ACT Newsroom & Blog

This piece was originally published by Education Commission of the States and is reprinted below with permission.

This post is a collaboration with guest author, Gregory Kienzl, principal strategist at ACT.

“I hear this over and over, ‘We are not a college family,’” Texas State Sen. José Menéndez told a group of institutional leaders at an event hosted by ACT this month. “But dual enrollment can change that.”

The event celebrated a U.S. Department of Education Experimental Sites initiative that awards postsecondary-level grants from the Pell program to low-income high school students in dual enrollment programs leading to a credential. The initiative, if shown to be effective, “could be an important tool for families confronting the joint challenges of college access and affordability,” he concluded.

In the Experimental Site institutions, incoming dually enrolled students may be eligible to receive a federal Pell Grant to support their dual enrollment experience. These grants count toward students’ lifetime eligibility for Pell, and this early access may allow flexibility to earn credits before a high school diploma is conferred.

While dual enrollment offers many benefits to students seeking to bank as many postsecondary credits as possible, implementing effective policies is not without its challenges. First, students have to be made aware of the opportunities available and how to take advantage of them. Ensuring affordability — which extends beyond tuition and fees to books, supplies and travel costs — is also paramount. Additionally, state higher education agencies and institutions are responsible for ensuring rigor, while balancing equitable access to postsecondary-level courses. Finally, postsecondary institutions have to quickly evaluate incoming students’ transfer credits, ensuring credits bring students closer to a postsecondary credential.

Early access to Pell Grants may be an avenue to remove financial barriers for students seeking dual enrollment. In nine states, dually enrolled students bear the responsibility for covering their tuition, according to our 50-State Comparison. In 13 states, footing the bill is a local decision; and in 12 more, multiple programs exist — all with unique requirements that may lead to confusion for students who are interested in dual enrollment but cannot afford the cost.

While dual enrollment can reduce postsecondary costs for students, as Menéndez pointed out, its success can be tempered by issues in funding and implementation. As the Experimental Sites initiative seeks new ways to advance affordability for students seeking postsecondary education, it will be pivotal that rigorous evaluation take place and be publicly available to inform policy debates.

On this Giving Tuesday, an international day of giving to commemorate the start of the holiday season, I feel especially fortunate and proud, as I reflect on the good work being done by team members across ACT to serve others.

ACT’s rich heritage of helping others is evident in so many ways, from volunteerism in our community to philanthropic efforts that benefit areas such as education; social and community improvement; culture and the arts; and disaster relief.

Meet our Future: This first grade student came to me after my keynote today to tell me she was going to go to college, she and her family from Haiti totally inspired me to continue to do more of the good work!! #ThankYou @ACT @ACTEquity @browardschools @BrowardESOL @VickySaldala pic.twitter.com/Zj1An2MBJI

— Juan Garcia (@juang353) November 17, 2018

Collectively, our team members devoted more than 332 days of the year volunteering for the causes they care about, to help our neighbors and community members in need.

The ACT Corporate Giving Committee, which awards funding to nonprofit organizations for projects or events that align with our organization’s mission and values, donated funds to benefit a variety of causes this year, which included:

• supporting adult education for English learners preparing for the U.S. Citizenship Exam; 
• funding youth writing projects; and 
• delivering critical educational materials to underserved learners in Puerto Rico, as they recovered from Hurricane Maria.

Thank you @ACT for your gift to support the Femineer® Adopt-a-School Program and rural STEM education for young women in Iowa! @ACTCareer #actcares @UIowaEngr @HawkeyeCaucus #uiowacoefemineers #cppfemineer #sdsufemineer #uiowafemineers @UIAdvancement pic.twitter.com/Nx0L6oGhZm

— UIowa COE Femineers (@UIowaFemineers) October 30, 2018

A huge thank you to @ACT for supporting the Safe Schools Academy. We are excited to reach thousands of educators across Iowa with the mission of creating safe & inclusive schools for all students-- thank you for your help! @ACTcareers #ACTCares pic.twitter.com/vPNj46OGFT

— Iowa Safe Schools (@iowasafeschools) June 5, 2018

The Corporate Giving Committee also sponsored the Iowa City Pride Parade for the first time this year, and I was honored to join other ACT team members who walked in the parade in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community.


Many of our ACT team members joined activities organized by the Volunteer Services Committee (VSC) to benefit causes in our local Iowa City area. These included:

• a campus-wide Heart Walk and potato sack race to raise funds for the American Heart Association;
• Big Brothers Big Sisters of Johnson and Washington Counties’ annual fundraising effort, Bowl for Kids’ Sake; 
• a back-to-school backpack and supplies drive to benefit families in the area who need us the most; 
• a canned goods drive to benefit University of Iowa students who are food insecure; and
• a food and supplies drive to benefit three local animal shelters.

