College Entrance Exam Prep for Underserved Communities

[00:01] SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Dustin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by my guest, Dr. Matthew Pietrofetta. Matthew is the founder and CEO of Academic Approach, which helps students develop college and career readiness skills. He holds a PhD from Columbia University, and he's here today to join me to talk about what we can do as school leaders to help our students become college and career ready.

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And now, our feature presentation.

[00:41] SPEAKER_00:

So Matthew, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:43] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you very much, Justin, for having me.

[00:45] SPEAKER_00:

In your work with high school students, with their families, and helping students prepare, what have you developed as your understanding of what it means to be college ready? You know, there's a lot of talk these days about college and career ready, and I know specifically you work on the college side. What does that really mean to you, to say that a student is college ready?

[01:04] SPEAKER_01:

Well, to be college ready, the way that we measure that is in terms of Preparedness for college level curriculum the major instrument that we use are the college entrance exams the ACT and the SAT and They are very useful Exams to look at take a skills based approach to thinking about college readiness because there are summative exams of multiple years of learning so they cover a scope and sequence in math and reading and grammar and from 8th grade through 11th grade. So one definition of college readiness is by the time you get to junior year, junior spring, senior fall, what is your summative mastery level of certain college readiness skills that will be required and are highly correlated with success in freshman year college curriculum.

[01:55]

And that's really what the college entrance exams do on a certain level is provide that summative snapshot at a certain critical point in time, as a student is nearing the admissions process, of how that mastery-based learning has worked. over multiple years of middle school and high school work.

[02:14] SPEAKER_00:

I feel like we've heard a lot in recent years about colleges paying attention to more than test scores and looking, of course, at activities, at extracurriculars, at leadership. But it sounds like you're saying that those exams, especially the SAT and the ACT, do still play a pretty critical role.

[02:30] SPEAKER_01:

They do. I think it's really important to take a step back. And if you look at statistics from the National Association of College Admissions Counselors and reports that they put forth about what factors have the greatest influence on admissions officers decisions about admitting students to college it definitely is you know first and foremost grades and the rigor of the coursework that students take in school so you know as you would expect the number one criterion for admission is you know what kind of student are you in the classroom and from a data standpoint that data is the best data because it's sustained data over multiple years of work in the classroom. So what your GPA is that you've earned by the end of junior year, you know, is basically a summation of three sustained years of academic achievement data in the classroom.

[03:24]

So that's number one. And so colleges also then look at the rigor of the coursework that a student engaged in. Are you in a school that has honors curriculum, AP curriculum, IB curriculum? And did you track and take that more challenging curriculum? So that's another indicator of what type of rigorous coursework you undertook. So of course, first and foremost, it's your grades.

[03:46]

It's the challenge of the coursework that you took on in school. But then if you look at criteria after that that admissions officers are interested in, they are interested in the SAT and the ACT because they're common assessments. that are normed nationally across a wide testing group. And so if you see where a student ranks on those tests, that can be a very useful check against the grading habits of a given school. So you go from school to school, and there may be a variance in the way grades are assigned and assessed. So getting an A at one school might be a little bit easier to earn than at another school where it's equivalent to a B.

[04:29]

But if you can look at another assessment, one that's national and normed, and you can look at percentiles accordingly, then that might help you as an admissions officer just get another check on that student's academic readiness.

[04:41] SPEAKER_00:

And I think it's important to talk about academic readiness and not just the admissions decision because, you know, obviously schools to some extent like admissions tests because they're kind of a hard data point that, as you said, allows them to kind of accommodate differences in rigor across schools and, you know, how easy is it to get an A in a given school, as well as deal with just the huge number of applications that they have, right? It's obviously easier to look at test scores than not when you're having to make admissions decisions among students. thousands and thousands of students for a limited number of spots. And we know that that's especially an issue at the more competitive schools. And I wanted to talk for a moment about this issue of competitive schools versus non-competitive schools, because I feel like as a profession, as educational leaders, we've started to focus more on encouraging students to get into less competitive schools.

[05:34]

And I don't know if that's really a fair statement to make across the board, but I know, especially as the idea of college access and broadening college access has become more popular, we've stopped looking at the question of whether students are getting into the best schools possible. And there's this phenomenon known, and I know it's discussed quite a bit at the The idea that for a lot of our students, especially if they come from a background that's lower income or if maybe they're the first person in their family to go to college, often they're kind of encouraged to go to a school that's less challenging than they're actually ready for. And they could actually succeed in a more competitive, a more rigorous university setting than maybe they've been told. What have you encountered about undermatching in your research and in the work that you do with students and families?

