A Classist ACT Prompt?

Last weekend my students took their third practice ACT. This is an exciting time because they have finally had a few good weeks of ACT strategy and they are eager to see if their scores have improved. This is also an important time for me to figure out which students are understanding the material and which students need some extra attention. While most of my students seemed confident that they had at least improved a little on each section, they left the test with defeated looks on their faces after finishing the last section, the essay. After reading the prompt, it's not hard to see why my students felt this way.

The prompt goes:

"Most people enjoy having a yard so that they can design both the exterior and the interior of their homes. Some people prefer landscaping that is polished and controlled, with lush green lawns, carefully trimmed shrubs or bushes, and flowers that are replaced each season so that they remain fresh and colorful. Proponents of this type of landscaping believe that the visual design of a yard is the most important factor and that neighborhoods should have standard guidelines so that the area looks uniform and consistent. Opponents of polished landscaping believe that yards require a variety of treatments, based on factors such as the climate conditions of the region, and advocate for choices that incorporate water conservation, native species, and edible plants. In your opinion, should people follow standard landscaping guidelines that focus on a yard's visual design, or should they vary their landscaping design out of consideration for other factors like climate or conservation?"



As I see it, there are two main problems with this prompt:

1. We told our students that every prompt they would get on the ACT would have something to do with their lives as students, something they could relate to. We gave examples of debates surrounding school uniforms, year round schools, single sex education, serving fast food in the cafeteria, weighted grades, the list goes on. This prompt has nothing to do with the lives of the majority of high schoolers in this country and I'm pretty sure that most high schoolers would have no opinion on the issue whatsoever (unless you're one of my good friends who worked summers with a landscaping company).

2. This prompt certainly has no relevance or context for most low income or urban students- who may be living in housing without yards or might not have the income to afford landscaping. This is the issue I will be focussing on for the remainder of this post.

Most of my students qualify for free or reduced lunch and if they don't, they definitely make well under the average income for the state. The neighborhoods surrounding the school where I work have small yards, but, as far as I can tell, no neighborhood association regulating landscaping or anything else. When I think of neighborhood associations, I think of wealthy neighborhoods where the residents can afford to pay dues to have a council that puts on BBQs and gives gifts to the mailmen. That is certainly not the kind of neighborhood my students come from. For those who don't live in single family homes, they live in apartments or town homes without yards. Thus, this prompt brings up a concept that almost none of my students have any experience with.

In fact, quite a few of my students did not know what landscaping was- and this was true among my coworkers as well. In their essays we had students argue for having landscapes instead of yards or having a back yard, or what to put in your yard (think swimming pool and playground). It was clear that besides not having any personal experience with landscaping in their own yards, they had never even encountered the term.

To me this begged the question: 'is this a classist prompt??' And honestly, I believe the answer is yes. The definition of 'classist' is "biased based on social or economic class." For a writing prompt to be classist it would have to give an unfair advantage to those of a certain social or economic class. I believe this prompt does just that. If I had this prompt when I was taking the ACT (or SAT in my case), I would have had absolutely no trouble answering the prompt. Why? Because most if not all of the neighborhoods I lived in growing up had guidelines for landscaping. More than that, I'm pretty sure that for at least the last 13 years my family has had a LANDSCAPER. I grew up seeing drawings for new gardens in our yard, hearing about the installation of underground sprinklers, and watching my parents ask permission from neighborhood councils to put fences in my yard (and wouldn't you know they even cared about what material the fences were made out of). I grew up surrounded by this information because my parents had the expendable income to pay for everything that comes with landscaping and because we belonged in a social class that expected it of us.

Most of my students do not have the same exposure to landscaping as I did, giving them an unfair disadvantage when approaching this prompt. In the words of one of my co-workers: "they might as well have asked if hired help should be full time or part time or if neighborhoods should be gated or not!"- this prompt was clearly aimed towards a set of students with a certain life style, one which, from my knowledge, most urban low income students do not share.

It's incredibly frustrating to think that a standardized test, one which is supposed to put students on an even level regardless of their high school, background, religion, race, etc. can so blatantly give an advantage to some students over others. What's worse is that it is really difficult to help our students overcome this type of disadvantage. We can teach our students how to write a well structured essay, but we cannot give them life experiences they've never had- and when a whole prompt is based on such an experience, having it can make or break one's score.

Wanna Know My New Boyfriend's Name? Kaplan!

With the new year has come a new focus to our curriculum: Kaplan ACT Preparation.

In the beginning of the week we handed out 3 prep books to each student and walked them through what were essentially wedding vows betrothing them to their prep books. The goal was to emphasize how important our students should be taking their books and this prep season in general and to make things a little fun because, let's face it, the next 3 months will not be all that fun.

Teaching the Kaplan curriculum is scary and frustrating. Scary because what and how we're teaching our students really matters now. Before, we were having conversations with them: what kind of school do you want to go to? what is the best way to save money? what should you include in your resume? Now, we are entrusted with helping our students improve their ACT scores and properly teaching them the techniques to do so.

Teaching Kaplan is also frustrating because it doesn't all relate to our students. Some examples:
- Kaplan does all of these cheesy things with the word "Kap" in it. For example "Kap Wrap" is the end of the section question that is supposed to make them think. "Thinking Kap" is the question at the beginning of each unit that is supposed to use the same methods that we will be teaching later in the section. I'm assuming this was amusing for the authors of the kaplan curriculum, but my students are not amused.

