Arkansas Home Schooler Earns Perfect Score on ACT

The Education Alliance is proud to announce that eleventh grade home schooler Alison Giggleman of Roland recently scored a perfect 36 on the ACT.

The ACT is one of the most widely-recognized standardized tests for assessing college readiness. Scoring a perfect 36 on the ACT puts Alison in the top 99th percentile of students who took the test and unlocks incredible opportunities for her when it comes to enrolling in college and qualifying for academic scholarships.

Home schoolers in Arkansas have a solid reputation for academic achievement. They routinely outperform other students on standardized tests, and many have gone on to graduate from prestigious colleges and universities.

I hope you will join us in congratulating Alison and her parents, Charles and Mika, for her accomplishment.

Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash

Canceling Grades

John Stonestreet, Radio Host and Director of the Colson Center

Last week the LA Times reported that, facing soaring rates of D’s and F’s, more schools are simply doing away with grades entirely. Instead, teachers are encouraged to give students little to no homework, move deadlines, and have fewer outcome-driven measurements of achievement. 

What’s the rationale behind the move?

“By continuing to use century-old grading practices,” wrote L.A. Unified’s chief academic administrator, “we inadvertently perpetuate achievement and opportunity gaps, rewarding our most privileged students and punishing those who are not.” In other words, standardized grades are racist. 

But isn’t suggesting that poor or minority kids can’t get good grades itself a racist belief?

A major reason for merit-based grading is that if we don’t evaluate students based on their achievements, we’ll evaluate them on something else; in this case, an administrator’s preconceived ideas about their ability to succeed, based entirely on ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

Even more, by doing away with grades, educators keep students from the potential to succeed, no matter how hard they work. It’s a different kind of tyranny, but no less destructive: the tyranny of low expectations.

Copyright 2021 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.