[06:29] SPEAKER_01:

I think that's a fascinating point, and I'd add to undermatching the concept of mismatching. So one way to, you know, what mismatching would mean is if you look at where a student ends up and you look at their success rate at the school, their persistence rate, their graduation rate, then maybe it was not the best fit in the first place. So it was either, to your point, an undermatch and that it was less rigorous than it could have been, or it was not aligned with the student, the background the student came from, the supports the student needed to succeed academically, and therefore the student didn't persist at all. So the larger question that we can kind of embed this in is maybe the question of a return on investment or a return on education, ROI or an ROE. What are students getting out of a four-year college degree? and you know are they are they getting a return on that investment on that time are they getting great job placement you know career readiness uh after the completion of that program are they persisting and graduating through that program and in large urban school districts um the sort that we work in uh you know we work with families that you know come to us privately for um personalized tutoring support and they are aspiring to a certain set of schools and they come from

[07:42]

sometimes some of the better educational institutions, and they have some of the benefits of a great background and a college-ready family. But then we also work with underserved populations in large urban school districts where the quest for college admissions is essential for transforming the student and the family's potential for income. But that match had better be right because the student is coming often from, you know, their first member of their family to go to college. They don't have a lot of experience. They don't have a lot of supports at home. And so that match had better be right to place them in an environment where they are prepared to succeed, where they're going to get a lot of supports to help them persist.

[08:25]

And a lot of the schools, the public schools and the charter schools that we work with are very interested in studying persistence to see that not only are they placing their students in four-year programs and college programs, but that those students are persisting, graduating, and then getting successful job placement thereafter.

[08:45] SPEAKER_00:

I'm glad we're focusing more on college completion and, as you said, persistence, rather than just college acceptance or college admission. Because I think we've started to realize that there are some schools that are kind of playing a game when they say, we've got 100% of our students accepted to four-year colleges, when in fact what they're actually doing is they're just requiring all of their students to apply to college. Including schools that offer kind of open enrollment and guaranteed admission. So there's really no chance that they won't get accepted somewhere if they apply to those schools. But what you're saying is that's not enough. There's got to be a good fit between the student and the school.

[09:18]

And one example I'll give from the Seattle area is we would have a lot of students who would apply to one of the state schools. Sometimes they'd get a good financial aid package. and they would, you know, qualify academically. And then they'd go to school, they would move from Seattle and go to school in Eastern Washington or Central Washington in basically like a little farming town. And they would say, this is not for me. I'm a Seattle kid.

[09:40]

I grew up in Seattle. This is not a good fit for me. And it was, you know, partially being away from family, partially being in the country instead of the city. You Beyond just, do I have the scores? And, you know, can I get the support? Is this an environment that I want to be in?

[09:56]

And what I'm hearing you say is we've got to look at all of that in terms of fit.

[09:59] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think as a, you know, as a, we work principally with high schools and we focus on college entrance and college readiness. And I think, you know, one of the developments that's going on presently is this, the ESSA, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which will take full effect in school year 2017, 2018. and where in a number of states they're being allowed to use a college entrance exam like the ACT or SAT as the high school accountability exam as well. And we work in a number of districts that already use the ACT or the SAT this way.

[10:38]

And what's interesting about that in large public school districts in particular is it can create some energy around really looking at college readiness in terms of skills and benchmark scores. And the school is held accountable for it, so teachers get heavily invested in developing really good skills-based instruction within the school. And so you can create a 9th grade through 12th grade curriculum map within a school that's aligned to some really rigorous standards for college readiness because, you know, one of the goals is to make sure the students are scoring very well on the test and that's really an undertaking in skills mastery that are specifically designed to be preparing students for success once they get to college.

[11:31]

So, you know, with a lot of the more successful schools that we've worked with that have really good college placement and persistence, what they've been able to do is build really good organized curriculum planning and assessment systems within their schools and direct instruction that integrates in 9th and 10th and 11th grade really rigorous skills-based instruction and you know so what you can control on the high school level if you're a principal if you have the right kind of assessment system and instructional data-driven systems is you can you know create a school culture in which the mission is to get students college-ready so they have the skills to persist. And when they get to that school, they're able to succeed. If they're under-matched, we have seen a number of students, too, be able to transfer out to more rigorous schools. If they have the skills and they have the ability, if they've been prepared well, then they should be poised to succeed, persist, graduate, and maybe even transfer up.

