Six years ago, states were forced to acknowledge and confront an unfortunate truth: too many students were graduating from high school without the knowledge and skills required to successfully compete in either college or the workplace. Achieve, a bipartisan, nonprofit education reform association, dubbed the problem an “expectations gap” and challenged national and state leaders to adopt and implement college- and career-ready policies for all high school graduates. Since then, the group has conducted annual surveys of each state and the District of Columbia, monitoring their progress in aligning standards, graduation requirements, assessments and accountability with the expectations of postsecondary institutions and employers.
The 2011 Closing the Expectations Gap report shows that, although states still have work to do, there is a concerted effort to ensure that every high school graduate is adequately prepared for work or college.
Sandy Boyd, Achieve’s vice president for strategic communications and outreach, says an emphasis on college or workplace readiness is “the new norm” across the nation.
“States, individually and collectively, have been working on this agenda pretty diligently for the last five years. I think there’s very much a sense that we’re at a potentially transformational moment,” she says. “With the widespread adoption of the common core and with so many states working together on common assessments and on tools to actually make sure that the standards are implemented and find their way in classrooms, there’s a real opportunity to transform the system in a way that we just haven’t been able to accomplish on a broad scale.”
Currently, 47 states and the District of Columbia have developed and adopted English and math standards that are aligned with college- and career-ready expectations. Of those states, 44 and the District have adopted the K-12 Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in math and English.
“The CCSS offer an unprecedented opportunity for states across the nation to improve upon their education policies and practices and achieve systemwide reform,” the report states. In addition, it says that many states’ efforts have been bolstered by Race to the Top Awards.
Nebraska, Texas and Virginia have adopted their own state-developed standards in those areas. Montana and North Dakota will decide this year whether they will align their state standards to the CCSS, and Alaska has begun conducting a review of how its standards compare to college- and career-ready expectations.
