Reinventing the Federal Role in Education: Supporting the Goal of College and Career Readiness for All Students

This issue brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education addresses the need to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to help improve the college and career readiness of all high school students, especially those at the lowest-performing high schools. The authors examine six major actions that should be addressed with reauthorization: 1) establish college and career readiness as common goal for students, 2) design common indicators of college and career readiness for high school accountability; 3) replace current improvement process with one that that targets lowest-performing schools, 4) implement large-scale high school improvement strategies, 5) build the capacity to implement innovative solutions, and 6) provide funding for lowest-performing schools. The authors discuss how current federal policy does not have college- and career-readiness as a goal for high school graduates. They recommend that schools, districts and states use common indicators and be held accountable for college and career readiness in addition to high school graduation rates along with using data other than just adequate yearly progress (AYP) to differentiate among low-performing high schools to address school improvement issues.