Richard Noeth and George Wimberly, ACT
2002
This policy brief from ACT was written by Richard Noeth and George Wimberly. 47 pages in length, it's actually the first report from ACT's new Office of Policy Research and was done in conjunction with the Council of the Great City Schools. The "seamless" transitions that it seeks involve high school to college moves. The paper is based on a survey of 293 minority high school seniors in five big urban districts as to their "postsecondary planning" and what they found helpful in the process. (Nearly all of these young people were headed toward college.) The findings are fairly predictable, as are the recommendations for schools as to what services and information to provide their students, including the suggestion that schools would be well advised to use ACT tests and other products! (I wonder whether the beady-eyed folks who check to see whether think-tanks publish self-serving stuff ever cast their skeptical gaze upon the non-profit and for-profit firms that do that sort of thing.) You can download a PDF version from http://www.act.org/research/policy/pdf/2181.pdf.
