Note to Lincoln Public Schools juniors: Sharpen your No. 2 pencils and brush up on your grammar rules. You're about to become part of a statewide experiment.
The school district's 2,500-some high school juniors will be among about 3,800 in eight Nebraska districts who will take the ACT on April 24 as part of a study on whether the college preparatory exam should replace statewide tests now given to all 11th-graders.
Last year, the Legislature appropriated about $430,000 to pay for the three-year pilot program, which officials hope will answer two questions:
* Will making the ACT available to all students spur some onto college who hadn't considered it?
* Will high school students perform better on the ACT than the statewide tests now given, making it a better statewide assessment?
The state asked LPS as well as the Hastings, Sidney, South Sioux City, Columbus, Gering, Scottsbluff and Alliance school districts to be a part of the pilot program in an effort to get a good geographic and demographic cross-section, Breed said.
The 11th-graders in the study will continue to take the statewide tests, so state officials can compare how students perform and how well the ACT measures performance on state standards.
"This might be a step that will help," Breed said. "It might not. It might not change anything. It might be counterproductive."
Now, Nebraska gives tests in math, reading, writing and science to third- through eighth-graders and 11th-graders, but juniors traditionally have done significantly worse on the tests than their younger counterparts.
Educators have speculated that part of the reason is that while the tests carry high stakes for school districts, judging their effectiveness based on the scores, they don't matter to high school students.
By their junior year, the reasoning goes, students are more concerned with college prep exams, graduation demonstration exams and GPAs.
Last year, nearly 80 percent of all LPS graduates -- and 76 percent of graduates statewide -- took the ACT, a necessary rite of passage for college-bound students, who often take the test more than once because the scores carry major implications for scholarships. Taking the test costs $34.
Making the ACT mandatory for juniors would give those students a free test and ensure everybody takes it at least once.
"When we give the ACT to everybody, we will be capturing the 25 to 28 percent not taking it," said state Board of Education member Bob Evnen, who championed the pilot program. "What we hope for is identifying more students who might otherwise have been overlooked, who can go on to college."
Marilyn Moore, LPS associate superintendent of instruction, sees that as one of the biggest advantages to using the ACT.
"It may, for some students ... increase their sense of what's possible in their future. And I think those are really great outcomes if that happens."
Among the downsides of the study is that participating districts -- and likely the state -- will see lower composite ACT scores because more students will be taking the test.
Eight states -- Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming -- give the ACT to all juniors. Some report that after a few years, their composite scores began to rebound.
"When we first started giving it universally, we saw dips, and it's gradually improved," said Illinois State Board of Education spokeswoman Mary Fergus.
If Nebraska replaced statewide tests for juniors with the ACT, it ultimately would result in less testing, but during the pilot program, the participating juniors will take both tests. And at LPS, it will mean the loss of one instructional day. All other grades will get the day off because that was the best way to free classrooms and staff to administer the test, Moore said.
Even if state officials conclude the ACT is a better option than the statewide tests, they've still got a major hurdle: getting the federal government to accept it for accountability purposes under the No Child Left Behind Act.
So far, states have had little success convincing the U.S. Department of Education to do so, although several states are asking for that as part of the NCLB waiver process.
Because Congress has yet to reauthorize federal education law, the Obama administration has offered waivers from NCLB's strict accountability requirements. Nebraska has not applied for the waiver.
Moore sees getting an OK from the federal government as problematic, at least based on current law.
"I think it would take a marked change in the current law and regulations for that to happen, or a marked change in the ACT," she said. "The ACT is not designed to measure Nebraska math standards or any other state standards. It's designed to predict how well students will do the first semester in college."
But Evnen said because federal education law is in a state of flux, policymakers have an opportunity to influence it.
"NCLB is on the way out, and we don't know what the new world ... will look like," he said. "The bottom line is I want to affect what the rule is. We are in a position of great political possibility now. We need to be heads-up about this."