Of course, these events were in addition to our annual United Way Week activities to support United Way of Johnson and Washington Counties, an organization that impacts one in three community members through a variety of support services.



Finally, we kicked off our year-long celebration of ACT’s 60th anniversary with a significant education-focused initiative in our hometown of Iowa City. We made a three-year financial commitment to support the Iowa City Community School District’s implementation of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program, an innovative classroom-focused initiative designed to improve college readiness for all students, particularly low-income, minority, and first-generation students pursuing higher education.

When we give back to our communities, we strengthen the bonds that unite us as human beings. There is no shortage of good causes to give to, or people in need of love, help, and support, but it is encouraging to see the progress that is made and the joy that is spread when we seek to do good together.

.@ACTEquity proud to support @RedNoseDayUSA and @Walgreens on #RedNoseDay to end child poverty! @ACT pic.twitter.com/rBOCvIc5N9

— Jim Larimore (@jimlarimore) May 24, 2018

Nothing beats having a great team of co-workers, community partners and HERKY around you to help raise funds for those in need in our community. ACT is proud to support our United Way.#ACTEQUITY, #ACTCares pic.twitter.com/ZVmK5ezJ1G

— Lew B. Montgomery (@sweetlew34) November 2, 2018

Did you hear that? Yep, school bells are warming up and @ACT is on board to outfit area youth for their first day! Great to partner with @BBBSmentoring! @ACTEquity @amberoconnor @adnicknish pic.twitter.com/eVysqQb4pM

— Tina McCoy Hearn (@TMcCoyHearn) August 2, 2018

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In 2017, ACT Cares was introduced to create brand ambassadors who inspire and motivate others by promoting a culture of caring for our communities, our customers, one another, and especially, our mission.

The ACT Cares effort allows us to do more with our dollars, our time, and our commitment to serving the common good. Check out #ACTCares for more inspiring stories and follow Corporate Giving updates on @ACTCareer.

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While the iconic HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey may not yet be a fixture in our homes, many of us have intelligent assistants, such as Alexa or Google Home, that help us manage our daily lives. And that technology is quickly becoming commonplace in schools, as well. Some argue that intelligent assistants will be one of the most disruptive technologies in the near future.

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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 AVID CEO Sandy Husk, in support of the My Success campaign. Learn more about how she defines success and how the song “Champion” keeps her motivated.

What does education and workplace success mean to you?

As a superintendent, I always pictured our students as happy learners prepared to tackle the school day, culminating in all of our students walking across that stage to receive their high school diplomas.

I still hold that image in my mind and have added that all of our students should leave our schools with paths to meaningful post-secondary experiences including college, technical certifications, and the military.

All children have the potential to succeed—it is our responsibility as educators to discover, believe in, and develop that potential in every child.

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

At AVID, I work every day with a diverse and motivated staff who is just as dedicated as I am to closing the equity gap in K-16 education. As a district leader, I was able to influence my local team. At AVID, along with all of my colleagues working to support the AVID mission, I can influence on a larger scale, which is extremely rewarding to me personally.

I have been given a great opportunity to influence policy, coach, lead, and provide services to schools that are making a difference for educators, students, and communities.

I heard a student in 8th grade speak at a recent AVID conference. He announced to a room filled with educators that AVID has influenced his future children by opening up opportunities in his life. Needless to say, that was simply amazing!

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

Education is the key to everything, isn't it? Personal satisfaction, career satisfaction, economic security—it all starts with education. As educators, we have a greater responsibility than ever before, because the shelf-life of workplace skills is shrinking. The jobs that will be held by today’s kindergartners don’t even exist yet. Because the workplace is so rapidly evolving, we must develop lifelong learners who are resilient and adaptable, with “soft skills,” such as critical thinking, communication and collaboration, to evolve successfully as well. These skills give people the confidence to problem-solve, persevere and have the grit to tackle the problems they face—large or small.

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

"Champion" by Carrie Underwood and Ludacris. This song reminds me of how we encourage our educators and students to be resilient champions of their own lives. It’s so energetic and inspiring and reminds me that each of our students has the capacity to be a champion! It focuses me on the work we need to do on behalf of students who are underrepresented in higher education, and it also fills me with energy, because I am leading an organization that is proven to be making a difference for those populations.

It fills me with excitement to see our AVID educators reach more and more students and have such a positive effect on the students’ vision of their future.

