High school reading skills: solutions for educators and policymakers to begin addressing students' college readiness.

My career in education began as a high school math teacher. Anyone who has shared that experience knows frustration that arises when students arrive in class unprepared to learn the material you're teaching.

Somewhere along the way, too many students have fallen too far behind. In the 34 years that I've been with ACT, my classroom experience has helped to drive my interest in identifying solutions to problems which, left unattended, are sure to leave far too many students under-prepared for what awaits them when they leave high school.

Our latest step in that effort is a research policy report, Reading Between the Lines. In it, we analyze the reading skills of high school graduates, and offer solutions for educators and policymakers to been addressing the problem.

Preparing all students for college is a noble goal, but it would be naive for us to think that all students entering high school today will be ready for college-level coursework upon graduation. It simply can't happen overnight. However, if the right steps are taken now, we will eventually get much closer to this college readiness goal.

The Crisis in Reading Skills

A few years ago, ACT developed College Readiness Benchmarks. These are scores on the four parts of the ACT exam (English, reading, math and science tests) that students should achieve if they are prepared to earn a "C" or higher in relevant courses during the first year of college. The College Readiness Benchmark score on the ACT Reading Test is 21. Only 51 percent of the ACT-tested high school graduates in the class of 2005 scored 21 or higher. Since we're talking about a total group of 1.2 million graduates, this means more than a half-million graduates likely started college last fall unprepared to keep up with the reading demands of social studies courses.

ACT research dearly shows that when students are ready for college-level reading, they're more likely to enroll in college in the fall immediately following high school; earn higher grades in college social studies classes; earn higher first-year college grades; and return to the same college for a second year.

What Educators and Policymakers Can Do

Our findings suggest that the ability to read complex material is the dearest differentiator between students who are ready for college-level reading and those who aren't. Unfortunately, the majority of states don't define the types of reading materials to which high school students in each specific grade should be exposed, and not a single state defines what complex texts are. All of the state standards are silent on this matter.

Interestingly, scores from our eighth and tenth grade assessments show that more students are on course for higher reading skills until the last two years of high school, and then skills don't improve much between tenth grade and graduation. It tells us that students are not getting continued reading instruction.

But in all states, educators and policymakers must get together to make sure specific reading standards are in place for each grade in high school, and that those standards drive complex classroom reading instruction.

Our recommendations to educators and policymakers are these:

* Strengthen reading instruction by incorporating complex reading materials into course content in all high school courses;

* Revise state standards so they explicitly define reading expectations across the high school curriculum and incorporate increasingly complex texts into the English, math, science and social studies courses in grades 9 through 12;

* Make targeted interventions to help students who have fallen behind in their reading skills;

* Provide high school teachers with guidance to incorporate the kinds of complex texts into their courses that are most likely to increase students' readiness for college-level reading;

* Strengthen high school assessments so they align with improved state standards and high school instruction across the curriculum.

www.act.org/path/policy

Richard L. Ferguson is CEO of ACT, Inc., an independent, not-for-profit organization that provides assessment, research, information and program management services.