Leveraging the Every Student Succeeds Act to Support State Visions for College and Career Readiness
Learn about the opportunities to leverage the Every Student Succeeds Act, 2015 (ESSA) to promote a coherent college and career readiness vision.
The College and Career Readines and Success Center closed on September 30,2019 because the grant cycle for the U.S. Department of Education Comprehensive Centers ended. The information on this website will no longer be updated. Visit www.air.org for updates on college and career readiness.
Learn about the opportunities to leverage the Every Student Succeeds Act, 2015 (ESSA) to promote a coherent college and career readiness vision.
How can educators assess students’ college and career readiness, particularly the deep content knowledge and complex skills required with new standards? Performance tasks are one way to assess students’ college and career readiness because they require students to produce authentic work that demonstrates their mastery of specific skills and content.
For more than a decade, Achieve has reported on all 50 states’ policies concerning college and career readiness, such as state standards, graduation requirements, assessments, and accountability systems. However, policies alone do not guarantee that students will graduate prepared for college and careers. This latest report from Achieve looks to examine measures and indicators of college and career readiness from each state, including students’ performance on college and career ready assessments, completion of a rigorous course of study, and earning college credit while in high school.
Although nearly all states and the District of Columbia have adopted college and career readiness assessments for high school students, few are using the tests to: (1) identify students who demonstrate college readiness and provide these students with opportunities to enroll in advanced coursework during their senior year and (2) identify students who are not college ready and provide these students with interventions to put them back on track toward postsecondary matriculation.
High school diploma options vary across states with regard to: (1) the number offered, (2) their alignment to college- and career-ready expectations in English language arts/literacy and mathematics course requirements, (3) the types of assessment requirements associated with degree conferral, and (4) whether or how they report student outcomes. Achieve’s analysis provides detailed descriptions of these four characteristics for the 93 diploma options available across all 50 states and the District of Columbia for the class of 2014.
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