A First Look at the Common Core and College and Career Readiness

COLLEGE READINESS

Albuquerque Public School District

© 2011 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved.

A Letter from Cynthia Schmeiser and Michael CasserlyForty-three states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards. Now, implementing the Standards—to realize their goal of increasing the college and career readiness of our high school graduates—takes on primary importance. This transition to implementation introduces challenging questions: What is the baseline of student performance on the Common Core State Standards, and what reasonable expectations should we hold for students moving forward?

ACT and the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) are pleased to provide this first look at student performance relative to the Common Core State Standards and college and career readiness for the Albuquerque Public School District. The report establishes your district’s baseline of performance on the Standards using projections from your 2010 ACT-tested high school graduates. Your report also compares your baseline performance to statewide projections and projections for all 36 CGCS districts for which reports have been developed. The report then discusses how states, districts, and schools can support the implementation of the Common Core State Standards going forward.

The period between Common Core adoption and Common Core implementation offers an important opportunity to evaluate and reframe education policy and practice at all levels, including within our nation’s urban public schools. ACT and CGCS believe this report provides information that stakeholders can use to understand the current state of college and career readiness of their students and to begin implementing programs and policies that best support the Common Core.

Now is the time to provide students with more effective opportunities to prepare for education and workforce success. ACT and the Council of the Great City Schools stand ready to assist as your district works toward the important goal of preparing students for college and career readiness.

Sincerely,

Cynthia B. Schmeiser, PhD Michael CasserlyPresident and COO Executive DirectorEducation Division Council of the Great City SchoolsACT

1

About ACTThroughout ACT’s 50-year history as a research-oriented, not-for-profit education organization, we have helped people of all ages prepare for success in education and in the workforce. Each year, ACT serves millions of people in high schools, colleges, professional associations, businesses, and government agencies both nationally and internationally. Though designed to meet a wide array of needs, all ACT programs and services have one guiding purpose: to provide information to advance educational achievement and workplace success.

About the Council of the Great City SchoolsThe Council of the Great City Schools is a coalition of 66 of the nation’s largest urban public school systems.

Founded in 1956 and incorporated in 1961, the Council is located in Washington, DC, where it works to promote urban education through legislation, research, media relations, instruction, management, technology, and other special projects designed to improve the quality of urban education.

The Council serves as the national voice for urban educators, providing ways to share promising practices and address common concerns.

2

The Common Core State Standards and College and Career ReadinessThe Common Core State Standards Initiative represents one of the most significant reforms to U.S. education in recent history. The efforts of 48 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia have—for the first time—given consensus to educators on the essential knowledge and skills necessary for the college and career readiness of our nation’s students. As of January 2011, 43 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards.

ACT is pleased to have played a leading role in the development of the Common Core State Standards. Not only did the initiative draw on

3

A Baseline for College and Career Readiness According to the Common Core State Standards

ACT’s longitudinal research identifying the knowledge and skills essential for success in postsecondary education and workforce training, but ACT’s College Readiness Standards™ were also among the resources used in the creation of the Common Core State Standards.

As states and districts begin to implement the Common Core and raise expectations for what students should know and be able to do by the end of high school, it is important to understand the level of college and career readiness of today’s students and use all available data to inform decisions related to education policy and practice. Recognizing that no state has fully implemented the Common Core State Standards, ACT identified a way to estimate performance relative to the Common Core. At the request of the Council of the Great City Schools, we have extended this methodology to estimate the performance of 36 of the Council’s 66 member districts.1 This report summarizes those findings for the Albuquerque Public School District in relation to the state of New Mexico and the CGCS cohort districts.

1Reports were developed for districts where a significant percentage of the district’s high school graduates took the ACT. A full list of the 36 districts can be found at the end of this report.

ACT has long defined college and career readiness as the acquisition of the knowledge and skills a student needs to enroll and succeed in credit-bearing, first-year courses at a postsecondary institution (such as a two- or four-year college, trade school, or technical school) without the need for remediation. ACT’s definition of college and career readiness was adopted by the Common Core State Standards Initiative and provides a unifying goal upon which educators and policymakers must now act.

