contact with our own graduates, we could establish a life-long network that would pay dividends across a variety of dimensions. Why rely on third party test sources when we can derive real data from the people that matter most to us, our own students?
- Citizenship and civic participation. Academics are the primary endeavor of public education, but do we not want some means to see that knowledge will be leveraged by our students to contribute to a greater good? Isn’t that what this is ultimately all about?
Gov. Snyder and the state legislators, in the recently approved school aid budget that cuts an additional $300 per pupil, have provided a carrot in the form of “best practices recommendations” to recoup $100 for at least one year. I believe we, locally, have yet another opportunity to demonstrate how the Grosse Pointe Public School System can be a leader in this regard just as I believe we are the statewide leader in the contract agreements we have with our teachers and all other staff to self-adjust to the state’s financial decisions.
We have the opportunity to establish our own measures of effectiveness and satisfaction that can extend well beyond the narrow standardized test results all too frequently cited by state and national policy makers. We can allow these locally developed measures to serve as our dashboard and perhaps set the bar for the state.