And I feel a tremendous sense of urgency to increase the momentum. I truly want every student in the country to have the resources, support and self-esteem to achieve whatever they want to in their post-secondary life; whether this means attending college immediately following high school graduation, starting their career while saving to fund their college degree, or working part-time while receiving a technical certificate with a goal to complete college. Our educators, in the work they do every day, instill the confidence to succeed. “Champion” reminds me of this passion.

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

My style is to ask a lot of questions and to listen, and then put together a plan. If the "bump" is internal to my organization, I also make sure my team knows of the plan. If everyone has clarity around the plan, I can lead from a place of consistency to further the mission. The result is that we get through this as a team. If the "bump" is personal, I reflect deeply on my plan, decide on my strategies, and then attack the plan with determination. Sounds like an AVID student, right?

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

Generous and wise mentors, colleagues, and friends, too numerous to name!

Is there anything else you'd like to share to help others achieve education and workplace success?

As a leader, it is important to communicate your vision well. I've always found it helpful to use my words to create a visual that others can internalize. For example, when I share my desire to make AVID ever more accessible, I ask my audience to visualize a crowd of students on a football field, divided into two groups. The smaller group has had AVID. Those students know they can achieve their dreams through determination and hard work. Then, on the other side of the field, visualize an even larger group of students who might be afraid to even dream—because they really don’t know where to begin or if they can even do it. Can you see it? One side of the field knows where they’re going and believes they can get there; the other side longs for the same confidence and skills their friends over there have. Then I ask my audience, whether staff or external partners, to think about what they can do to help the larger group join the college-ready students on the other side of the field. When it's told like that, people can see it, and they want those students to have the same opportunities. Getting others to share your passion for your mission is part of leadership.

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 AVID


AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) is a nonprofit, proven college-readiness system that closes the achievement gap. Today, AVID is implemented in approximately 6,100 schools in 45 states across the U.S., plus schools in DoDEA, Canada and Australia. AVID impacts 1.5 million students in grades K–12 and in 45 postsecondary institutions. The AVID College Readiness System transforms a school’s academic culture to increase the number of students who enroll in four-year colleges and succeed in higher education. For more information please visit www.avid.org

ACT recently committed $310,000 to help the Iowa City Community School District (ICCSD) implement AVID programming, in hopes of helping more students from the organization’s corporate hometown attain their story of success.

Interested in this blog? Read more:

• Join the My Success Campaign
• ACT’s Breakfast Initiative: Helping to Build Equity on Test Day

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IOWA CITY, Iowa—ACT’s Marten Roorda has joined the CEOs of more than 500 prominent national organizations in supporting specific steps to advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace and throughout society. The chief executives met November 15 in New York at the second annual “CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion™” conference.

“At ACT, we work hard to level the playing field for everyone, regardless of needs, backgrounds, or resources,” said ACT CEO Marten Roorda. “Our commitment to diversity and inclusion applies internally and externally. I’m proud to support CEO Action in addressing these important issues that affect us all.”

The CEO Action coalition announced three key actions:

• Launching the new “Check Your Blind Spots" unconscious bias mobile tour, which will make 100 stops across the country and engage one million people. 
• Initiating the "I Act On" pledge for individuals to commit to mitigating any unconscious biases, and act on encouraging more inclusive behaviors in their everyday lives. 
• Organizing a "Day of Understanding" in which organizations, including ACT, will hold a day of candid conversations to help people embrace differences. 

ACT is actively contributing to the CEO Action network by sharing its best practices and learning from the successes of other organizations. Consistent with these cooperative activities, ACT recently introduced three diversity and inclusion initiatives:

• One-on-one conversations with every team member, from every background, to discuss what motivates them and how best to develop and support their diverse talents, interests and abilities. 
• Monthly celebrations that highlight the many cultures and personal characteristics present at ACT, and that explore how those differences help ACT fulfill its mission. 
• A program through which team members learn how biases can affect their work and the work of ACT. Team members are given tips to mitigate biases that may exist. 

The member companies of the CEO Action coalition employ more than 12 million people. Research indicates 78 percent of Americans want companies to address social justice issues. The conference is an opportunity for CEOs to learn from fellow leaders, and to gather ideas than can drive progress within their organizations around diversity and inclusion.

For more information about the initiatives, visit ceoaction.com.

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In its advice to students about preparing for the ACT test, ACT suggests that it is important to eat breakfast before taking the test. It’s good advice: ACT research has shown that, on average, among students who had taken the test twice, those who reported eating breakfast before the second test earned a higher ACT Composite score on that test than on the first test. And the average score increase was also higher than the comparable increase for students who reported not eating breakfast before the second test. These results almost exactly matched the results for students who reported sleeping 7 to 9 hours the night before the second test versus those who reported sleeping 0 to 3 hours.