4

Given ACT’s leading role in the development of the Common Core State Standards, we were able to classify ACT® test items to the standards, clusters, and domains of the Common Core State Standards (e.g., Key Ideas and Details in Reading, Number and Quantity in Mathematics, Conventions of Standard English in Language) and model the effect in the Albuquerque Public School District of moving to a college and career readiness assessment for all students. As a result, we can provide this first estimate of student performance on the Common Core in advance of state and district implementation efforts. Our work was driven by three basic questions that have implications for the implementation of the Common Core State Standards:

1. Given the data available from ACT’s college and career readiness assessments, what is the best estimate of current student performance in the Albuquerque Public School District, including strengths and weaknesses, on the Common Core State Standards?

2. What progress is being made by schools in the Albuquerque Public School District relative to college and career readiness, and what can we learn from the higher-performing schools?

3. What steps can district and state policymakers and urban education leaders take to help ensure an effective transition to the Common Core State Standards?

A Unique OpportunityThese three essential research questions framed ACT’s analysis of the test results. In our report of that analysis on the following pages, the Albuquerque Public School District results are projections modeled from the performance of the district’s 2010 ACT-tested high school graduates and are compared to the results of the projections for all students in the state of New Mexico and the Council of the Great City Schools cohort districts. The data provided in this report for your district and for both comparison groups are designed to represent the performance of all students rather than only self-selected, college-bound students.

MethodologySince performance indicators have not yet been established for the Common Core State Standards, this report uses ACT’s research-based College Readiness Benchmarks to estimate college- and career-ready performance levels on each of the clusters of Common Core State Standards. For each Common Core strand and

The ACT College Readiness Benchmarks are the minimum scores required on the ACT subject tests for high school students to have approximately a 75 percent chance of earning a grade of C or better, or approximately a 50 percent chance of earning a grade of B or better, in selected courses commonly taken by first-year college students: English Composition; College Algebra; social sciences courses such as History, Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, or Economics; and Biology. The Benchmark scores on the ACT tests are 18 in English, 22 in Mathematics, 21 in Reading, and 24 in Science; on the ACT Writing Test, a score of 7 or above indicates readiness for college-level writing assignments.

5

cluster for which ACT has data, we report the percentage of students who met or exceeded—or are projected to meet or exceed—the performance level of college- and career-ready students on the test items associated with a strand (e.g., Language) and its associated clusters (e.g., Conventions of Standard English, Knowledge of Language, Vocabulary Acquisition and Use). Further details on methodology can be found at the end of this report.

So, how well are students in the Albuquerque Public School District projected to perform on the content clusters of the Common Core State Standards? Raising awareness with the answer to this question enables educators and policymakers to focus efforts on improving student performance on the Common Core and on increasing the college and career readiness of all students.

Overall ResultsThe results of this analysis should be used with caution, as they are based on results of students who took the ACT at a time prior to the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. Given that states and districts were teaching to and assessing different sets of standards, it can be argued that students were not adequately prepared for an assessment that measures the skills described in the Common Core State Standards. We agree; however, the analysis is intended not to focus on student performance on current state standards, but to shed light on current student achievement levels relative to the Common Core State Standards. As states and districts adopt the Common Core State Standards and begin aligning instructional practices, resources, and assessments to college and career readiness—as some have been doing for a number of years—the expectation is that all students will be adequately prepared for such an assessment. Until such time, this analysis serves

as a starting point for assessing achievement relative to the Common Core in advance of full implementation efforts.

Our analysis indicates that across all Common Core domains, strands, and clusters, too few students are reaching a college- and career-ready level of achievement. Moreover, for each Common Core domain, strand, and cluster, the percentages of Caucasian students who met or exceeded the performance of college- and career-ready students were uniformly higher than the corresponding percentages of Hispanic students.

These results indicate that we must begin immediately to strengthen teaching and learning in all areas of the Common Core, with particular focus on raising the college and career readiness rates of Hispanic and other underserved students.

Detailed ResultsThe following pages report student performance within each Common Core State Standards category in English Language Arts & Literacy (pp. 6–7) and Mathematics (pp. 8–9) for all students within the district, and for one to three racial/ethnic groups. Student performance in New Mexico, all 36 CGCS districts, and the Albuquerque Public School District is reported as the percentage of all students projected to meet or exceed the performance level of college- and career-ready students in each category of that Standard. The results for the CGCS districts are based on the results of 36 CGCS districts for which ACT had sufficient data to project student performance. In this way, your district’s projections can be compared with projections for the state and for comparable districts across the nation. (See the Detailed Methodology section at the end of this report for more information.)

