There’s an important new study out looking at what happened in states that mandated all high school juniors take a college entrance exam. It measured the impacts for the first two states with mandates in place, Colorado and Illinois, which both created mandates around the year 2000 forcing all students to take the ACT*. It found some promising results.

Obviously test-taking went up, partContinue Reading »

“College readiness” is the new mantra. And not surprisingly, there’s a scramble on to develop the measures that define what readiness actually means.

The two assessment consortia seek to make the scores from their new assessment systems align directly with readiness. The PARCC consortium, for example, lists “Build a Pathway to College and Career Readiness for All Continue Reading »

The Goal of Ed Steps, a New Initiative Launched by the Council of Chief State School Officers: “EdSteps, led by the Council of Chief State School Officers, supports the high quality teaching and assessment of college and career-readiness skills in schools.  …EdSteps seeks to give teachers, parents, and students a Web-based resource for comparing their student work to that of other stuContinue Reading »