Key Terms
Federal Support for College-and Career-Ready Standards
For more information about how the U.S. Department of Education is supporting the state-led movement to ensure all students are held to high standards for learning and achievement, please visit these sites:
What Standards Are- and Aren't
Standards represent the goals for what students should learn. They are different from curriculum, which means what teachers teach, and how. Federal policies encourage states to adopt high standards, but do not touch on curriculum, which is a state and local matter.
The Common Core State Standards
To date, 45 states and the District of Columbia voluntarily have opted to participate in the Common Core State Standards Initiative. The federal government has not been involved in the design of these standards, which were developed in a partnership between the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association.
The Need
There is growing consensus that America's students need to be prepared to compete in a world that demands more than just basic skills. Today, about a third of American students require remedial education when they enter college, and current college attainment rates are not keeping pace with our country's projected workforce needs. Moreover, America—once the global leader in college completion—now ranks 12th in completion rates for young adults. Therefore, educators, governors, business leaders, and parents have called for reforms in education that will help students succeed in a world of unprecedented connectivity and complexity.
One of the most powerful strategic levers of improvement is to ensure that every student is held to high academic standards. In an environment of high-quality standards, teachers can focus on the higher-order skills that students need to think critically, solve real-world problems, and be successful in the 21st century and beyond. And with assessments aligned to high-quality standards, teachers will be empowered to better monitor their students' progress and adjust their instructional practices to ensure every learner is on track to college and career readiness. Rigorous standards and assessments also will help parents and communities to determine the areas in which their schools need to improve and the areas in which they are thriving. Most important, strong standards help ensure that students receive coherent preparation aligned with the demands of the real world
The Plan
Over the past several years, states have taken the lead in developing and adopting rigorous standards in English language arts and mathematics that build toward college and career readiness by the time students graduate from high school. Nearly every state now has adopted these college- and career-ready standards. The federal government has supported this state-led effort, in part, through ESEA Flexibility, which is helping to ensure that higher standards are being implemented for all students and that educators are being supported in transitioning to new standards. ESEA flexibility has enabled states to replace overly prescriptive and burdensome, "one-size-fits-all" aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) with state-developed accountability systems. All states approved for ESEA flexibility have engaged in one of the following endeavors to raise expectations for students' academic performance:
- Upgraded their existing standards to make them more rigorous by working with their four-year public universities to certify that mastery of standards ensures that students will not need to take remedial coursework upon admission to a postsecondary institution in the system; or
- Adopted and implemented common standards developed by a consortium of states that build toward college and career readiness.
Additionally, federal policies have encouraged states to adopt high-quality assessments aligned with new, higher standards.
To support this effort, the U.S. Department of Education has provided more than $350 million to two consortia of states to develop high-quality assessments that are benchmarked to new standards. Forty-five states and the District of Columbia are preparing to implement those assessments in the coming school year.
As states are taking the lead in developing college- and career-ready standards and assessments, federal policy also has encouraged states to use measurable indicators of student learning and growth to inform educator professional development and evaluation. For example, under ESEA flexibility, states are developing systems that will evaluate principals and teachers based in part on student growth on test scores, along with measures that may include observation, peer review, feedback from parents and students, and classroom work.