6

Reading

Writing

Language

Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) & Literacy

Integration of Knowledge & Ideas

Range of Writing

34

24

37

49

26

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

35

26

39

50

28

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

33

24

36

47

26

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

42

32

47

60

34

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

32

26

35

42

27

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

32

26

35

42

27

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

49

40

52

64

41

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

Informational Text Literacy in Social Studies Literacy in ScienceLiterature

Key Ideas & Details

Text Types & Purposes

Craft & Structure

Production & Distribution of Writing

34

26

37

47

27

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

42

32

47

60

34

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

Knowledge of Language & Vocabulary Acquisition and Use

Conventions of Standard English

Common Core Literacy Scores

34

26

36

45

28

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

34

25

37

48

26

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

38

31

41

50

32

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

16

12

17

26

10

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

46

37

50

63

39

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

37

33

39

44

33

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

77

27

19

30

40

20

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

A First Look at Common Core ELA & Literacy in the Albuquerque Public School District n Too few students are able to understand complex text. Relative to the

Common Core, only 30% of students are performing at a college- and career-ready level with respect to successfully understanding complex text. The Common Core State Standards define a “staircase” of increasing text complexity designed to move all students to college- and career-ready levels of reading by no later than the end of high school. To help prepare all students for the challenges of reading at the college and career readiness level, districts and states should ensure that students are reading progressively more complex texts as they advance through the grades.

n Increased focus is needed on some key aspects of language. Two areas of emphasis in the Common Core State Standards for Language are (1) students’ knowledge of language varieties and ability to use language skillfully and (2) students’ ability to acquire and use a rich vocabulary. Relative to the Common Core, only 39% of students are performing at college- and career-ready levels with respect to these skills. To help all students develop a sufficient command of these language skills, districts and states should ensure that students gain sufficient understanding of how language varies by context; how to use language effectively for different audiences, purposes, and tasks; and how to gain and use a vocabulary adequate for college and careers.

• Students should master the grade-specific standards for Common Core Language Standard 3, which, beginning formally in grade 2 and building throughout the grades, focuses on such areas as recognizing differences between formal and informal English and between spoken and written English, using language precisely and concisely, and maintaining consistency in style and tone.

• Students would also benefit from greater and more systematic attention to vocabulary development. This can include direct vocabulary instruction and a steadily increasing emphasis on helping students acquire vocabulary through reading. Particularly important is that students gain what the Standards refer to as general academic vocabulary: words and phrases that are often encountered in written texts in a variety of subjects but that are rarely heard in spoken language.

n Content-area reading needs strengthening. Students struggle when reading texts in content areas, especially in science, where only 17% of students are able to work with science materials at a level that would make them college and career ready. To help all students achieve sufficient literacy skills in history/social studies and in science and technical subjects, as well as in English language arts, districts and states must ensure that teachers in these subject areas use their unique content knowledge to foster students’ ability to read, write, and communicate in the various disciplines.

• Specifically, English language arts teachers in middle and upper grades should incorporate a particular type of informational text—literary nonfiction—into the traditional curriculum of stories, dramas, and poems.

• Teachers in other subject areas should use their own subject-area expertise to help students learn to read, write, and communicate effectively in their specific field.

• The Common Core State Standards in reading are explicitly modeled on the idea of shared responsibility for students’ literacy development. States and districts should therefore prepare middle and high school content-area teachers for this role by providing professional development opportunities that build the reading instruction capacity of content-area specialists.

Range of Reading & Level of Text Complexity

88

2

Mathematical Practices

Number & Quantity

Functions

Statistics & Probability

Common Core Mathematics

Algebra Seeing Structure in Expressions

Creating Equations

Geometry Congruence Similarity, Right Triangles & Trigonometry; Circles

Real Number System; Quantities; The Complex Number System; Vector & Matrix Quantities

Interpreting Functions; Building Functions; Linear, Quadratic, & Exponential Models; Trigonometric Functions

