ACT Newsroom & Blog

Collaboration will further a shared commitment to worldwide workforce readiness and help individuals achieve workplace success

IOWA CITY, Iowa—ACT, Inc. and Aspiring Minds have partnered to launch ACT® Stack™, a work-readiness solution for institutions, employers and individuals around the world who need to identify and measure work readiness covering foundational, job-specific and essential skills.

ACT Stack combines a comprehensive set of foundational and job-specific skill assessments from ACT and Aspiring Minds that are designed to validate the skills necessary for success in the workplace. Together they will enable “stackable credentials” for current and prospective employees as well as students, helping companies and institutions better prepare people for jobs in the 21st century.

ACT is the nonprofit learning, measurement and navigation organization behind the ACT® test, ACT® WorkKeys®, and the ACT® National Career Readiness Certificate (NCRC®). Aspiring Minds is a global leader in talent assessments and credentialing, working with some of the world’s largest corporations to help select the right talent and with institutions and job seekers to measure and credential job readiness. Aspiring Minds’ highly scalable artificial intelligence (AI)-driven assessment and interviewing technology consistently helps organizations of all sizes take the guesswork out of hiring their ideal candidates.

ACT Stack easily enables organizations to assess their employees’ competencies and identify key skills and performance gaps. With AI-driven technology, companies can better manage the costs associated with an unsuccessful hire and hire with confidence for all types of positions and skill types.

Dr. Jon Berry, Department Coordinator of World Languages at Mount Carmel High School in Chicago, shares his experience after attending the ACT Certified Educator Basics training program.

Everyone involved in secondary education agrees that success on standardized college entrance exams—like the ACT® test—creates opportunities for students, opening doors into higher education and careers beyond. Regardless of how often we hear that colleges take a holistic approach to admissions, we all know that for the vast majority of students, getting into and being successful in college, depends to some extent upon their performance on college entrance exams.

We also understand how important teachers are to the process. Regardless of where we teach, who we teach, or what we teach, we understand that what we do in the classroom is essential to a student’s entrance into and preparation for college.

We also understand how difficult this is. Our jobs are not defined as “ACT Teachers,” and no classroom activity gets more criticized than “teaching to the test,” - and rightly so. Secondary education is, and should be, much more than a summative test taken several times during a student’s junior and senior year. Furthermore, it is impossible to take students who have not been exposed to a strong curriculum or who have performed poorly in whatever curriculum they have experienced, who lack a strong foundation in the language, math, and scientific reasoning skills that are assessed on the ACT test, and magically transform them into high performing ACT students through nothing more than practice tests and a crash course on fundamentals.

So the question is, and always has been: “How do I improve my students’ ACT scores and readiness for college when I am just one in a long line of instructors, when I am teaching subjects that are not specifically assessed on standardized tests, and when my own interests go deeper than the proper use of a comma or using the correct word in the correct place?”

It was with this question in mind that earlier this year I attended an ACT Certified Educator workshop in Naperville, Illinois. Although the workshop was designed for the purpose of certifying ACT tutors, I went primarily as a classroom teacher, hoping to understand better what I could do in the classroom to help my students perform better on standardized, college entrance exams and to better prepare students for college.

The workshop lasted the entire day and at the end of the day we took a test which was required for becoming an ACT Certified Educator. The workshop I attended was on basic information about the ACT test and general preparation for the test. What I learned from this workshop was extremely valuable. The presentation and the conversations served as a reminder not just of the importance of the test, but of the important role that all teachers play in student success on the ACT test and in college.

This role goes beyond preparing students for the test through a strong curriculum, sound teaching methods, practice tests and test-taking strategies. Since much of the workshop involved issues relating to the process of taking the test (registration, accommodations, emotional and physical preparation), I was reminded of how important our role is in that process.

As individuals who frequently know more about the testing experience than the students’ parents, and who have more frequent encounters with them than their school counselors, we should be willing and able to work with students as they go through the registration process. Without taking any time from our curriculum, we can easily be involved in the early stages of the students’ decision to take the test by:

Initiative serves more than 500,000 students and 6,300 schools nationwide, increasing college-going for low-income and first-generation college students

IOWA CITY, Iowa—ACT, the nonprofit learning, measurement and navigation organization behind the ACT® test, announced today it has acquired the American College Application Campaign® (ACAC) from the American Council on Education® (ACE®). ACT’s Center for Equity in Learning, which focuses on closing gaps in equity, opportunity and achievement for underserved populations and working learners, will oversee and continue to expand the campaign.

