State must stress importance of ACT
Students will take many tests during their time in Nevada's K-12 schools. However, it would be hard to argue that any of those exams are more important than the ACT.
In 2013, the Nevada Legislature passed Assembly Bill 288, which moved the state away from high school proficiency exams toward end-of-course exams. As part of this transition, the state's Board of Education was tasked with choosing a College and Career Readiness assessment for all 11th-graders. The board wisely chose the ACT, so that every junior in the state would have a state-funded chance to take this college-qualifying test. This past April was the first time the ACT was administered statewide.
Nevada joined 12 other states in making the ACT mandatory for all juniors, which allows us to accurately compare the results to those states. This comparison is very valuable three reasons. First, it’s an annual assessment that every student in the mandatory states takes, so it is an apples-to-apples comparison among peer states, instead of a sample of students, as is the case with the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Second, without data from the end-of-course exams this year, the ACT gives the state a strong snapshot of high school performance. Finally, the ACT can serve as a consistent baseline for all Nevadans to measure the success of recently passed education reforms.
So how did Nevada's juniors do on this year’s ACT? Based on preliminary data, they scored an average of 17.4 out of 36 points, a full point and a half behind the next lowest state with mandatory testing (North Carolina). It is also well below the standards for college readiness, set at 21.3. While there are traditionally strong performing states such as Utah, Illinois and Michigan on the list, Nevada also fell well behind traditionally low-performing states such as Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana. It is not exactly news that Nevada's students are performing worse than their peers in other states, but these numbers are particularly alarming because the students have so much to gain by doing well on this test. Schools must emphasize the importance of doing well on the ACT, since it can serve as the gateway to college.
In selecting the ACT for the 11th-grade assessment, the board believed that the state would find more students who would be college and career ready, but who had not taken the ACT before (only 36 percent of eligible Nevada students took the ACT last year). Despite having 22,000 more students taking the ACT, only an additional 628 students met the college readiness standards in all four subjects. I am glad we discovered hundreds of more students will now be college eligible; however, we have extensive room for growth as a state to get more students ready for college without the need for remediation.
The data is quite depressing. So how should Nevada move forward? First, this data should serve as the base expectation for judging the battery of reforms the Legislature passed in the 2015 session. The ACT is going to be the only assessment that all students in a certain grade took in this state, this year and in all years moving forward. As reforms targeting middle schools and high schools — such as Zoom Schools, Victory Schools, and Career/Technical Education programs — come into place, the ACT should serve as a key accountability benchmark for progress in the short term. In the longer run, it will be a key measure of whether our early childhood interventions — such as third-grade retention and full-day Kindergarten — are paying dividends for the future of our state. If our students are not ready for college and/or careers in the future, then it will be clear that our investments in reform have not paid off as well as intended.
Today, the ACT numbers are sadly revealing. There is no way around the ugly truth that Nevada students are not achieving as well as they should. States such as Louisiana and Tennessee, which have pursued bold reforms, have seen growth in their ACT scores in recent years. So Nevada might be on the path to replicating such growth and ideally finding ways to exceed its performance in the near future. Hopefully, these results are rock-bottom for the state, and the path toward improving achievement for all Nevada students begins now.
Seth Rau is policy director at Nevada Succeeds (www.nevadasucceeds.com), a business-backed education advocacy organization.
