Let’s Measure Ready
A 50-State Analysis of College, Career, Military, and Civic Readiness Indicators
By Anne Hyslop
This report was funded by the National Governors Association and co-published with the Urban Institute. All4Ed would like to thank the Student Upward Mobility Initiative at the Urban Institute and the National Governors Association for their collaboration and partnership in this work.
Today, all but nine states use at least one college and career readiness (CCR) indicator to hold high schools accountable for student performance. This report provides a fifty-state landscape analysis of those indicators, focused on variations in their design, components, benchmarks, and transparency to the public across states.
The inclusion of CCR indicators in nearly every state’s accountability system is worth celebrating, but these findings reveal there are still areas for growth and state leadership, particularly in how CCR measures are crafted and reported.
Unfortunately, there is no standardized way by which states measure readiness. But by exploring the differences in states’ CCR indicators across four key dimensions, this analysis sheds light on policy choices that influence the accuracy, utility, and effectiveness of CCR measures. Throughout the analysis, we provide key considerations for states as they improve and refine their CCR indicators, including trade-offs between various approaches and examples from innovative or leading states. Download the full report or executive summary to learn more.
