The Importance of Early, Aggressive Training for the ACT and SAT

Four Grade 8 students and one Grade 9 student enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative are currently training to take the ACT, generally taken by students aspiring to attend college when they are in Grade 11. These five students will eventually also train to take the SAT, but the ACT is the test of preference for many of the colleges and universities to which these students will apply.

Notably, all five of these students have been enrolled in the Initiative for three years or more; two of the students have been enrolled for four years, and one has been a student in the Initiative for six years. These students have been enrolled long enough for the program to have served as the kind of support system that children from middle class and upper middle class families frequently have by virtue of the circumstances into which they were born. Without this kind of support system, children from economically challenged families of low educational attainment have much lower exposure to the kind of vocabulary and cultural information that instruments such as the ACT and SAT do and should assume.

Students in the Minneapolis Public Schools from poor and ill-educated families typically achieve a score of about 15 on the ACT, for which a perfect score is 36. Highly regarded colleges and universities tend to require a score of 25 or better, and schools of Ivy League quality have ample selection pools of students with scores of 30 or better on the ACT. Scoring below 21 on the ACT limits the post-secondary opportunities for many Minneapolis Public Schools students, including a sizable number of students who achieve grades of "A" or "B" in most of their classes.

Many students from families of low economic and educational status have academic histories that cause them to take remedial math courses in high school or to struggle through a challenging math sequence culminating in Algebra II, Trigonometry, Pre-Calculus, or (rarely) Calculus without the proper background knowledge. Children from families of similar economic description may achieve decent grades in English classes, but they seldom acquire the kind of vocabulary that allows them to fully understand and appreciate advanced reading material.

Recently I was working with a student that I shall call Jason, the Grade 9 student among the five currently training to take the ACT. We were reading a passage from the monograph, >When School is Out and Nobody's Home< (Peter Coolsen, et al), a selection appearing in the "Reading Test" portion of a practice ACT. Jason understood the very general sense of this passage on first reading, but it was only when we went back over the reading with focused attention on vocabulary that he began to answer my comprehension questions with a high degree of accuracy.

Jason is well on track to achieve grade level performance on the standardized tests that he will take during high school in writing (Grade 9) and reading (Grade 10). But rising to excellent performance on the ACT by the time he reaches Grade 11 will take the kind of training that he has begun in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Jason has strong reading comprehension skills when he knows the vocabulary, but his vocabulary mastery is only now beginning to develop toward the sophistication featured on the ACT and SAT.

In just this five-paragraph selection from the practice "Reading Test," there were 35words and expressions that Jason did not fully understand. These included the following:

et al
albeit
monograph
portrait (in the sense of a "revealing portrait")
editor
colleague
contend (in the sense of "assert one's view")
resentful
bias (in a more generally applicable sense, beyond "racial bias")
probe
discrepancy
urban
rural
close-knit
continuum
sibling
susceptible
authoritarian
authoritative
permissive
ultimate
maintenance (in the sense of "household maintenance")
multiple (in the sense of "many" [rather than the mathematical "multiple"])

morale
isolation
apathetic
embittered
resigned to (in the sense of "just going along with")
stoic
content (in the sense of "happy and satisfied")
elicit
socioeconomic
enlightening
insecure
anxiety

Jason and the four other Grade 8-9 students are now undergoing the kind of explicit and contextual vocabulary development, and the kind of close questioning for comprehension, that will allow them to excel on the verbal portions of the ACT and SAT when they take these tests as Grade 11 students. They are also training to acquire the kind of knowledge and skill sets that will allow them to achieve high scores on the math and science portions of the tests. I aspire for these students the kind of performance on the ACT that will hold a score of 25 as a kind of minimal baseline, with the goal beyond that of scoring in the 30-36 range. Jason and the other students have internalized my message that they cannot be satisfied with good grades in their courses at school; they know that they are entering a very different realm of academic difficulty as they strive to meet the aspirations that they have also internalized.

Public schools should be the great democratizers giving people from all backgrounds the same life opportunity. We must be aware of the particular academic deficits that the children of the poor and ill-educated have as a result of their life circumstances, and we must provide them the kind of academically rigorous training that will allow them to remedy their deficits and go on to excel at the highest levels.

Given the ground that must be covered, and the distance that must be made up, these students must begin years ahead of time to train aggressively for the ACT and SAT, so as to meet the expectations of high quality colleges and universities.