This work is just one part of a significant body of policy research demonstrating either the negative effects of student hunger on student cognition and academic performance or the positive effects seen in the performance of students who eat breakfast before taking standardized tests. The research points to the potential benefit of breakfast before testing, which can help to offset hunger during the administration that could detract from students’ ability to perform. But even more simply, it can help ensure that students begin the test day with something in their stomachs.

These benefits may be especially important for lower-income students, who are more likely than other student groups to face food insecurity. One day last fall I heard a story on National Public Radio about a recent research study that would seem to bear this out. The researchers (including Orgul Ozturk of the University of South Carolina, who was interviewed for the story) found that the standardized math-test scores of South Carolina elementary and middle school students whose families participate in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) tended to be much lower when the tests were given just prior to the dates when the families receive their monthly SNAP benefits. The researchers theorized that this may be because the families have less food in the house at that time each month.

As ACT’s senior director of policy and planning, I am well aware of the ability of our research to identify a problem and recommend solutions but not always to do something to help solve the problem ourselves. But now, suddenly, listening to the radio, a way to potentially do just that occurred to me: Why couldn’t ACT experiment with offering test-takers breakfast right before a national administration?

We could, as it turned out. We reached out to potential partners and ultimately, thanks to assistance from the Child and Adult Care Food Program, a federally funded program administered by the Virginia Department of Education’s Office of School Nutrition Programs, we were able to offer breakfast at test centers in five schools across the Commonwealth where half or more of the student population is eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. While we look forward to analyzing the results of these test administrations, we already know that, in our own small way, ACT is helping to address the problem of hunger in the U.S., and even if it turns out not to be a total solution to opportunity gaps between potentially food-insecure students and those who are not, it is definitely an equity builder—part of our overall effort to support students in whatever way we can on the path to college and career readiness. We sincerely thank those who helped us with this initiative, and we anticipate its eventual expansion.

More and more we hear that open source software is gaining traction in educational settings, as well as in banks and consumer eCommerce companies. If you are not completely familiar with open source, you might be asking yourself, “how can free software possibly be of any value?” or “what’s the catch?”

In schools and districts, open source software is gaining momentum as it fuels innovation in education and allows flexibility to the institutions that adopt it. Rather than being limited by the features offered in a proprietary solution licensed from a traditional vendor, a truly open source offering allows the user to freely access and modify the source code to create the system they really need; a solution that works well with other ed-tech solutions in the existing ecosystem.

While open source software is free of licensing fees, there are associated costs including the technical expertise to implement and configure it, as well as deploy and support it. For many agencies, having this level of control along with the ability to change and add to their digital infrastructure as needed brings a huge benefit, especially when they tap the services offered by the developers of the open source system.

An EdSurge article tells the story of how Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy came to build, adopt, and pave the way for other schools to use Slate, the open source “mainframe 2.0.”

Within this context, here are some common and compelling reasons why educational decision makers are increasingly turning to open source solutions:

1. Open solution: Traditionally, when a school district adopts proprietary software for its core infrastructure, it can easily become locked into one solution or vendor, which greatly reduces choice and flexibility. Since educational policies, goals, and strategies change from time to time, a flexible, open infrastructure can better enable you to offer effective solutions and maintain control of your ecosystem without getting walled in. 
2. Lower cost of ownership: Every district has a unique combination of students, styles of teaching, and operating models. Proprietary software is usually packaged to fit a generalized need, which naturally leads to a high acquisition cost. With open source software, there is no licensing cost and decision makers can pick and choose the exact components or features they need and package them into their system of choice, therefore providing a much lower total cost of ownership. 
3. Interoperability: Open source software applications and modules that are compliant with open standards like the ones from IMS Global can be combined to work seamlessly together. This plug-and-play approach brings great flexibility to the user, allowing a best-in-class approach where software from different vendors can be combined into one unified and fully tailored ecosystem. 

In the long run, open source software in combination with open standards may prove to have more longevity than the proprietary systems that come and go. Thanks to the solid reliability of commercial entities and, of course, the innovative communities behind them, open source software will increasingly stay in the mind of ed-tech leaders to meet the ongoing needs of educational progress.

ACT, which is transforming into a measurement, learning and navigation organization, recently invested in Open Assessment Technologies S.A. (OAT) as a powerful endorsement of open solutions that benefit learning and measurement for everyone from school through career. OAT is the award-winning provider of open source assessment solutions and best known for its QTI®-native assessment platform, TAO®. Learn more.

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