Interpreting Categorical & Quantitative Data; Making Inferences & Justifying Conclusions; Conditional Probability & the Rules

of Probability; Using Probability to Make Decisions

29

25

31

39

24

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

25

20

28

37

19

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

23

20

26

34

18

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

26

23

29

36

22

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

33

30

36

45

28

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

23

18

26

36

17

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

39

36

41

48

35

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

31

27

34

43

26

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

27

23

30

39

22

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

25

21

28

38

20

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

1 Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them

2 Reason abstractly and quantitatively

3 Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others

4 Model with mathematics

5 Use appropriate tools strategically

6 Attend to precision

23

18

26

36

17

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

26

22

29

39

21

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

25

21

28

37

20

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

4 61

99

35

32

37

43

31

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

A First Look at Common Core Mathematics in the Albuquerque Public School Districtn Increased focus is needed on the foundations of mathematics. The low

performance by students on Number & Quantity (31%) in the Common Core is of particular concern because these skills are the foundation for success in the other Common Core mathematics conceptual categories (e.g., Algebra, Functions, Modeling, Geometry, and Statistics & Probability). Students need to make meaning of numbers, operations, and arithmetic expressions, and to use their understanding to solve problems, reason about mathematics, and explain their thinking. To increase math performance, districts and states need to ensure K–8 curriculum and instruction require rigorous understanding of the concepts in Number & Quantity from the earliest grades.

• In the early grades, students will benefit from problem solving in novel contexts and hands-on experiences with increasingly sophisticated quantities and their measurement.

• In middle school and high school, teachers should lead students to see connections between Number & Quantity and other Common Core mathematics conceptual categories, particularly Algebra.

n Math interventions are needed for students who are falling behind at the earliest grades. Across the board, Hispanic students performed well below their Caucasian counterparts in all Common Core math domains. Districts and states must ensure that teachers and students have the resources necessary to identify struggling math students as early as possible (K–4) so that proper interventions are made. Providing teachers and students with adequate opportunities to collect achievement data that function diagnostically—data collected frequently and from both formative and summative assessments—is crucial to supporting students’ learning progressions and for optimal growth to occur.

n Greater understanding of mathematical processes and practices is needed. For each of the Common Core Mathematical Practices standards, only a little over one-fourth of students reached the college- and career-ready level. States and districts must ensure that conceptual understanding is emphasized for all students in mathematics. More specifically, students at all grade levels need to be:

• working and solving challenging nonroutine problems;

• explaining methods and justifying conclusions;

• predicting and conjecturing about things like unknown numbers, measurements, quantitative relations, the behavior of functions, how well a model fits reality, the effectiveness of different solution methods, and the way probabilistic events occur; and

• looking for patterns and structure in places like diagrams, equations, number systems, proofs, problems, tables, graphs, and real-world objects.

Arithmetic with Polynomials & Rational Functions; Reasoning with Equations & Inequalities

Expressing Geometric Properties with Equations; Geometric Measurement & Dimension; Modeling with Geometry

29

25

31

39

24

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

25

21

28

37

19

0 50 100

NM

All CGCS Districts

Albuquerque

Caucasian

Hispanic

Percent

7 Look for and make use of structure

8 Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning

3 5 7 8

10

College and career readiness for all students is a critically important yet challenging goal. It changes expectations by setting higher standards for the level of readiness that all students need as they leave high school. While challenging, the goal of college and career readiness is attainable—in fact, some schools in your district and/or state are already making good progress toward this goal.

ACT researchers examined the performance of the Albuquerque Public School District schools or other similar schools in the state on commonly accepted college and career readiness measures to identify examples of schools showing exemplary improvement in student achievement and/or exemplary overall student achievement. Where applicable, we spotlighted schools that serve large populations of minority (defined as African American or Hispanic) students and/or students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch—two groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education.

Specifically, schools were identified based on one or more of the following criteria:

Growth—Student performance at the schools improved as students progressed through high school as measured by their growth on ACT’s college and career readiness assessments. Schools were identified based on average growth in student achievement from ACT’s EXPLORE® (8th grade) to the ACT (11th–12th grade). A school was selected if its average growth was in the top 10% nationwide for schools with similar student characteristics, indicating that the average ACT Composite score for this school (for students who took both EXPLORE and the ACT) was at least one point above normal growth expectations.

