As anyone knows who has followed the rise and fall of Common Core through it's stealthy and masked implementation inside the Race To The Top, it is now called by another name..."college and career ready"..
Every piece of literature from the educational establishment, from the Gates Foundation on down, now uses the terms "college and career ready"... One only links to Common Core whenever an antique reference is required... The State of Maryland publicly denounced "Common Core", and Lillian Lowery, its Superintendent, officially changed Maryland's Program from Common Core to "College and Career Ready."
It is a misnomer. And yet enticing... "College and Career Ready" sounds good. After all.... who wouldn't want their son or daughter to be college or career ready after spending k-12 years in public schools? After all that time, one certainly would be upset if one found them to be "college or career unready"...
And that is how these things get accepted.
Pop quiz. What does "College and Career Ready" mean to
you? __________ ,
Most likely you answered probably prefixed with a "duh", that it means someone is ready for college or ready for a career. That too is how I would have answered it a year ago...
Now here is what college and career ready... really is...
This was pulled from Chris Christie's State-Of-The-State address, from which the news media panned just the words of the official, without seeing any of the implications of what it portends...
In his address he was speaking of the city of Camden and of his new educational czar stepping into his new job.... Paymon Rouhanifard, superintendent, announced that he had his work cut out for him. He had only 3 students who were "college or career ready" in his whole district....
Of course anyone who has ever driven through Camden to get to its great aquarium, is mentally prepared to expect the worst out of that suburb of Philly.. So upon hearing this spoken and repeated by the governor, it sadly does not stretch our bounds of disbelief...
But it should have. Even for Camden...
As rebutted by New Jersey's teachers union"
A more accurate assessment, said its spokesperson, would be to look at those who actually went on to college and are still there. Take 2011! The graduates of Camden's five high schools, four public schools and a public charter school, have enormous college attendance rates, Wollmer said. That includes a third of Camden High graduates and all of those who went to the LEAP academy. Yet few reached the 1550 score on SAT's that would make them "college ready".
"
That includes a third of Camden High graduates"
So one third of Camden Schools graduates are going to college (Yay! A pure triumph of human endeavor appreciated in full by anyone who's been through Camden) and only 3... only 3... in case you didn't get it... only 3 are deemed college ready?....
What does that tell you?
If you think for yourself, you are probably thinking this "college and career ready" is one messed up piece of junk.. You would probably want to know, where do they get this standard? College and career ready is what exactly? How do they get that?
Being "college and career ready" is benchmarked at being over a 1550 Score on the SAT...
"College and Career Ready" is a 1550 score on the SAT.....
8 people who scored lower that 1550 were accepted for entrance into Harvard in 2012.... 6 people who scored lower than 1550 were accepted by Yale.in 2012.. University of Florida accepted 40 of its entrance class of 2012 from below 1550..
As an employer, would you turn away a Harvard Graduate applying to your firm, because his entrance SAT score was below 1550?....Of course not.
And yet one third of Camden's graduating class is in College. Whereas the
national average is 66% of a graduating class going forward, one would expect Camden to be less. Just like one would expect Watts to be less, ore would expect the Bronx to be less, one would expect eastern Kentucky to be less, it is less.
But only 3 students are "college or career" ready? Where does that standard emanate?
Now if you have a heart condition and are reading further, you need to take your nitroglycerin ... now!. If you're on stimulants including caffeine, you need to stop, come back and finish this later. Because what you are about to learn will upset you. It will make you very angry.
1550 is an arbitrary number.
It represents out of all those going into colleges and out of all those taking the SAT, the midpoint number where half of those below will have a 65% chance of having a GPA under a B minus and half of those above will have a 65% chance of having a GPA over a B minus..... If you didn't follow that math, then you obviously have not been through David Coleman's mathematical curriculum.
That is what college and career ready means... 1550 .... an arbitrary number where if you are over, you have a 65% chance of getting a grade average over a B-... If you are under 1550 you have a 65% chance of having a grade average under a B-.
It doesn't mean anything. You can have a 1500 (under by 50) score and still have a 35% chance of having over a B- or.. you can have a score of 1600 (over by 50) and have a 35% chance of having below a B-... it is entirely arbitrary. It is ridiculous to tie the educational policy of the entire United States of America to such a random figure.
Now if you go to the College Boards website and pull up their 2012 numbers.... you should start at the beginning, because it is rather unbelievable and you must see it in person to believe it.. Personally I'm puzzled and I cannot envision why they decided to publish this, because it completely destroys their entire argument for promoting college and career ready.... Why would anyone do that?
The telling point starts with findings from the class of 2013....
They show a chart across which passes a straight line showing that between 44% and 43% of students from 2009 to 2013 meet the benchmark... It then states 57% are under. We have to do better than this it exclaims....
From the data it gives, one must readily ask.... why?
Why... if 44 and 43 percent are college ready and that is unchanged, not just on this graph,
but that same ratio carries back though all the Bush presidency years, back through all the Clinton presidency years, and if one backs out and counters the pre-written test portion for the SAT, back through the HW Bush years, back through the Reagan years, and back through the Carter years... the score or its equivalent of 1550 has always had the same benchmark between 44 and 43 percent....
If that score was good for your parents, who all got good jobs, raised you, and if you are under 30, are probably helping you keep your head above the economic waters right now, then why is it so horribly bad right now for tomorrow's students?
It isn't. "College and Career Ready" is nothing more than a scare tactic... It is like your daughter's first grade teacher saying: "your daughter got a B. She'll never get into Harvard if she keeps that up. Get her a tutor now!..."
Well ... what if I don't want her to go to a pissy crappy school like Harvard? Personally I'd rather put her in a good decent school like Carleton.
But for the entire nation to make broad, sweeping, elemental changes to our education system that appear to be uncalled for, ones that do not benefit any students btw, but do bring tons of money into those think-tanks surrounding the Beltway, one must create a crisis. Similarly, if one were a self-employed arms distributor, one must create a war now and then to stay in business.
What that solid line on the above graph does actually do, however, is give tremendous credibility to the SAT. A test that consistently shows that it holds regularity over such long periods of time, means it is still a good judge of a student's ability and probably should continue to be used to determine a child's probability of succeeding in a college environment. With that, we need no individual test consortiums; neither PAARC nor Smart Balanced Assessments. We already have the SAT and it has held up well, very well, over time....
But that is an aside. What we are discussing here is the definition of "college and career ready". A term which plays upon our hopes for all our children, by making us want to make it happen.
When one tries to shock you with a statement there are always two responses that should go off in your head... One, is how did we let this get so bad, and the other is, wait a minute, with what criteria are you making such a statement because I find it hard to believe we suddenly have a crisis materializing out of thin air.
If we agree with the criteria and it seems reasonable that the condition is thus, then we should become alarmed....
In this specific case, where over 30% of Camden's graduates go on to post secondary education, for Governor Christie to "create" another traffic-study type of crises by echoing in his State-of-the-State that only 3 of Camdem's students are "College and Career Ready," can only mean the "College and Career Ready" Curriculum has got to go, and all those promoting such nonsense, have got to go as well......
The entire "college and career crises" appears upon inspection to be a ridiculous fabrication bordering on a premise similar to that behind the Hans Christian Anderson story of the
Emperor's New Clothes..
If the theoretical bar had been set at 800 or even a 1000 and we were below, we might have an actual educational crises on our hands. But when the bar is set so high, that even Harvard and Yale will accept applicants below it... we should suspect the calls for a crisis are way overblown, and are being stated for reasons other than our children's welfare..