ACAC is a national initiative led by leadership teams in 50 states plus the District of Columbia that seeks to increase the number of students from low-income families and first-generation college students that pursue a postsecondary degree, and to help those students navigate the college application and admissions process.

Driven to address the opportunity gap in this country and provide all students with opportunities for success, ACAC state teams work to remove barriers that may prevent underserved students from applying to a postsecondary institution by ensuring that all high school seniors at participating schools have the support they need to complete an application to at least one two- or four-year postsecondary institution. The campaigns are run independently in each state, with public and private entities organizing the effort with guidance and technical assistance from ACAC.

ACT’s Center for Equity in Learning has supported and empowered the ACAC program for several years, and now the Center will manage the program.

“We are very excited to bring such an important resource such as ACAC into ACT and grateful to ACE leadership for approaching us with this offer,” said ACT CEO Marten Roorda. “ACAC is a perfect fit for ACT and our mission. We are committed to increasing college access among underserved students, particularly with the work of our Center for Equity in Learning, and becoming the home of the ACAC initiative will help us expand and accelerate our efforts. It will also enable us to serve and empower more students in their college and career journeys as we transition into a learning, measurement, and navigation organization.”

“We have admired and supported the work of ACAC for a long time, as we pursued a mutual goal of helping underserved students transition to college and prepare for college success,” said Jim Larimore, chief officer for ACT’s Center for Equity in Learning. “We know this campaign is an essential part of helping low-income and first-generation college students navigate their educational path in pursuit of their college and career aspirations.”

ACAC’s national reach exceeded 500,000 students in 2017, generating more than 800,000 applications, and its strategy is to accelerate expansion efforts and deepen state-level impact in the years ahead.

“ACE is proud to have served as ACAC’s home for the last seven years,” said Louis Soares, ACE chief learning and innovation officer. “During that time, our team expanded ACAC to all 50 states and the District of Columbia. As the initiative’s growth strategy turns to engaging more high schools, I am confident that the team’s move to ACT, which already had been engaged in a successful collaboration with ACAC via its Center for Equity in Learning, will result in significant expansion. We look forward to celebrating ACAC’s continued success as an ACT initiative.”

In its ongoing effort to support all students as they pursue whatever path is right for them, ACAC will encourage all students to apply to higher education and will remain “test-agnostic,” encouraging young people to take a college entrance exam should their pathway require it.

ACT will be able to support ACAC’s continued success by analyzing and supporting the use of data to help improve and expand the campaign in the future.

Terms of the deal have not been released.

About ACT

ACT is a mission-driven, nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people achieve education and workplace success. Headquartered in Iowa City, Iowa, ACT is trusted as a national leader in college and career readiness, providing high-quality assessments grounded in nearly 60 years of research. ACT offers a uniquely integrated set of solutions designed to provide personalized insights that help individuals succeed from elementary school through career. To learn more, visit www.act.org.

ACT’s Center for Equity in Learning focuses on closing gaps in equity, opportunity, and achievement for underserved populations and working learners. Through purposeful investments, employee engagement, and thoughtful advocacy efforts, the Center supports innovative partnerships, actionable research, initiatives, campaigns, and programs to further ACT’s mission of helping people achieve education and workplace success. http://equityinlearning.act.org

About ACE

ACE is a membership organization that mobilizes the higher education community to shape effective public policy and foster innovative, high-quality practice. As the major coordinating body for all the nation’s higher education institutions, ACE represents more than 1,700 college and university presidents and related associations. For more information, please visit www.acenet.edu or follow ACE on Twitter @ACEducation.

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WASHINGTON — The National Governors Association (NGA) Center for Best Practices, in partnership with ACT, the nonprofit learning, measurement and navigation organization behind the ACT® test, is releasing its initial 10 one-page profiles detailing the educational priorities and plans of the nation’s governors, along with statistics that provide a snapshot of education in each state.

The one-pagers, which can be found at https://education.nga.org/, were developed through a months-long project by NGA’s Education Division that examined the top education priorities of gubernatorial candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. The Gubernatorial Candidate Education Priority Monitoring project found that public education remains an important focus for most of the nation’s governors, who are increasingly framing education in terms of workforce development.