Trend—The schools exhibited a pattern of increased college- and career-ready performance across the past 5 years as measured by steady improvements in the average ACT Composite score of their graduating students. Schools were identified based on an increase in ACT Composite scores from 2006 to 2010. A school was selected if its increase was in the top 10% of all schools nationwide, or in the top 20% nationwide for schools that had at least half of their graduating students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, or if the percentage of minority students among its graduating students was in the top 25% of all schools in the comparison group.

Status—High overall achievement levels were evident at the schools as measured by the average ACT Composite score of their graduating students. Schools were identified based on their average ACT Composite score in 2010, among schools testing at least 50% of their graduating students. A school was selected if its average ACT Composite score was in the top 10% of all schools nationwide, or in the top 20% nationwide for schools that had at least half of their graduating students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, or if the percentage of minority students among its graduating students was in the top 25% of all schools in the comparison group.

Examples of schools that are making exemplary progress toward college and career readiness for all students are shown on the next page.

These schools are demonstrating that higher standards and increased expectations for all students can be accomplished. The goal is achievable.

Is College and Career Readiness an Attainable Goal?

11

La Cueva High School, Albuquerque Status: High Overall Achievement Percent Underrepresented Students

20.1

23.6

15 20 25 30

NM

La Cueva HS

ACT Composite Score

20

45

7

48

0

25

50

75

100

La Cueva HS NM

Per

cent

Minority FRLunch

Magdalena High School, Magdalena Growth from EXPLORE to ACT Percent Underrepresented Students

14.4

18.5

14.4

17.3

12

14

16

18

20

EXPLORE Average Composite Score

ACT Average Composite Score

Com

posi

te S

core

Actual Magdalena HS Growth Typical Expected Growth

30

45

98

48

0

25

50

75

100

Magdalena HS NM

Per

cent

Minority FRLunch

Taos High School, Taos Trend in ACT Composite Percent Underrepresented Students

18.4

19.8

19.2 19.0

20.3 20.1 20.2 20.3 20.0

20.1

18

19

20

21

22

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

AC

T C

ompo

site

Sco

re

Taos HS NM

70

45

100

48

0

25

50

75

100

Taos HS NM

Per

cent

Minority FRLunch

Minority (African American and Hispanic) percentages and free and reduced-price lunch percentages were obtained from The Common Core of Data (CCD), a program of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.

The ACT Composite score range is 1 to 36; the EXPLORE Composite score range is 1 to 25.

While these are just a few examples of higher-performing schools, further research on their practices and policies can help inform local initiatives as well as guide other schools. ACT intends to study these schools to help identify common practices and instructional strategies that school personnel perceive as having led to

the success of their school. These results will be combined with other school improvement efforts under way across the nation and will be shared with states, districts, and schools as a means of promoting and disseminating effective practices in improving college and career readiness for all students.

12

The transition period between state adoption of the Common Core State Standards and implementation of the Standards presents policy and education leaders with a window of opportunity to ensure that educators have sufficient resources, tools, and knowledge to embed the Standards successfully into core educational practices. The Common Core State Standards clearly define what students should know (and why), but how, when, and where students will learn the specific skills present a series of strategic and practical challenges that must be met if the implementation process is to lead to increased student achievement.

Undoubtedly, the transition to the Common Core State Standards will require state and district leadership to collaborate to help schools navigate the road to successful implementation.

Fully recognizing that the transition to the Common Core State Standards is unlikely to be a “one-size-fits-all” process, ACT believes that there are six basic steps that states and districts can take to help every community translate the Common Core State Standards into effective classroom teaching and learning.

1. Engage public stakeholders—including parents and students—early on to discuss the significance of the Common Core State Standards and the economic imperative to help all students become college and career ready by the end of high school. High priority should be given to helping establish a clear understanding of what college and career readiness means among all public stakeholders, why it’s important, and how it affects school, district, and state expectations. This can be done through town hall events, media releases, state and district discussions,

and workshops where the importance of the Common Core State Standards to the district’s future is addressed.

2. Examine the differences between existing state standards and the new Common Core State Standards in order to systematically evaluate where and how your district’s curricula and content will need to adapt to new expectations. As an early step in making the shift between current state standards and the Common Core State Standards, teachers and leaders will want and need to know how the two sets of standards compare. Identifying commonalities will help to quell anxieties about the transition to the Common Core, and identifying differences will highlight those areas of the curriculum that will need to be modified or enhanced.

