Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy
Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy (HFCA) is a non-profit, public charter school for grades 9-12 located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In SY 2022-2023, the Associate Principal was Phil Smith, who has worked closely with Academic Approach since SY 2021-2022. As of Summer 2023, Smith is the school’s principal.
“It’s a true partnership with moving the needle on our ACT outcomes. [Academic Approach] is the outside provider that I have worked most closely with and developed the most trust with. The work has been extremely hands on, extremely personalized, and really thorough. The level of expertise combined with deep resources and banks of activities and information has been really exciting and really productive for our school community.”
Why Academic Approach
Since SY 2021-2022, HFCA has partnered with Academic Approach to provide ACT-aligned learning experiences for its students and teachers at all grade levels, with initial goals of preparing students to take the ACT, increasing student performance on the test between 9th and 12th grade, and reducing the heavy lift of ACT prep on teachers’ shoulders.
Smith notes that, along the way, he realized the school could also shift its culture around the ACT, specifically moving students’ perceptions about the test and about themselves as test takers.
Smith attributes HFCA’s ability to achieve these goals to the “true partnership” cultivated between the two organizations, as well Academic Approach’s personalized support, depth of resources, and institutional expertise. “It feels like Academic Approach is truly a part of our team, it’s an entity, it’s really a part of what we do here. To prepare kids for an ACT without Academic Approach, I don’t know where I would start.”
SY 2022-2023 Partnership
HFCA’s goal was for its 11th graders to increase their average composite ACT score by 2 points between September 2022 and April 2023.
In SY 2022-2023, for the second year in a row, Academic Approach partnered with HFCA to provide a variety of comprehensive ACT services, including:
To transform ACT culture at HFCA, Principal Smith also collaborated with Academic Approach to create a custom program called ACT Time—a schoolwide, weekly event during which students at every grade level participate in a timed, ACT-aligned activity using the Formative Assessment Builder. Grade-level accuracy scores are reported in a competition format, and student-level successes are announced and celebrated. After initial meetings with his instructional leadership team, Smith turned to Academic Approach, who had the capacity and technical skill to put together a 16-week ACT Time schedule that rotated through skills in all four ACT subsections across all four grade levels. “Everything [they] did in helping me to develop it, asking me questions and then delivering a product, was so perfect. I never had to talk to [them] about it again, except to say, ‘Hey, it’s going great!’”
As a measure of growth on full-length tests, 11th graders took two Academic Approach practice tests and one official test during the year.
AA Diagnostic ACT
AA Practice ACT
Official ACT
“Any way that you can think to attack the ACT from an assessment or teaching standpoint, [Academic Approach] has available.”
Student Outcomes: ACT Transformation
HFCA 11th graders met their goal—increasing an average of 2.2 composite points between the September Diagnostic ACT and the April Official ACT.
By subject, HFCA 11th graders showed the most growth in Science (2.9 points) and English (2.8 points), followed by Reading (2.2 points)—with consistent growth seen across the year for all three of these subjects.
Student Outcomes: Culture Transformation
According to Smith, participation in ACT Time not only helped HFCA students at all grade levels gain increased familiarity and fluency with the ACT, but it also helped change their perception of the ACT and of themselves as test takers, raising excitement about and investment in their results. Students were not the only ones positively impacted by HFCA’s partnership with Academic Approach, as Smith notes a schoolwide shift in confidence around the ACT. “Academic Approach has a doctorate in the ACT and helped [us] go from an undergrad to a Masters on it,” he says.
“A good way to measure any school initiative is how many kids are coming up and talking to me about their results…The trickle-down effect of confidence from school leaders, then into teachers, then into students that this program can bring is really meaningful.”
