Nearly three out of four Ohio high school graduates from the class of 2011 who took the ACT test did not meet all four standards for college readiness established by the test maker, suggesting they are likely to struggle in at least some of their college-level courses.

ACT scores for the Ohio high school graduating class of 2011 held steady from the previous year, although Ohioans still exceed the national average, both in terms of their overall composite score and their ability to meet college-readiness “benchmarks” that ACT has established.

A former dean of the University of Dayton’s college of education who has specialized in testing and college-readiness issues expects Ohioans’ scores to rise as teachers, administrators and state education officials align what is being taught in the classroom with what’s on tests such as the ACT.

Thomas Lasley, professor of education at UD and executive director of Learn to Earn Dayton, said such alignment between curriculum and tests will boost the number of Ohioans who go to college — and the percentage who actually go on to get their degrees.

“We’re starting to see some early dividends, and it should just get better over the next several years,” Lasley said.

ACT officials also found signs of progress from their annual report entitled “The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2011,” released Wednesday.

The report includes ACT scores broken down by state and an assessment of the college and career readiness of the nation’s high school graduating class of 2011.

The private company does not release ACT scores by school district or by county, a spokeswoman said.

About 25 percent of graduates in the class of 2011 who took the ACT exam met or surpassed all four of the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, suggesting they are ready to succeed academically in specific first-year college courses — English composition, college algebra, introductory social science and biology — without the need to take remedial or developmental classes. This compares to 24 percent last year, marking the third consecutive year that overall college and career readiness has increased.

In Ohio, 28 percent of the class of 2011 met or surpassed all four benchmarks, unchanged from last year. The graduating seniors’ composite score of 21.8 (on a scale of 1 to 36) also was unchanged, and slightly higher than the national average composite score of 21.1, up from 21.0 in 2010.

Nationally, “It’s encouraging to see the positive trend continuing, with more high school graduates showing they are ready to succeed academically at the next level,” Jon Erickson, interim president of ACT’s Education Division, said in a news release. “Although growth has been slow, it has been consistent. Things appear to be moving in the right direction.”

Not everyone agrees. Bob Schaeffer — education director for FairTest, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing — said the class of 2011 ACT scores show that “test-driven policies which claim to be improving U.S. public schools have, in fact, failed by their own standards.”

Proponents of state-level high-stakes exit exams and testing programs, such as those implemented by states as part of the No Child Left Behind act, promised that their strategy would boost overall academic performance and would narrow historic achievement gaps between ethnic groups, but academic gains as measured by ACT are stagnant, and racial gaps are increasing, Schaeffer said.

UD’s Lasley said state testing programs should use exit exams to assess student achievement — not as a hammer to punish those who don’t pass. He is encouraged by schools in all states adopting a common core curriculum, and by Ohio’s move toward “end-of-course” exams that will more directly measure what students are learning in the classroom. Those end-of-course exams, which will be adopted statewide in 2014 and are being piloted by several school districts already, will help align each Ohio school district’s curriculum with standards such as the benchmarks that ACT uses to measure college readiness.

ACT officials said this year’s increase in overall college and career readiness can be attributed to gradual gains in math and science, the two subject areas in which students are least likely to be prepared. That’s also the case in Ohio, where 49 percent of the Buckeye class of 2011 met the benchmark that ACT set for college readiness in that subject, up from 48 percent the previous year. Similarly, 35 percent met the science benchmark, up from 34 percent the previous year.

The ACT College Readiness Benchmarks are based on actual grades earned by students in college. ACT officials used those grades to help them specify the minimum scores needed on each ACT subject-area test to indicate that a student has a 50 percent chance of earning a grade of B or higher or about a 75 percent chance of earning a C or higher in a typical credit-bearing first-year college course in that subject area.

About 71 percent of Ohio’s graduating seniors who took the ACT met the English benchmark — down from 72 percent the previous year — and 58 percent made the grade in reading, unchanged from the class of 2010’s performance.

ACT’s Ohio scores showed that 23 percent of those who took the test did not meet any of the four benchmarks for college success, suggesting that those students are graduating without all of the academic skills they need to excel after high school, ACT officials said. Nationwide, 28 percent of test takers did not meet any of the four benchmarks, unchanged from last year.

“Too many students are still falling through the cracks,” the ACT’s Erickson said.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said American students “are making incremental progress toward being ready to complete college-level work, but there’s still significant work to be done. In today’s knowledge-based economy, American children are competing with the rest of the world for jobs, and our country’s long-term economic security is directly tied to the quality of its public education. These ACT results are another sign that states need to raise their academic standards and commit to education reforms that accelerate student achievement.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2258 or mfisher@DaytonDailyNews.com.