CURMUDGUCATION: Maybe We Should Talk About College Readiness Again

CURMUDGUCATION: Maybe We Should Talk About College Readiness Again

Maybe We Should Talk About College Readiness Again

College and career ready. College and career ready. College and career ready.

How long have we been reading and listening to that magical phrase, quietly at first and now omnipresent as the euphemism of choice for people who no longer dare say "Common Core."

It is a hollow phrase, completely empty of meaning. It never, ever, comes with a list, description, or quantification of what "college ready" actually looks like. No mystery there-- we don't know.

But then, few education policy mavens have ever tried to figure out, really, what college ready means,. and mostly they weren't even tryin. Instead, the phrase has been employed to give weight to the Big Standardized Test. "Students didn't score as well on the BS Test as we wanted them to," is not terribly compelling-- but run around hollering, "OMGZ! 63% of our students are not ready for college!!" and you can draw a crowd and get some money moving around in support of whatever test-driven idea you're selling this week.

But "scored higher than the cut score on the PARCC" is not the same as "college ready." How could any single measure tell us that? What single measure would tell us that one student is ready to attend as pre-law at Yale and another student is ready to attend Julliard to study music and another student is ready to attend East South Dakota Community College to get a history teaching certificate and another student is working on her welding certifications. What one instrument could possibly measure the readiness of students for an infinite variety of Next Steps?

But reformsters keep telling us that test scores measure college readiness, even as we all know that CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Maybe We Should Talk About College Readiness Again