[12:31]

if the opportunity presents itself. So when you're a high school leader, when you're a school leader, you can't necessarily control what happens at every college that you're going to send your children to. What you can do is try to find that pool of schools where your students, the students from your neighborhood or the background, your demographic that you're serving, have the best persistence rates and kind of guide them towards those schools. But what you can really control is what happens in your school building in 9th through 12th grade. And that, you know, what we focus on is building a really rich, you know, skills-based instructional culture so the students graduate with mastery of the rigorous skills they need to be successful once they get there.

[13:16] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. And I think placing that responsibility with ourselves when it comes to curriculum, I think is really, really critical because it goes back to the old kind of self-confidence statement, whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right. And when it comes to our students, if we believe they can't go to college, And we have the power to actually set curriculum and provide a curriculum that's not actually capable of helping them get ready for college. We're unfortunately going to be right that they're not ready because we haven't taught them what they need to get ready. So what I hear you saying is that we've got to take responsibility for providing a curriculum to all students that creates access to the opportunities that students need. And not just...

[14:01]

treat it as a situation of sorting, that it's our job to help the students who are college material get into college, but to provide the curriculum to all students that sets them up for success. So wherever they choose to go to college, they're going to have had the exposure to the skills, to the knowledge, because of the curriculum that we provide as educators.

[14:21] SPEAKER_01:

I love that sentiment, Justin, and I love the quote, whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right. And as a matter of fact, it's Henry Ford, and I have the quote on the wall of my children's room at home. So it's close to home as an educator and as a father. I think what you're getting at there in that quote, too, is something else that school leaders need to be concerned about. So you need to build a really good skills-based instructional system within your school. And that's a function of having the right assessments in place, the right college readiness culture and mentality among your staff, the right skills-based instruction in the classroom.

[15:03]

But the Henry Ford quote really gets at growth mindset, a non-cognitive . And these non-cognitive skills and non-cognitive factors, of course, they've gotten a bit of interest, stylistic interest. So it's become quite glamorous with Angela Duckworth and her work on grit. But truly, you know, even though there are critics against some of this work and research on growth mindset, if you're an educator, you work with young people, you understand that this is very real. And the difference between an adolescent with a static mindset or a growth mindset can make a huge difference when it comes to this question of college persistence that we're talking about. So let's say, for example, You are, you know, first to go to college and you're from an underserved community and you go into this new environment.

[15:50]

It's new. You don't have any precedence for it. And you're going to invariably encounter the unfamiliar and you're going to come up against some adversity. You run out of some money for, you know, buying your books first semester. You get your first you know, bout of, you know, the flu, you know, something hits you, whatever happens to freshman and freshman year, you know all the pitfalls. And if you're a static mindset and you kind of think, oh gosh, I can't do this and this defines who I am and I'm inevitably going to fail, then, you know, you may have a higher rate of dropout at that point.

[16:26]

You may quit. If your growth mindset and you've been prepared to understand that you're tough, you can handle it, and that learning involves failing forward and dealing with adversity and being able to believe in your capacity for growth, not immediate success, but long-term growth, then you might be gritty enough to hunker down and persist. And so a lot of educators at the high school level too are starting to understand that in addition to building a rich skills-based curriculum, having my assessments and my data-driven culture, to drive students towards college readiness in terms of skills, I also have to build non-cognitive factors into my instruction, into my culture. I have to build growth mindset. I have to build resilience. If I truly want persistence and graduation, if I want my students to be tough enough to not only take these skills, smart enough to learn the skills, master them,

[17:22]

but tough enough to persist in applying them, then I need to be thinking about both skills and non-cognitive factors.

[17:28] SPEAKER_00:

Very well said. And we've got to take responsibility for that as school leaders. And if you are a Principal Center Pro member, you might recall that we have a kind of a book talk on Angela Duckworth's book, Grit. Certainly good reading for any parent or any administrator who wants to help students develop those non-cognitive skills that are so essential for So I really appreciate your point there, Matthew. I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about the data piece. You mentioned that schools have got to do the work of collecting the right data, of analyzing that data, and figuring out what their students need.