“Whether the issue is school funding, career and technical education, expanding early education programs or school safety, public education very much remains on the minds of governors, many of whom are developing and implementing solutions to the challenges of educational equity and access, as well as a well-educated workforce,” said Seth Gerson, who oversaw the project as a program director in the Education Division of the National Governors Association Center on Best Practices. “The one-page documents we’re releasing today provide a brief, yet contextual and data-rich, overview of each governor’s positions on the major education issues in his or her state. We are proud to have partnered with ACT on this first-of-its-kind project, which is part of our commitment to sharing policy best practices across states.”

“As we move into 2019, the NGA Center’s analysis indicates that the nation has a strong class of education governors,” said R. Kirk Jonas, director of the NGA’s Center for Best Practices. “We look forward to working with them as they advance their priorities.”

“This initiative will shed light on the most pressing educational issues facing our nation and how specific states and governors are tackling them,” said Scott Montgomery, senior vice president of ACT State & Federal Programs. “Just as ACT developed a series of Policy Platforms as a basis for promoting education and workplace success, we believe these profiles provide a starting point for policymakers to discuss problems, strengths and solutions and share best practices across states to improve college and career readiness for all.”

The NGA Center for Best Practices plans to release one-page documents spelling out the educational priorities of the governors of all 50 states. Following today’s rollout, the NGA will post subsequent documents on the website over the next few months.

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Success is as unique as a fingerprint—and so is the journey to achieve it. The My Success campaign seeks to provide a community of support, stories and resources for lifelong learning. The following is a Q&A with Friends of Puerto Rico President, Angelique Sina, in support of the My Success campaign. Learn more about how she defines success and how she is recharged by reading inspirational quotes.

What does education and workplace success mean to you?

As a lifelong learner, education and workplace success to me means that all children, regardless of their individual circumstances, are allowed to go to school and to receive a quality education. I believe that in order to have a world without poverty, education needs to come first and is essential for the global economy.

How has working at your organization helped you define your own version of success?

Working with Friends of Puerto Rico has allowed me and my team to work with high-risk communities in implementing a tailored approach to providing desperately-needed resources. These resources vary from the basics, such as books, to wi-fi access, technology, computers, and sometimes healthy lunches that allow students to concentrate and to learn better. One of the projects that stands out in my mind for its success was delivering books to the public school of Jose de Diego in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. A group of 30 kids that are from the “Maria Generation,” Hurricane Maria survivors facing serious hardships, received books after their school had been closed due to budget cuts. I’ll never forget the faces of these children. They were so grateful for the books, and their faces reflected the joy of knowing that there was a group like Friends of Puerto Rico who cared about them.

Why do you think learning is so powerful in helping people achieve success?

Learning is the key to allowing communities to overcome poverty and to reach prosperity. It has the power to take someone from darkness to light in defining and achieving their own success. We have first-hand experience observing Puerto Rican students’ desire to learn beyond the classroom, which is why we continue to provide grants and resources that will allow them to develop the skills they will need to become the next generation of leaders.

What is your favorite quote or song that keeps you motivated to achieve success?

Something that recharges me is reading quotes. It’s very hard for me to choose only one, and I want to share some of my favorites:

• "It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results." — Warren Buffett 
• “Don’t be the girl who fell. Be the girl who got back up.” — Jenette Stanley 
• “We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give.” — Winston Curchill 
• “Small acts, when multiplied by many people, can transform the world” — Howard Zinn 

What helps you when you hit a bump on your journey to success?

When I hit a bump in my journey, I remember that we are doing something that is bigger than ourselves. It won’t come easy, but we are building the base for generations to come to have the equity and access to education that they deserve.

Who would you like to thank for helping you along your journey to success?

I’ve been blessed to have many people helping me. Among them, I want to highlight my most trusted advisor, my mother Maria Roman, and Ana-Mita Betancourt, who has been a mentor and a sponsor. Both continue not only to inspire, but also to provide the critical advice needed to ignite social change.

About My Success

Success is as unique as a fingerprint—and so is the journey to achieve it. The My Success campaign was created to provide a community of support, stories and resources for lifelong learning, to encourage and inspire individuals navigating their journey to find success. Join our community of support and share your story of success by using #MyStoryMySuccess or visiting mysuccess.act.org.

