Common Core Isn’t Helping College Readiness After All

ACT released their annual report last week showing that the level of college-readiness is stagnant among U.S. students.

Wait, wait, wait… I thought that Common Core was supposed to turn this around, but ACT CEO John Whitmore  notes, “The needle is barely moving on college and career readiness, and that means far too many young people will continue to struggle after they graduate from high school. This should be a wake-up call for our nation.”

So Common Core barely moves the needle.  That is what a reasonable person should infer.

From ACT’s press release:

The report, based on data from a record 1.9 million ACT-tested students—nearly 60 percent of the 2015 U.S. graduating class—shows very little change in overall college readiness over the past several years.

This year, 40 percent of graduates showed strong readiness, meeting the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks in at least three of the four core subject areas (English, math, reading and science). That percentage has stayed virtually flat over the past five years.

In contrast, 31 percent of students did not meet readiness levels in any of the four subject areas. This figure is unchanged from the past two years and slightly higher than in 2011 and 2012.

These general findings from ACT mirror those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and other large-scale academic achievement studies, which show that U.S. students have not progressed over the past several years in terms of their preparedness for success after high school.

Note that the percentage of students who did not meet readiness levels in any of ACT’s core subject area has increased since 2011 to 2012.  Common Core has now been fully implemented in every state that has adopted it.

It would be interesting to do a state-by-state comparison with states who didn’t adopt Common Core with those who did, but considering the percentages of students taking ACT widely vary by state it’s impossible to do an apples-to-apples comparison.

http://truthinamericaneducation.com/common-core-state-standards/common-core-isnt-helping-college-readiness-after-all/