Education World – Pamela Burdman
“Teachers and students across the state are adjusting to the Common Core standards, which promise to help more young people become ready for college. In the words of State Board of Education President Michael Kirst, the standards represent “a unique opportunity to strengthen alignment across the divide between K-12 and post-secondary education in California.” Kirst and other advocates of the new standards were motivated to support them, in part, by sobering data showing that a large proportion of high school graduates require remedial courses when they go to college. In math, for example, about 85 percent of community college students and about a third of California State University students confront at least one remedial course. A chief goal of the new standards is to reduce those rates by ensuring that more students finish high school with the knowledge and skills that colleges expect. The standards, however, assume colleges’ expectations are static. In fact, as a new policy report by LearningWorks and Policy Analysis for California Education that I authored reveals, those expectations are shifting as colleges and universities seek to make their remedial math programs more effective.”(more)