ACT Supports President Bush's Call for Improving Academic Achievement

March 8, 2001

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a statement issued today to the House Subcommittee on Educational Reform, ACT President Richard L. Ferguson commended President George W. Bush's plan, "No Child Left Behind," for "including elements essential to improving the quality of our nation's schools."

Full text of the ACT statement

President Bush's plan aims to empower states and schools to take important steps to further their longstanding efforts to increase student achievement. Since the 1989 Education Summit, virtually every state has developed standards in core academic areas as a means of defining what students should know and be able to do at the end of their K-12 education.

"But, in far too many cases, the standards are fundamentally disconnected from both statewide assessments and classroom instruction," Ferguson said. "Because the states' standards vary widely in scope and content, the development of assessments common to all the states presents a formidable challenge for test developers, a challenge well worth the effort."

According to Ferguson, for the president's plan to succeed, it must incorporate four ingredients:

Well-defined standards. The standards must clearly describe the knowledge and skills to be measured and the ways they can be measured. Teachers, schools and students should not be held accountable for standards that have not been clearly defined.
High-quality assessments. The assessments must be closely aligned to the states' standards, and they must be developed in a manner that ensures that they are technically sound.
Multiple measures. Reliance on multiple sources of information, as opposed to test scores alone, is essential to making sound decisions about students' progress.
Direct relationship to instruction. If teachers and schools are to achieve the high standards we set for them, they must have a clear understanding of what those standards mean, and the resources needed to accomplish our expectations as regards those standards. Moreover, the assessments must be designed in such a way that "teaching to the test" means teaching the important high-level problem solving skills measured by the tests.

Above all, ACT believes that effective teaching is the ultimate key to improving student achievement, according to Ferguson. "Good tests can, but aren't guaranteed to contribute to that outcome," he said. "In the final analysis, tests and instruction must mesh, and only teachers can ensure that this happens."