2 Superintendents and principals across the nation found that the ACT staff treated them with disdain and disrespect. The NCAA cost us money, frustrated deserving students, and confused the community. 3 Dozens of articles have described the problems created by the NCAA and its ACT-operated clearinghouse. After four years of debate, the NCAA agreed in January 2000 to accept what high school principals said about their courses, rather than to continue judging courses through the clearinghouse. Here are several lessons we can learn from this experience.
Journalists can be marvelous allies for school reformers.
These articles bothered the NCAA in a way that almost nothing else did. NCAA officials are sensitive about bad publicity, and journalists are eager to write stories about deserving young people being mistreated by a giant bureaucracy. Members of an informal national alliance that developed to combat the NCAA rules found that journalists were quite open to discussing the issue. The three-sentence memo contained several mistakes. A sense of humor is extremely useful in challenging large, powerful organizations.