College Readiness

Preparing Students for Work and Life: College and Career Readiness

Are you preparing your students for what comes next? High school graduation rates are up. Yet many students are graduating ill-prepared for college, work, or life. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), less than 40% of high school students score at college- and career-ready levels.

Prepare your students for college, work, or life: Learn what it means to be Really Ready with this webinar.

You’ll learn: 

Pathways for All: AP, CTE, College, and Career

Nearly 40 percent of today’s students are not graduating ready for college and career. Educators striving to better prepare students for life beyond their secondary education must grapple with the reality that the world of work is quickly redefining what it means to be college or career ready. Students need a broader set of skills and understanding to navigate fast-paced, complex, and diverse workplaces. While providing students with this real-world skill development, educators are also tasked with connecting state, industry, and national standards.

Not Your Father’s Summer School: How Districts are Reinventing Summer Programs to Increase Opportunity and Achievement

Back in the day, summer school was just for students who needed to recover lost course credit. Today, innovative districts are expanding their summer programs beyond traditional remediation of course failure to meet a wide range of student learning needs, including options to earn initial course credit, prepare for college entrance exams, and remediate gaps in the prerequisite knowledge needed for success in the upcoming grade level.

CEO Cheryl Vedoe Discusses Student Readiness in MDR Article

Are today’s students really ready for college, work, and life? CEO Cheryl Vedoe posed this question in a guest post for the MDR thought leadership blog, Voice from the Industry. In her column she encourages readers to celebrate the increasing graduation rates, but also to recognize the fact that many students are still not graduating prepared or ready for the next step in college and career.

Getting Smart and Apex Learning Define Student Readiness

Press Release — 2017 — Seattle, WA — Getting Smart, a learning design firm that focuses on innovations in education and the future of learning, and Apex Learning, known for digital curriculum that makes rigorous, standards-based content accessible to all students, have collaborated on a study to define what it means for high school students to be really ready for what comes next.

Infographic: The State of College Readiness in Texas

The Texas Success Initiative Assessment (TSI Assessment) ensures students are ready to take on college-level coursework before they enroll in any college courses. After the initial implementation of TSI Assessment the percentage of college-ready students jumped from 44 percent in 2008 to 54 percent in 2014 [1] however, progress has slowed. In 2015 only 31.8 percent of graduating students in Texas met the SAT college and career readiness benchmark while nationally 41.9 percent of students met the benchmark [2].

Infographic: What Does That Graduation Rate Really Mean?

A diploma alone doesn’t mean students are prepared for college, work and life after high school. Performance on high-stakes assessments, like the SAT and ACT, also are an indicator of college and career readiness.

But test scores are trending down. In 2015, high school graduates had the lowest scores on the SAT in 10 years. The percentage of students who reached the college-ready benchmark on both exams was less than half — dipping as low as 20.8 percent on the ACT.