[18:09]

In your work with schools to create programs that create access to higher education for students, what have you found to be some of the most important data points that we need to track, that we need to pay attention to?

[18:20] SPEAKER_01:

That's a great question. So I think having an early snapshot of where students are in any given school year in high school, but certainly, you know, upon entry is critical. So if you can get a snapshot of where students are in ninth grade and, you know, we use instruments like the ACT or the SAT or the PSAT to take these summative snapshots of where students are, particularly if you're in a school district that is going to use the ACT or the SAT as a college entrance exam, ultimately, you want to see where you are in terms of, you know, your on-track rate. How far are we behind from the college readiness goals that we have, from the school-wide goals that we have in terms of graduating students? And you want to know that early and often. So, you know, to get an early snapshot, then you can make adjustments in instruction to have that interim snapshot along the way to capture growth.

[19:19]

and to do data conferences around and reflect on best practices. That's key. So, you know, and some of them, the more sophisticated systems that we've seen when we work with schools and that we've helped schools set up, they have, you know, interim assessment model that's at work in ninth, 10th and 11th grade. And they have good, they've created time for their faculty to do data conferences around the return of that interim data and then to make instructional decisions and changes. And so that, you know, takes a while to build. And folks who are familiar with Bamberg's work on this, you know, in data-driven instructional school cultures and have adopted it have seen, you know, some of the transformative power of building that system to give transparency into where students are to help in a narrow, granular way target the high-impact skills for reteaching.

[20:12]

And to help build purpose in both, you know, the faculty, you know, by department, by grade level, and in the students around what, you know, the critical skills are that we as a group want to master in order to approach and reach, you know, college readiness. So building that data-driven instructional culture and infrastructure is critical. You know, it takes some time. It takes some time, but it's important work and it can have a transformative impact on student achievement. So some of the more successful schools we've worked with have committed to that model, built it out over years, seen it mature, and have been able to produce higher and higher results for their students.

[20:54] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Matthew, if people want to learn more about the work that you do with schools, especially at the high school level, to develop those data systems, to develop that system of paying attention to what it takes to get students ready for college, where can they find you online and learn more about the work that you do?

[21:11] SPEAKER_01:

Well, they can come to our website at academicapproach.com. And we're really, we enjoy partnering with school leaders online. who serves students at a variety of different readiness levels. It's hard work. It's great work.

[21:24]

It's rewarding work. And it's going to be, I think, in the years ahead, particularly as there's going to be a move nationally to kind of combine accountability exams with college entrance exams, I think it could be even more efficient, more effective work under the new Every Student Succeeds Act. So we're excited to partner with schools and come up with logical, impactful solutions.

[21:48] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Matthew, thank you so much for your time today, and thank you for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[21:52] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you, Justin, for having me. It was a pleasure. And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.

[21:59] SPEAKER_00:

So high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Matthew Pietrofetta? One thing I want to emphasize, because I know this is certainly true from my own life, is that SAT and ACT scores are changeable. They are not scores that come to us carved in stone. And with practice, with preparation, with a little bit of work, any student can get their scores up. And this is no secret among affluent parents. This is no secret whatsoever.

[22:28]

in elite private schools, and I want it to be no secret in every public school as well. If you have students with low SAT or ACT scores, they can improve those scores with work. And personally, I can tell you I improved my SAT score several hundred points by taking a prep class, by taking the test multiple times, and by combining my best scores on the different subtests, which the school that I was applying to allowed. So there are things that students can do. There are things that you can do as a school to help students get the scores they need to get into the universities of their choice that are a good match, that are rigorous enough, that are a good fit. And we've got to pay more and more attention to that.

[23:12]

As Matthew said, under the Every Student Succeeds Act, this is increasingly becoming an accountability option. So I want to encourage you to look into this, get in touch with Matthew if you would like. But I want to encourage you, most of all, to take responsibility for it. for how we're preparing students for those college entrance exams and for their persistence their ultimate success in college we've got to pay more attention to those persistence skills and those those readiness skills and again i want to refer you to our pro member book talk we've got a video called insights for instructional leaders where i summarize some of my key takeaways from angela duckworth's book grit the power of passion and persistence You can find out more about our Insights for Instructional Leaders series and all of our pro-member resources at principalcenter.com slash join.

[24:04] Announcer:

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