Today's workplace requires most Americans to have some form of education beyond high school, yet most high school students are not graduating well-prepared for college or career training.

SREB is tackling this challenge head-on. Based on its experience and research, SREB has developed and refined a model college- and career-readiness agenda that defines the key steps each state can take to improve students' readiness statewide.

With a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, SREB is working with five states — Kentucky, Maryland, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia — to accelerate progress in college/career readiness in support of Achieve Inc.'s American Diploma Project. SREB's College Readiness Initiative helps state leaders and policy-makers improve students readiness in essential academic subjects and navigate the complexities involved in addressing the problem on a statewide scale.

Unlike solutions that address readiness at isolated points in the education pipeline, SREBs model agenda focuses each state's K-12 and higher education efforts on the same set of college-readiness standards and related student assessments.

Specifically, SREB's model agenda calls for each state to take these five actions:

Develop statewide college- and career-readiness standards in reading, writing and math that are created jointly by public pre-K-12 and higher education sectors.
Make college- and career-readiness standards key components of state high school assessments and statewide higher education placement/readiness assessments.
Make school and student performance on the readiness assessments part of the state school accountability program.
Adjust or develop curriculum and instruction to target the specific statewide readiness standards.
Develop statewide plans for targeted professional development to help teachers understand the specific readiness standards and how to teach them effectively.

Using this model as a framework, SREB evaluates college- and career-readiness policies in each participating state and assists state leaders as they develop and implement their own college- and career-readiness action agendas. SREB also is helping states re-examine their teacher development activities and their senior-year curricula to ensure that teachers are prepared to use state college- and career-readiness standards in their instruction and that students receive the help they need to meet the standards.

SREB and Achieve will disseminate the project results nationally through reports and policy briefs that draw on each state’s performance in meeting the project objectives.

Check this page soon for more information on the work happening in the states partnering with SREB on this project.

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College and Career Readiness