The phrase “college-and-career-ready” dominates Common Core rhetoric, as if it is the Holy Grail of educational endeavors. Even kindergarten activities are now supposed to be college and career ready.Seems right to me.
Who could possibly argue with wanting our children to be ready for college and careers?
Obviously, no one.
Making sure our children are college and career ready is the answer to all of America’s educational woes. All we need to do is aim everything done in our schools at reaching this goal. The Common Core standards are being promoted as the mechanism for achieving this.
There is only one set of standards, which must be attained by every school and every student; therefore, there must be only one definition for what it means to be college and career ready. Logically, that would mean that there is only one appropriate way to prepare for every college, every major course of study, and every career...
“College and career ready” is a marketing slogan, just like the musical “Bam ba dum bum bam bam bum” that follows the words “we are farmers” in the insurance commercial. And just like the syllables in the commercial, they have no actual meaning. They just sound good.
In the end, they are nothing more than gibberish.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
"College and Career Ready"
Some people chant it like a mantra, but this author calls it like it is:
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5 comments:
That lovely marketing phrase is a brilliant product of America's thriving and successful education industry CEOs!
That phrase has snookered an enormous number of people. Lots of groups, such as the Chamber of Commerce and college math and science teachers, have embraced the core when they really shouldn't have, and largely done so because of that marketing phrase. If they had looked beyond the slogan, many of those groups would have been appalled.
weird, as a business student, I don't believe that an engineering student or a nursing or an education student and I have the same needs to be college and career ready...
I probably don't need to know how to administer an IV or build a hovercraft. I don't think a future nurse or engineer really wants to know how SAP or any other business DMS system works either.
One size fits all does not work in this case.
If you want to trace this, it goes back to when Governor White of Texas turned over reorganizing education in the state of Texas to H. Ross Perot. Perot saw no point in art or humanities and would have jettisoned all humanities for hard sciences and math if not for parent opposition. Since then this has evolved into the STEM model, which is ironic since most people who excel in innovation take some type of art or humanities related discipline. A good friend of mine, a stellar AP Chem teacher, tried to have his dissertation that high stakes testing was not an accurate predictor of college achievement. They turned him down BECAUSE all the state universities get money for writing portions of the tests given in Texas.
I get all twitchy when I hear that phrase. It drives me mad how we got to this place.
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