Southeast Texas P-16 Council

AUSTIN – Texas is the first, and so far, only state to meet all the American Diploma Project’s five key college and career readiness measures, Achieve, a national bipartisan organization, announced.

In a report called Closing the Expectations Gap, Achieve said “Texas has the most comprehensive approach to college and career ready accountability.”

“With the passage of HB 3 in June 2009, Texas became the only state that meets the minimum criteria Achieve believes necessary to measure and provide incentives for college and career readiness,” the report says.

Texas Commissioner of Education Robert Scott said, “Texas has worked strategically and comprehensively to adopt college and career readiness curriculum standards, increase graduation standards, develop end-of-course exams, enhance our data collection systems and expand our accountability system to report college preparation information. By aligning all of these elements, Texas is clearly leading the race to prepare its students for a successful life after high school graduation.”

Texas was one of the 13 charter member states to form the America Diploma Project Network, which Achieve oversees, in February 2005. Today, the network includes 35 states which educate nearly 85 percent of all U.S. public school students. As part of this project, Achieve, a bipartisan, non-profit organization created by the nation’s governors and business leaders to help states raise education standards, conducts an annual survey of all 50 states and the District of Columbia on key college and career readiness policies.

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Texas’ English and mathematics college and career readiness standards meet and, in many cases, exceed national standards, a new analysis released by the Texas Education Agency found.

Teams of higher education and public school educators and content specialists conducted a comparison of the Texas College and Career Readiness Standards, adopted in January 2008, and the national Common Core College Readiness Standards created by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA). President Barack Obama has proposed conditioning a state’s eligibility for federal education funding on either its adoption of these national standards or certification that a state’s standards are college and career ready.

Texas was the first state to adopt college readiness standards, concepts that are to be taught in the public schools that help prepare students for success in the workplace or in college or university courses. The standards were jointly created through a process that included Texas public education, higher education and business community stakeholders.
The comparison of the Texas and national standards, known as a “gap analysis” or crosswalk, found that the Texas standards contained everything that is included in the national standards. But the Texas standards are more comprehensive, covering additional areas of college readiness that are missing from the national standards.

Some examples of material found in the Texas standards but missing from the national standards are:

• Analyze works of literature for what they suggest about the historical period and cultural context in which they were written;
• Use effective reading strategies to determine a written work’s purpose and intended audience;
• Identify and analyze the audience, purpose, and message of an informative or persuasive text;
• Geometric reasoning that makes connections between geometry, statistics and probabilities;
• Connecting mathematics to the study of other disciplines by using appropriate mathematical models in the natural, physical and social sciences.

Read more at the Texas Education Agency