3. Develop a grade-by-grade instructional/ curricular framework for the Common Core State Standards for teachers and leaders that clearly defines learning progressions within and across subjects, establishes relationships between standards across grades and courses, and illustrates desired performance standards for college and career readiness in each subject and grade. Such frameworks should provide in-depth descriptions of the Common Core State Standards by including suggestions for how they can be taught and measured in the classroom, by illustrating the performance of students who are on target for college and career readiness, and by providing illustrative rubrics that include the important components of the Common Core for use by teachers in evaluating student work on a daily basis.

District Action to Assist Schools in Implementing the Common Core State Standards

13

4. Develop and disseminate a clear, specific, content-rich set of curriculum guides to complement the Common Core State Standards. While the Common Core State Standards are explicit statements of what students should know and be able to do to be college and career ready, these Standards must be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum that can guide and inspire curricular and teaching practices at the local level. In collaboration with the state, districts should develop and disseminate comprehensive curriculum guides to help educators effectively adopt, develop, or refine grade-by-grade curricula in content areas such as science, history, geography, civics, and the arts, as well as English language arts and mathematics. These guides should help school leaders and teachers effectively evaluate their classroom content and instruction relative to the Common Core, addressing issues of scope and sequence, lesson planning, and instructional strategies. Districts can then support the understanding and use of these guides by convening capacity-building workshops for educators to help ensure that school leaders fully understand the curricular content and performance standards of the Common Core.

5. Develop and implement a quality professional development plan for educators that grounds them in the fundamentals of the Common Core State Standards and supports a deep understanding of college and career readiness. To ensure that teachers, counselors, and administrators are

supported in their preparation, instruction, and assessment of the Standards, districts will need to provide extensive professional development to support the teaching and learning of the Common Core. This strategy should include efforts to:

n Engage educators early to evaluate and identify their unique professional needs, so that the resulting plan can sufficiently address the differentiated needs of administrators, counselors, and teachers

n Provide content-specific professional development around the Common Core—by establishing a clear understanding of what college and career readiness means, why it’s important, and how it affects school, district, and state expectations—so that teachers have a strong foundation as they individually and collaboratively evaluate and redesign their curricular and instructional practices

n Increase the assessment literacy of educators to more effectively apply student assessment data for diagnosis, guidance, and instructional/school improvement

n Create a structure and process that will focus the formative years of Common Core implementation on continual learning and improvement among educators, such as peer-to-peer working groups to evaluate, refine, and share their curricula, instructional practices, and student intervention strategies

14

6. Identify indicators of progress and monitor the fidelity of the implementation of the Common Core State Standards through district data initiatives. A user-friendly data management system for school districts, designed to make student performance data readily available to teachers, administrators, and parents, can be used to monitor student progress as well as collect indicators of how well the transition is being implemented at classroom and school levels. Such systems are essential in ensuring that the formative years of the implementation of the Common Core produce student, classroom, and school-level data that educators can use to quickly diagnose implementation problems and adjust appropriately. This strategy should include efforts to:

n Adopt and use existing formative and summative measures of college and career readiness to monitor student progress during the transition period to the Common Core State Standards while new state assessments aligned to the Common Core are being designed for implementation in 2014. Existing college and career readiness assessments aligned to the Common Core

State Standards can provide essential information about student learning now so that midcourse corrections can be made early in the transition process.

n Identify other indicators that can help teachers and leaders in districts and schools monitor how well they are making the transition to the Common Core State Standards based on key milestones and outcomes

n Focus research on successful planning and collaboration practices with other similar districts based on how higher-performing schools and districts are preparing for the Common Core, with a particular emphasis on school leadership, goal setting, curriculum and instruction, analysis and use of data, intervention and adjustments based on data results, professional development strategies, and other core practices that support the transition to the Common Core

15

ConclusionThe results of this study tell us that, as seen through the lens of the Common Core State Standards, far too many of today’s students will likely graduate from high school not ready for college-level work or career training programs without needing some type of remediation in English language arts and mathematics. State, district, and school education leaders now have a clear starting point for implementing the Common Core by targeting those areas of the Standards where student performance is weakest and ensuring that K–12 educators are adequately prepared with instructional strategies, interventions, and training to support students in becoming college and career ready.

ACT believes that a comprehensive approach to Common Core implementation that incorporates changes in practice and policy is essential for turning the promise of the Common Core State Standards—college and career readiness for all high school graduates—into a reality for our students, schools, districts, states, and the nation.

