This report describes ACT test results for Austin Independent School District (AISD) seniors in the 2018-2019 school year. In 2018-2019, the district's average ACT composite score of 23.0 exceeded the state (20.5) and national (20.7) average composite scores.

This report brief describes district-level ACT test results for AISD seniors in the 2016-2017 school year.

The 1966 Anglo-American Seminar at Dartmouth certainly stands as a landmark event in the history of English teaching. For the purposes of this Special Issue, however, I want to unsettle some familiar interpretations of Dartmouth by reading with and against a range of American responses to the conference published in the late 1960s and 1970s. As an…

John Mayer, Adjunct Professor of English Education at Lehman College, City University of New York, and Professor Emeritus of English Education at New York University, begins by saying that he still Misses Garth Boomer, and has known no other friend or colleague with whom he has had more stimulating professional and personal conversations. Garth…

Purpose: An overview of English aims, theoretical scope and methods is badly needed. Ministries throughout the English-speaking world have become dominated by a demand for testing -- stimulated no doubt by regular Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) surveys -- and lost sight of first principles. The purpose of this…

This article uses the analytic lens of power relations and models of power to examine how the participation of two students in an urban US eighth-grade English language arts class was symbolically and literally deleted. The researcher asks why do some students fail despite being placed in a technologically rich educational environment that…

Latinos accounted for three in five new workers in Metro Chicago's workforce over the last decade--representing a national trend that will intensify as the growing count of young Latinos in the U.S. comes of age (U.S. Census, 1980, 2010). To address this increasing diversity and invest in the future, Illinois passed a mandate designed to foster…

From penmanship, to product, to process...this article recounts 100 years of instructional practice in the US elementary writing classroom through the voices of past teaching manuals and curriculum guides. This particular tale begins at the turn of the 20th century--a time when the elementary school was firmly established in the country, and…

For the "Extending the Conversation" section in this issue, the authors invited English educators from the United States and abroad to reflect on the state of English education in their countries. All five contributors have interacted through their participation in the NCTE Annual Convention, the CEE summer summits, the International…

This article argues that theoretical understandings of multimodality have enormous potential for assessment purposes in secondary school contexts. Informed by the work of three researchers in three North American high schools, the article offers vignettes of the effective assessment of communicative competence in English classrooms that draws on…

Drawing attention to widespread instances of discourteous speech and hate discourse that permeate US and world culture, Alleen Pace Nilsen maintains that our imperative as educators is to teach "students the benefits of being civil to each other." She proposes some avenues for enriching students' understanding of the power of civil…

Low literacy levels in adult learners pose an educational and public health challenge to practitioners and the scientific community. Increasing demands placed on literacy can limit opportunities in the workplace and access to health-related resources, negatively affecting public health. Current estimates from the National Center for Education…

Public libraries in the United States have a long history of providing resources and education to immigrants. This tradition may be traced to Andrew Carnegie's support for public libraries as a place for immigrant self-education, enlightenment, and the study of democracy and English. This role is especially relevant today as the immigrant…

This report is the ACT annual report on the progress of U.S. high school graduates relative to college readiness. This year's report shows that 64% of students in the 2016 US graduating class took the ACT test, up from 59% in 2015 and 49% in 2011. The increased number of test takers over the past several years enhances the breadth and depth of the…

Recent years have seen the pace of change in education accelerate at all levels as educators and policy makers instigate reforms aimed at raising academic achievement in the United States to a world-class level. Perhaps nowhere has the pace and scale of change been more dramatic than in the realm of K-12 academic standards. In 2009, 48 states, two…