Is 'Career Ready' Getting the Short End of the Stick?
"All students college and career ready" is getting to be a veritable mantra among educrats, with "all students proficient" joining cassette tapes as quaintly outdated. If you've somehow napped through the steady flow of rhetoric coming out of the Obama administration in the last year and you want proof of this college-and-career-readiness drumbeat, you need go only so far as the president's recent blueprint for reauthorization of the ESEA (currently known as No Child Left Behind). (See our story here.)
What does the career readiness part of all this mean, though, and how would it manifest itself in schools? Some experts aren't convinced that the common standards have what it takes to prepare kids for 21st-century employment. Others are skeptical of the whole argument that any one set of skills can cover the diversity of skills needed in the economy's wide range of jobs. (See my storyon the first public draft of the common standards for folks who articulate some of