About ACT

ACT is a mission-driven, nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people achieve education and workplace success. Headquartered in Iowa City, Iowa, ACT is trusted as a leader in college and career readiness, providing high-quality assessments grounded in nearly 60 years of research. ACT offers a uniquely integrated set of solutions designed to provide personalized insights that help individuals succeed from elementary school through career.

About Friends of Puerto Rico

Friends of Puerto Rico is a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) social impact organization based in Washington, DC with the mission of mobilizing a network of partners to create an economic and innovation hub in Puerto Rico by investing in the next generation of leaders and entrepreneurs.

Since our beginning in 2015, we have served as an intermediary to provide direct financial support to nonprofit organizations in Puerto Rico. In three years, we have created a network of over 30,000 donors and have over 50 partner organizations.

Interested in this blog? Read more:

• Join the My Success Campaign
• Giving Tuesday: The Importance of Helping Others
• AVID CEO Sandy Husk Shares Her Story of Success

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As we celebrate the beginning of 2019, many of us have started down the path of our own New Year’s resolutions. Maybe you have set a personal goal or decided to pursue a professional aspiration.

If you are passionate about advancing education, perhaps you will be joining many teachers, principals and school leaders who want to help students with social and emotional development. In fact, that may be on the top of your list and it’s a new year’s resolution worth keeping.

Recently, I was invited to meet with the assistant principal at an Arizona public high school to discuss new initiatives to better support their students.

Within moments of my arrival, the school’s principal popped into the office to thank me for coming and to say, in essence, that student social and emotional development and support was probably the most important challenge facing the school.

As the next hour passed, my conversation with the two school leaders touched on an array of topics such as homework, letter grades, tests and exams, 9th to 10th-grade persistence, student depression and anxiety, school counseling programs, underrepresented student graduation rates, college persistence, and much more.

I regretted, later, not diagramming a “mind map” graphic on the assistant principal’s whiteboard. As our conversation unfolded, we could have then tracked the way each one of these topics and challenges were, in their eyes, influenced by the school but not (yet) addressing student social and emotional skill development.

Rightfully, they acknowledged the importance of starting small with social and emotional learning, and then building up their programming in this area. There’s no sense, as they say, in biting off more than they can chew. The school needs time for teachers—and in different ways, parents and students—to adapt to the new curriculum and materials.

The school chose to emphasize greater social and emotional learning with next year’s incoming 9th graders—well before the new school year begins!

Most of the new students will enroll in a summer “boost” program for orientation and student skill training. That’s when school leaders intend for several hundred of these teenagers to also receive targeted social and emotional skill development, beginning with an administration of the ACT® Tessera® social and emotional learning (SEL) assessment. This approach will help them achieve two goals:

1. It will provide teachers, counselors, parents and students with insights into each student’s strengths and areas of opportunity for improvement, enabling them to set goals and manage their growth. 
2.  It will provide the school a baseline data set that can be used to compare future administrations of the Tessera assessment system in the coming school year. 

This way, school leaders can determine how well their initiatives are working, and which areas need more attention going forward. In addition, the school plans to use the ACT Tessera Social and Emotional Learning curriculum that is bundled with the assessment in a comprehensive online platform.

All this is intended as a sort of pilot at the school level, a place to start and test-drive a new approach to student success.

While Arizona school leaders believe they can fund this initial “small starting point,” that might not be true for every school. As many of us well know, it can be hard to win budget allocations or grants for a pilot or untested program. Then, once a program proves itself, it is easier to secure financial support.

A New Year’s Resolution for Your School?

If you are intrigued by what this school is planning for its students, but unsure whether funding is available for you to purchase ACT Tessera to conduct a pilot of your own, there’s good news.

ACT is introducing a new “SEL Journey Program” for schools, districts, or other educational organizations to acquire a license to administer Tessera and employ its resources to conduct a trial-run of enhanced social and emotional learning at the middle or high school level, for up to 500 students for FREE.

The SEL Journey Program will allow your school or organization to:

• Familiarize your community with this kind of assessment and instruction. 
• Build a solid baseline of data. 
• Provide valuable instruction and support inside and outside the classroom. 
• Thoroughly test-drive the Tessera system to demonstrate SEL results for securing budget. 

By participating in this program, you will help your school leverage ACT’s resources to advance and improve social and emotional learning.

The application form is short and easy to complete. Check it out today, and, like the Arizona school, take action to begin or advance your school’s SEL journey in collaboration with ACT.

It’s a great resolution to keep in the New Year.

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