- Kaplan uses language that is too technical or confusing. Here's a perfect example in a section that I have to practice teach tomorrow:
In the English sections students read an excerpt and encounter various grammatical and structural errors which they are then prompted to correct.
" I rose slowly through the wooded sections, but upon reaching the flat, open areas, I rode MORE FASTLY. (this is not really in caps, it's actually underlined"
The first step of the method is to figure out what the problem is. In my mind I say: "oh, ok, the problem is that 'fastly' is NOT A WORD" but no.... according to the Kaplan book, the issue is that 'more is incorrect with slow'- what does that even mean?? If I told my students that, they would just look at me with death stares.

In a broader sense, my issue, perhaps not just with Kaplan but with the ACT in general, is that so many of the English questions are wrong or right because they "sound right." That's great for the majority of American high school students, but not for those who have learned English as a second (or third or fourth) language. To them, things don't just "sound right" in English- partially, I would argue, because English doesn't make all that much sense in the first place, but also because they don't naturally think in English. The second language that I'm closest to fluent in is Hebrew (and, mind you, there's no way I would survive a day in an Israeli high school where I was expected to speak Hebrew)- but there are very few occasions where I could read something in Hebrew and tell you that it "sounds wrong" or "sounds right"- it's Hebrew and if I'm reading it I'm going to assume it's grammatically correct- or at least it's more grammatically correct than I could ever write it. For my ELL students who struggle so hard to write correctly in English, how can I expect them to notice someone else's mistakes?

Numbers and Their Meaning

The organization I work for uses a lot of numbers and statistics. After all, it is due to some sobering and unfair statistics that the organization exists at all, for example: low income students are almost 30% less likely to enroll in college as their wealthier peers, every year there are 200,000 low income student who graduate from high school and are capable of going to college but do not go, and, in a 2005 article I just found, only 6% of low income students can expect to earn a bachelor's degree by age 24, compared to 51% average nationally.

It is only logical, then, that since we base our existence on statistics, we must be able to show statistics that prove our effectiveness. The amount of numbers floating around my head and our organization-wide friday meetings is overwhelming: number of students, rate of reliability for rsvps for a college visit, number of schools applied to, amount of scholarship money received, average baseline score, percentage increased, number of students enrolled, number of students dropped... the list goes on and on.

Yesterday, a new set of numbers came out: ACT 2 scores and percentage increase from baseline scores. With 82% of my 41 students tested, they've had a 7.7% score increase. Victoria, of course, blew me out of the water with 97% (functionally 100%) of her students achieving a 13% score increase. In a desperate attempt not to feel like such a loser, I began breaking my numbers down into more numbers. 22 of my students increased their scores with an average of an 18% increase. Six of my student got the same scores. 5 of my student's scores decreased an average of 11%, and I have one outlier, we'll deal with him later. Before I knew it I had a major excel document with every students baseline and ACT2 score and their score increase/decrease percentage color coded by percent attendance. It was getting a little scary.

With all of these numbers floating around in my head, I went to session and began having brief check-in meetings with each of my students, and it was then, cheesily, that I realized that my statistics, no matter how specific, broken down, high, or low, could never do justice to the experiences of my students. No percent could make me more happy than the smile on my student's face who improved from an 11 to a 17, or more determined to solve the mystery of my incredibly attentive student who dropped from a 16 to a 12, or more proud of my ridiculously high achiever who started with a 28 and has made it a goal to improve by 2 points every practice test and might actually do it, or more frustrated with the student who overslept and went from a 6 to a 10 on his reading section but got 1's on English and Math because he completely missed those sections.

So while I might sit here wishing that 7.7% score increase could be just a few percentage points higher, I must constantly strive to remember that the 7.7% is actually 41 different stories of happiness, triumph, frustration, determination, confusion, sadness, hope, and faith, each one as statistically significant as the next.

Realities

Today was a little bit heartbreaking because it was the first day that we shared our student's baseline ACT scores with them. In this organization we focus a lot on ACT prep in the junior year and we start off the year with a baseline ACT- a test where we tell them where to go and when but nothing else.

Our student's baseline scores ranged from 9-28 (the 28 was a major outlier... after this student no one had higher than a 20). To give some context: the national average is 21 and the state average is almost 23. A good portion of both mine and victoria's students fell in the bottom 1% of test takers.

This is incredibly disheartening. Our students are smart energetic students- yet the test in no way shows that. Our English Language Learners definitely struggle the most, being unable to come even close to finishing the reading section and getting a majority of those questions wrong.

I think what affected me the most was how immune my students seemed to being in the bottom 30% or lower of test takers. Most of my students failed their GRAD tests in reading and/or writing and they are completely used to being below average. I guess this is better than being destroyed by this fact. I even had one student make a joke about it. He had a 10 or 11 and was in the bottom 1%, instead he remarked: "I'm in the top 1% of test takers!"... all I could do was look at him with a sad smile.

The ray of hope here is that we are basically guaranteed to raise our students' scores. Our organization averaged a 25% score increase last year. But, I don't really think 25% is enough for most of my students and sincerely hope it will be possible to improve their scores even more.