All worked up about WorkKeys
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
-
WorkKeys
10 min read
The article centers on the WorkKeys assessment as an alternative to the ACT for CTE students, but most readers likely don't know the history, structure, and scoring system of this ACT-developed workplace skills assessment
-
Career and technical education
14 min read
CTE is central to the article's debate about assessment pathways, and understanding its history, structure, and evolution from vocational education provides essential context for the college-vs-career readiness discussion
In today’s edition: The final (?) word on the wisdom of using WorkKeys as an alternative assessment for CTE students, plus analyses of the Mississippi Miracle Marathon, the Massachusetts Malaise, and Overly-Patient Oregon.
Sign up to receive this newsletter in your inbox on Tuesday and Friday mornings. SCHOOLED is free, but a few linked articles may be paywalled by other publications.
I didn’t plan to spend three issues in a row discussing Alabama’s idea of letting CTE students take the WorkKeys exam if they fail to meet the state’s college and career readiness standards on the ACT. But it has clearly struck a nerve!
Below are two more super thoughtful and meaty responses. The first is from Boston College’s Shaun Dougherty, one of the nation’s leading scholars of career and technical education. The second is by Jill Pinsky of Watershed Advisors, who served as Deputy Assistant Superintendent at the Louisiana Department of Education in the mid 2010s, where she overhauled the state’s accountability system, in which WorkKeys plays a role.
Shaun Dougherty:
...Having a secondary test for high school accountability could improve the information that students and schools have to improve student outcomes after high school graduation. All students need the minimum skills to be adaptable and pursue additional training as the economy continues to change. However, two decades of test-based accountability have yielded too little useful information at the point of high school exit, especially for students who either cannot or will not enroll directly in college.
At present, nearly everyone takes the same tests of math and English language arts as a condition of state accountability. And while states complement these tests (or use elements of them) with measures to define college and career readiness, the metrics being used may not be as useful to students, employers, and colleges as the spirit of accountability should intend. In particular, among students who score at the low end of high school tests of math and reading and that are used for accountability, it is pretty clear that those lower scores are not helpful to the students and provide only limited information for schools about how to best advise students in their post school plans. Specifically, if students score above some agreed upon threshold for graduation, they may not meet the threshold for college readiness (e.g., an ACT score of 17 or higher in Tennessee), particularly readiness for colleges that are
This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.