From the OverAchievers

The College- and Career-Ready Agenda: Five Years Later

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the "Closing the Expectations Gap" report, which Achieve has conducted annually since 2005 when it first launched the American Diploma Project (ADP) Network to challenge states to work together to align high school expectations with the demands of college and the workplace. Over the past five years, since the National Governors Association (NGA) and Achieve co-sponsored the National Education Summit on High Schools, states have made impressive progress in aligning their high school standards, graduation requirements and assessment and accountability systems with college- and career-ready expectations. Briefly, the report finds: Standards: At the time of the National Education Summit, only ...

You've Come a Long Way Barbie...

Given the work we do here at Achieve, we are well aware of the general anxiety that pervades any and all discussions about mathematics  education, especially when it come to what math all students need in high school to graduate college and career ready. We have even pointed out the uniquely American attitude that only certain people are innately gifted and can do math - as opposed to the more common view among our international peers that with hard work and perseverance anyone can learn advanced mathematics. All of those jokes about "not being able to balance my checkbook" might be funny if it didn't reveal a serious deficiency which impacts us all: mathematics is the foundation for innovation, which in turn drives...

College- and Career-Ready Standards to the Forefront

Speaking at the National Governors Association 2010 Winter Meeting, President Obama outlined steps to prepare America’s children for college and the workplace. The President called for a redesigned Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that requires all states to adopt and certify that they have college- and career-ready standards in reading and mathematics, which may include common standards developed by a state-led consortium, as a condition of qualifying for Title I funding. "America's prosperity has always rested on how well we educate our children – but never more so than today," said President Obama. "This is true for our workers, when a college graduate earns over 60 percent more in a lifetime than...

Every Child College- and Career-Ready

President Obama released his proposed budget, unveiling a direction for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). A new line item -"College- and Career-Ready Students" – redirects ESEA (or No Child Left Behind, as it was formerly known) to anchor itself in the goal of graduating all students ready for college and careers. Given that college and career readiness for all students is at the core of Achieve’s mission, we are encouraged by this new direction. The Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Summary notes: "States would be asked to adopt statewide standards that build toward college- and career-readiness (CCR) and to implement high-quality assessments aligned with these CCR standards and capable of measuring indiv...

Assessment Lessons Learned for Race to the Top

Achieve President Michael Cohen testified on January 13th at the Department of Education's Race to the Top Assessment input meeting. The subject of the hearing was "Project and Consortium Management" and focused on the lessons learned from Achieve’s management of the American Diploma Project Consortia. A PowerPoint presentation accompanied Mr. Cohen’s testimony.