Alabama Department of Education considers changes to testing for high school graduation

The Alabama State Department of Education is considering applying for a waiver that would change the way high school students are considered prepared for college and work.

The waiver from the federal Department of Education would ensure career readiness is treated with the same level of importance as college readiness, according to Ann Jackson, chair of the Accountability Work Group, a committee of educators and education representatives across the state who have been meeting to discuss ways to restructure Alabama’s high school accountability measures.

“There seems to be a willingness to look at the current assessments that we are giving nationwide and maybe giving some waivers to some opportunities that may have been on the table before but have not been allowed,” Jackson told state board of education members last week.

Under this new accountability system, all students would still take the ACT, but those who do not show proficiency on the ACT would take the WorkKeys test instead. WorkKeys assesses workforce readiness in applied mathematics, workplace documents and graphic literacy, while the ACT measures college readiness in English, reading science and math.

“Currently, you’re only getting the proficiency piece if they’re ready for college, and we feel like our job is to have them prepared for success, even if that’s going straight into the workforce and that’s what WorkKeys would measure,” said Tony Willis, co-chair of the Accountability Work Group.

District 2 Representative Tracie West had concerns over the WorkKeys test.

“One of the comments I’ve received from the field is that the test may not be as rigorous as it could be for our students to really be prepared if they were going to enter the workforce or if they were going through a dual enrollment program,” West said.

District 1 Representative Jackie Zeigler said the WorkKeys is adequate at helping prepare students for the workforce.

“I’ve been in enough of the parts where they’re doing the welding and that math is very complicated,” Zeigler said. “I needed more of my fingers than I have in a long time. So, I don’t want to diminish the work that our kids going into the career end are not as bright. They are just choosing a different path.”

If Alabama is granted the waiver to do this mixed testing option, it would be the first state to implement it.

“We would be the first state to have a mixed delivery system but there’s about a dozen others that are waiting to see what Alabama does because we were the first state to adopt ACT as our state assessment,” Alabama State Schools Superintendent Eric Mackey said.

Alabama named ACT as the state assessment in 2014.

Mackey pointed out to the board members that because the waiver requires all students to take the same test, it could result in some students trying on one of the assessments but not the other.

“We used to require the WorkKeys, it wasn’t a part of the accountability, but it was a part of the assessment plan. And we got a lot of pushback that there were a lot of students who had no intention to do anything but go straight to college and that they felt like the WorkKeys wasn’t valuable to them,” Mackey told the board.

High school students would take both tests during their junior year to give the board time to add results to the state report card.