college-ready

The Virtue Of Boring In Education

The College Board recently released the latest SAT results, for the first time combining this release with that of data from the PSAT and AP exams. The release of these data generated the usual stream of news coverage, much of which misinterpreted the year-to-year changes in SAT scores as a lack of improvement, even though the data are cross-sectional and the test-taking sample has been changing, and/or misinterpreted the percent of test takers who scored above the “college ready” line as a national measure of college readiness, even though the tests are not administered to a representative sample of students.

It is disheartening to watch this annual exercise, in which the most common “take home” headlines (e.g., "no progress in SAT scores" and "more, different students take SAT") are in many important respects contradictory. In past years, much of the blame had to be placed on the College Board’s presentation of the data. This year, to their credit, the roll-out is substantially better (hopefully, this will continue).

But I don’t want to focus on this aspect of the organization's activities (see this post for more); instead, I would like to discuss briefly the College Board’s recent change in mission.

The “Jobless” Recovery: Implications For Education?

Our guest author today is James R. Stone, professor and director of the National Research Center for Career & Technical Education at the University of Louisville.

The headline of the USA Today article reads: “Tense Time for Workers, As Career Paths Fade Away” (January 13, 2011). The article notes that while most key economic indicators have improved over the past two years, the unemployment rate has remained persistently high. This is a jobless recovery.

Is this a time for pessimism or a time for a reality check?

This is not the first jobless recovery. The recession of the early 1990s spawned books with titles such as The Jobless Future (1994), A Future of Lousy Jobs (1990), The End of Work (1995), The End of Affluence (1995), and When Work Disappears (1996). Any one of those, and many other, similarly-titled books and articles could speak to today’s labor market crisis. Were these authors prescient or is the creative destruction in the labor market wrought by our relatively unbridled free enterprise system’s speeding up the cycles? I’ll leave that for economists to argue.

What is new this time around is the effect of the recession on recent college graduates.

More Than One Way Of Winning

Our guest author today is James R. Stone, professor and director of the National Research Center for Career & Technical Education at the University of Louisville.

In recent years, a consensus has emerged among education researchers and policymakers that all students should graduate from high school both "college- and career-ready." President Obama has made this part of his education agenda. And numerous advocacy organizations have championed the notion. But what does the phrase actually mean?

"College-ready" usually means not needing remedial courses once in college, and "career-ready" is usually equated with college-ready. High standards and expectations are the means recommended to prepare college-ready graduates. This means rigorous courses aligned with standards, and tests to ensure that students meet those standards. Presumably, career-readiness comes with the same requirements. The evidence contradicts the rhetoric, however. Paul Barton at ETS, Peter Cappelli at the Wharton School, and other labor market experts argue that being prepared for college is not the same as being prepared for a successful transition into the workforce.

Perhaps we ought to consider an alternative framework that more clearly defines what college- and career-ready means.

Failure To Communicate

Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews recently sparked some interesting online chatter about why students aren’t better prepared for college-level writing, and what can be done about it.

In a first article, Mathews introduces us to high school history teacher Doris Burton, who asserts that state and district course requirements leave “no room” for the assignment of serious research papers of 3000 words (10-12 pages) or more. According to Mathews, “We are beginning to see, in the howls of exasperation from college introductory course professors and their students, how high a price we are paying for this."