Readiness As An Accountability Component

In the 2014 overall scores released today, readiness is an element for middle schools and high schools.  Those results are broken out below, with some explanation below the graph.

For middle schools, readiness means readiness for high schools success, while for high schol, it means readiness means readiness for college, career, or both.

The middle school results use a single measure: the percent of students who reach benchmark scores in English, mathematics, reading, and science on the eighth grade Explore test.  Explore is a test developed by ACT, Inc., and the benchmark scores were also set by the ACT company.

The high school results reflect multiple measures. Students can show college readiness by meeting  ACT benchmarks set by Kentucky's Council on Postsecondary Education or required scores on college placement tests.   One important detail:  there are CPE  benchmarks for ACT English, mathematics, and reading, but not science, so ACT science is not part of the college readiness definition.  Students can also show career readiness in a variety of ways, and students can be counted as ready for college only, ready for career only, or ready for both.

The chart below shows a little more about Kentucky's high school progress in the past year.  We had a small downturn in the number of graduates, but a clear increase of more than 2,500 students who qualified as college ready and a similar jump in those who are career ready, with a total jump of almost 3,500 in the number meeting one or both standards.  Overall, it's quite an impressive improvement!

 

--Posted by Susan Perkins Weston