Bridging the Gap is a companion document to a series of three regional workshops, hosted by the Illinois Community College Board (ICCB), the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE), and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) and facilitated by the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC).
This policy brief reviews promising practices from California districts as well as insights from research on multiple measures to provide recommendations that improve how California districts generate, present, and use data in their Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs).
In this policy brief, EPIC recommends that college and career readiness serve as the “North Star” in California’s recently reformed accountability system. A district seeking to use its Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) to promote a college- and career-going culture should take the following steps:
• Adopt, modify, or generate a consistent and shared definition of college and career readiness.
• Evaluate the current LCAP for alignment to that definition.
• Revise the LCAP to align with college and career readiness as its new North Star.
By following these steps, district leaders will help ensure that the goals and actions outlined in their LCAP describe a coherent system instead of a collection of eight competing priorities.
In 2012, California Senate Bill 1458 added a measure of college and career preparedness to the Academic Performance Index (API). The Public Schools Accountability Act Advisory Committee was charged with making recommendations to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the State Board of Education regarding measures that could serve as indicators of college and career preparedness at the high school level. EPIC was commissioned to evaluate potential measures identified by the Committee.
A college and career ready student possesses the content knowledge, strategies, skills, and techniques necessary to be successful in any of a range of postsecondary setting. Success is defined as the ability to complete entry-level courses at a level of performance that is sufficient to enable students to continue to the next courses in their chosen field of study. Not every student needs exactly the same knowledge and skills to be college and career ready. A student’s college and career interests help identify the precise knowledge and skills the student needs.
The goal of this paper is to present a vision for a new system of educational assessment, one designed to support the kinds of ambitious teaching and learning that parents say they want for their children. Thankfully, the public schools do not have to create such a system from scratch—many schools already exhibit effective practices upon which others can build. For that to happen though, educators, policymakers, and other stakeholders must be willing to adopt new ways of thinking about the role of assessment in education.
This report summarizes EPIC’s work with the South Carolina Course Alignment Project from 2008 to 2014. In particular, the report highlights best practices in course alignment and professional development activities conducted over the course of the project.
This white paper considers the benefits and limitations of multiple measures of college and career preparedness. The previous papers in this series evaluated measures against a framework consisting of 10 criteria. This white paper uses theory and practice related to measures of college and career preparedness as its frame of reference and primary organizing structure.
This white paper considers the career preparedness assessments used most widely by state educational systems—specifically ACT’s WorkKeys, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), the National Occupational Competency Testing Institute (NOCTI), and industry certification assessments—as measures to be considered for California’s college and career indicator.
This three-phase study explored the effect of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme on college readiness by examining the academic and non-academic preparation of students who participated in IB Diploma…