Career and College Readiness
Especially with the Common Core standards movement, educators are even more determined to prepare their students with the skills and knowledge for higher levels of learning at the college level and within the professional arena. David Moltz (2010) comments about a recent publication from the Association for Career and College Readiness that states, “’Career readiness involved three major skill areas: core academic skills, and the ability to apply those skills to concrete situations in order to function to function in the workplace and in routine daily activities.; employable skills(such as critical thinking and responsibility) that are essential in any career area; and technical, job-specific skills related to a specific career pathway.” Ultimately, educators must consider these three areas that are critical for instructional planning.
Similarly, this will allow them to envision what their students must be capable of at the end of their high school years.
The Common Core standards will enhance the instructional roadmap and allow educators to assist students at arriving at this final destination: career and college readiness. Lederman(2009) comments about the evolvement of the national standards movement, “Back in 1990s, it started being clear to us that a whole lot of kids who were following all the rules and doing fine on exams in high school were entering college and finding themselves having to take remedial courses and learning things they should have learned in high school,” says Haycock. That suggested a clear lack of ‘alignment’ between what students were learning in high school and what they were expected to be able to do in college.”
Furthermore, Common Core standards are essentially the “common thread” that establishes a greater sense of continuity for learning from state to state. Lederman further states, ”While the process of stitching the standards down into high school curriculums and linking them upwards to college’s admissions or placement policies will take years, K-12 and higher education experts who have toiled in this terrain for years describe the development of the core standards as clearing a major hurdle.“
http://www.p21.org/documents/P21_Framework.pdf
