Kentucky college readiness tests being phased out
Progress checks on Common Core being lost!!!!To my great dismay, the Kentucky Department of Education has announced it will not administer the ACT Inc.’s EXPLORE and PLAN tests in the fall of 2015, ending use of this important, well-established set of college readiness tests a year ahead of schedule. Kentucky used EXPLORE to test all eighth grade students and PLAN to test all tenth graders since the 2006-07 school term. The state has rich trend lines for all of its middle and high schools from these college readiness tests.
The COMPASS, yet another ACT college readiness test used in Kentucky, is about to bite the dust as well.
One has to wonder, if Common Core is supposed to be about college readiness, why is the ACT ending so many college readiness tests?
The EXPLORE and PLAN problem: The ACT, Inc., which publishes EXPLORE and PLAN, won’t provide updated test forms for 2015 testing. Instead, had Kentucky elected to test in the fall, ACT would have reused same the test forms used in 2014.Reuse of the test forms opens a huge door to cheating because the 2014 test forms were released to students and teachers as instructional aids after the tests were scored. With so many 2014 copies of the test floating around, there would have been no way to control improper preparation.
I think it is fair to lay the blame for this situation firmly at the feet of the ACT, Inc. and not the Kentucky Department of Education. The testing outfit earlier told Kentucky they would support an additional year of testing. I don’t know if anyone in Kentucky knew ACT only planned to offer that support using a compromised test product.
What really disappoints me about this situation is that a very important tool to independently evaluate how Common Core is really performing in Kentucky is now lost. EXPLORE and PLAN were grade-appropriate college readiness progress tests closely linked and equated to the actual ACT college entrance test. The tests provided very valuable information.
And, that information was starting to look troubling for Common Core. As I wrote back in March, the 2014-2015 EXPLORE results were all down from scores two years earlier. This graph tells the story.
EXPLORE Benchmarks to 2015
The recent trends on this graph are not encouraging for the performance of Common Core in Kentucky’s eighth grade.
The PLAN results dropped for the Common Core related subjects of English and reading in 2014-15, as well.
It would have been nice to get another year of EXPLORE and PLAN data to further evaluate Common Core in Kentucky, but now that won’t happen. What a nice setup if someone doesn’t want any more evidence from real college readiness testing to show that Common Core isn’t living up to its promises.
COMPASS going, too: Incredibly, there is more testing fallout from the ACT. The organization’s COMPASS college placement test, also in use in Kentucky, is being phased out as well. COMPASS, which has been around since 1983, is also obviously related to college readiness. COMPASS obviously predates Common Core, which was released in 2010, by many years.
Kentucky’s Unbridled Learning impacted: On top of everything else, shutting down these tests will further interfere with the stability of Kentucky’s Unbridled Learning school accountability program. EXPLORE, PLAN and COMPASS were all used in various ways in the scoring system. Scoring formulas in Unbridled Learning, which have not been stable since the program began in the 2011-12 school year, now have to be changed yet again. This further delays establishment of valid trend lines for Unbridled Learning.
If college readiness is the goal, why terminate relevant tests? It seems like all the old college readiness tests are being terminated at ACT, Inc. (ACT has made comments that the ACT college entrance test is being aligned to Common Core, as well). Why would anyone want to eliminate established college readiness tests if the goal of education is to be college and career ready? Could it be that college readiness under Common Core isn’t going to be what college readiness used to be?
As a final note, ACT, Inc. recently launched a new, for-profit company in partnership with Pearson Publishing to create new tests called “Aspire.” Aspire, of course, is advertised as being fully aligned to Common Core. Is Common-Core-aligned Aspire going to be keyed to some new, perhaps lower, definition of college readiness? Is that new definition going to be one that the ACT, Inc.’s former tests just might not agree with? Does someone not want us to know that?