‘Don’t freak out’

Plain talk is the best kind

WHAT a joy it is to hear somebody in the education world speak to a slightly complex issue, and not clutter the air with a bunch of bureaucrat jargon. It’s so rare that it’s remarkable. That is, somebody should remark. “Don’t freak out.”

That was the wise counsel from our newest favorite education expert, Sarah McKenzie. She’s the executive director of the Office for Education Policy at the UofA. As mama used to say, bless her all to pieces.

For it would be easy to freak out on the news that ACT scores dropped almost a full point in the last year as Arkansas’ high schoolers toiled over the standardized tests. But there is an explanation. And a perfectly acceptable one, not just an excuse: More kids are taking the tests.

Arkansas is now one of 17 states in which all public school students can take the ACT—at no charge to them. Naturally, the number of test-takers jumped last semester, by more than 6,000 kids to a total of 34,451. That’s a new record for Arkansas. And doubtless many of those kids—before, during or after taking the ACT—decided that maybe college isn’t for them. But why not give the ACT a go, and see how you do? Especially now that there’s not a charge to the student.

So this one-off drop is likely a blip. Don’t freak out.

“We love that Arkansas is giving every student the opportunity to get a picture of his/her readiness for college and careers,” Ms. McKenzie posted on a blog this week, “and doing it early enough that students can use the information when making decisions.”

So, about that drop from an average of 20.2 in 2016 to 19.4 last cycle . . . .

“Don’t freak out,” she said. “Arkansas is headed in the right direction by increasing access to . . . the ACT.”

Isn’t that a more human way to put it, rather than reflecting the need to shift a paradigm to our schools’ core competency to get buy-in from parents and teachers while actioning our deliverables and aligning availabilities?

Corporate bureaucratic jargon— and its first cousin, education lingo—doesn’t mask thinking as much as it covers for the lack of it. “Holistic leveraging of key learnings” isn’t a thought, it’s balder and dash, gobbledy and gook. As if it was a person’s turn to speak at a Tiger Team lockup meeting, and he had to string words together. No matter the subject of the meeting. And it wouldn’t even matter if he was paying attention to the topic at hand.

The less educators sound like a Dilbert cartoon, the better for education. And, down the line, the better for students.

We’ll take Sarah McKenzie’s sage advice on this particular matter, and not freak out about these scores just yet. Let’s see another year’s worth of ACT scores and see if the drop really is a one-time occurrence or a trend. We suspicion we know the answer.

Besides, now that it’s football season, we’ll save freaking out for Saturdays.