College and Career-Ready Standards for School Leaders

According to the author, test developers can create two tests:

1. a general test of reading skills that meets bias stipulations and ignores Common Core’s literary-historical standards
2. a test on literary-historical knowledge, including open questions that make students draw on Twain, Shakespeare, ancient myths, Edith Wharton and so on.

It is one thing to gain an "intellectual understanding" of the "why" of high standards and college- and career-readines. It is quite another thing to come to "emotional acceptance" of the urgency to adequately prepare students for postsecondary education and training. This article helped me with both issues.

Highlights:

In 2010-11, 54 percent of students coming out of high school failed at least one subject on the Florida College System’s placement test.

Education experts say part of the problem is that a high school diploma has never been the same thing as a certificate of college readiness.

State Tests Never Measured College-Readiness

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has been a proponent of the state’s high school exit exam – the FCAT. But now the conservative education advocate admits the test was never meant to determine whether students are prepared for college.

Curriculum Gap

There’s a curriculum gap between what high school students are taught and what they need to know going into college. And it’s been an ongoing problem that state educators have not addressed until recently.

Low Expectations Equal Low Performance

"average 10th-grade student reads at a 7th-grade reading level"

At Miami Dade College, the final project for students in most remedial writing classes is to write a single paragraph by the end of a semester.