David T. Conley - Getting Ready for College, Careers, and the Common Core: What Every Educator Needs to Know

Contents

More Praise for Getting Ready for College, Careers, and the Common Core

This book confirms David Conleys place as Americas foremost expert on college and career readiness. It will serve as an invaluable guide to parents, public officials, and educators at all levels who are struggling with these issues. It is a timely and invaluable resource for practitioners.

Jim Nelson, executive director, AVID

David Conley provides a comprehensive view of what it takes for the youth of America to be college- and career-ready and relates it to the Common Core State Standards, so educators can easily see how the efforts support each other. Conley not only provides a road map of what will it take to align instruction and assessment to improve college and career readiness for all students in this new era of Common Core, he also addresses important issues of student motivation and ownership of their learning and makes clear that college and career readiness is a long process, which starts in elementary school and involves educators at all levels. The book provides both a high-level understanding of the key issues and also practical, time-tested strategies and tools to help students succeed.

Betsy Brand, executive director, American Youth Policy Forum

David Conleys passionate, relentless, and lifelong commitment to college and career readiness is the basis of this thoughtful and actionable book for educators and policymakers who are serious about giving every child a shot at the American dream.

Barbara Chow, program director, Education Program,

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Cover design: JPuda

Cover image Christopher Futcher/Getty

Copyright 2014 by CCR Consulting Group. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conley, David T., date

Getting ready for college, careers, and the common core : what every educator needs to know/David T. Conley. First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-118-55114-1 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-58496-5 (pdf); ISBN 978-1-118-58500-9 (epub)

Includes index.

1. Education, SecondaryUnited States. 2. EducationCurriculaStandardsUnited States. I. Title.

LA222.C57 2013

378.1'610973dc23

2013022219

PREFACE

Many of you who are students of the topic of college and career readiness or who simply wonder about these sorts of things have asked me what caused me to get into this line of research so long ago and to pursue it over such an extended period of time. Its a fair question, particularly in light of the fact that when I started to think about this in 1991, pretty much no one else was doing so. That was just after the 1989 announcement in Charlottesville, Virginia, by President George H. W. Bush of National Educational Goals, the first call for US schools to adopt high standards for all students. How did I get from that to the notion of college and career readiness, an idea that didnt mature fully as a policy topic until the latter part of the first decade of the twenty-first century? What drives someone to persist with an idea when most others are nowhere near as willing to take it up seriously or to act on it?

Ill spare you a psychological profile. Instead, Ill describe some of my thought processes and experiences along the way that caused me to sustain my efforts and activities in this field and take you on a brief tour of the route I followed, how it led me to take up the topic of college and career readiness in the first place, and why I persisted with it.

As those of you who read the foreword to my previous book, College and Career Ready , already know, I was first in my family to attend college, partly the result of luck and partly the result of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, which enabled me, after not taking high school seriously enough, to spend two years in a community college transfer program and be accepted at the University of California, Berkeley. I arrived at Berkeley in the late 1960s, a time on that campus of tremendous tumult. A common saying is that if you can remember the sixties, you werent there. And I must admit that much of the time at Berkeley is a blur, punctuated by memories of political protests, campus unrest, and searing self-examination. I came out the other side of the experience with a deep commitment to social justice, but with an equally deep cynicism about the value of radical political action as the primary means to achieve genuine social change. Education, I came to believe, was the engine and vehicle by which we might address issues of social justice toward the goal of all citizens having the opportunity to fulfill their potential in a society that treats them with dignity and respect.