This morning, as promised, I began reading the U.S. Department of Education’s blueprint for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). President Obama, in his introduction, describes the primary goal for the ESEA reauthorization effort. “Together, we must achieve a new goal, that by 2020, the United States will once again lead the world in college completion.” Much of the document centers around the President’s vision that high school graduates will be ready for college or the workforce.
I continued to read, wondering if this document would define the concept of college- and career-readiness. I feel like past initiatives failed because of a lack of clear definition for this concept. I began to worry that efforts to reform standards, assessments, and schools would fail because we would not have clear definition of this ambitious, yet appropriate, goal.
As of yet I have not completed reading the document. So far I have not read a clear definition for college- and career-readiness. What I found was something quite different. According to the blueprint document, the college community will have “final say” over the meaning of this concept. Here is a quote from page 8. ” States may either choose to upgrade their existing standards, working with their 4-year public university system to certify that mastery of the standards ensures that a student will not need to take remedial coursework upon admission to a postsecondary institution in the system; or work with other states to create state-developed common standards that build toward college- and career-readiness.”
What do you think about your state’s 4-year public university system certifying that a state’s standards are appropriate for college- and career-readiness?
Reference
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development. (2010). A blueprint for reform: the reauthorization of the elementary and secondary education act. Washington, DC: Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/index.html