For more information on ACT and the Common Core State Standards, please visit www.act.org/commoncore/

Detailed MethodologyTo prepare this report, we classified ACT test items to the standards, clusters, and domains of the Common Core State Standards (e.g., Key Ideas and Details in Reading, Number and Quantity in Mathematics, Conventions of Standard English in Language) to best estimate student performance on the Common Core. Data for individual items were used to calculate the percentage of items answered correctly in each Common Core category. Because the items on each ACT test form are unique and one form may differ slightly from another with respect to the number of items in each Common Core State Standards category and in the difficulty of those items, the percent-correct scores for each form were scaled to a common metric to allow combining scores across forms and facilitate future monitoring of trends across time.

Since performance indicators have not yet been established for the Common Core State Standards, ACT used its research-based College Readiness Benchmarks to estimate college- and career-ready performance levels on each of the clusters of Common Core State Standards. For each cluster for which ACT had data (i.e., all but Speaking & Listening and Research), we then reported the percentage of students who met or exceeded the performance level of college- and career-ready students on the test items associated with that Common Core cluster.

The Albuquerque Public School District results are the projected performance of the district’s 2010 high school graduating class for each of the Common Core State Standards clusters. These projections were derived using a two-step process. First, we determined (or estimated) the percentage of the district’s entire 2010 high school graduating class who met ACT’s College Readiness Benchmark in each of the four subject areas. (Estimates were derived by combining

the actual percentage of the district’s 2010 ACT-tested students and the projected percentage of non–ACT-tested students who would have met the College Readiness Benchmarks if tested. The estimates were based on changes in Benchmark attainment percentages for five states that moved from optional to statewide ACT testing in recent years.)

Second, we analyzed the test results of 256,765 11th-grade students in several states who were administered selected forms of the ACT Plus Writing (i.e., multiple-choice tests in English, Mathematics, Reading, and Science, plus the ACT Writing Test) in spring 2010. The students were not self-selected, as traditional ACT examinees are, but rather represented all students who took the ACT as part of their states’ annual testing programs. The group spanned the full range of abilities and college aspirations, were from a range of communities and schools, and included students tested under standard conditions as well as under accommodations. In other words, the sample comprised typical 11th-grade students like those found in high schools all across the United States.

Using this 11th-grade student group enabled us to establish predictive relationships between ACT College Readiness Benchmark percentages and the percentage of students who met or exceeded the performance level of college- and career-ready students for each Common Core cluster. Using this information, we derived the projected performance of the Albuquerque Public School District 2010 high school graduating class for each of the Common Core content clusters, based upon the actual or estimated Benchmark percentages previously derived and the predictive relationships established with this student comparison group.

16

17

The 36 CGCS School DistrictsThe CGCS school district cohort was comprised of the following 36 CGCS-member school districts.

Alabama Birmingham City Schools

Arkansas Little Rock School District

Colorado Denver Public Schools

Florida Broward County Public Schools Duval County Public Schools Hillsborough County School District Miami-Dade County Public Schools Orange County Public Schools Palm Beach County Public Schools

Illinois Chicago Public Schools

Iowa Des Moines Independent Community School District

Kansas Wichita Public Schools

Kentucky Jefferson County Public Schools

Louisiana Caddo Parish School District East Baton Rouge New Orleans Public Schools

Michigan Detroit Public Schools

Minnesota Minneapolis Public Schools St. Paul Public Schools

Mississippi Jackson Public School District

Missouri Kansas City School District St. Louis Public Schools

New Mexico Albuquerque Public Schools

North Carolina Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Guilford County Schools

Ohio Cincinnati Public Schools Cleveland Metropolitan School District Columbus City Schools Dayton Public Schools Toledo Public Schools

Oklahoma Oklahoma City Public Schools

Oregon Portland Public Schools

South Carolina Charleston County School District

Tennessee Memphis City Public Schools Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools

Wisconsin Milwaukee Public Schools

16212

ACT National Office500 ACT DriveP.O. Box 168Iowa City, Iowa 52243-0168319/337-1000

www.act.org

Council of the Great City Schools1301 Pennsylvania Avenue, NWSuite 702Washington, DC 20004202/393-2427

www.cgcs.org