College Readiness

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The Deliberate and the Driven

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

They must have the flexibility, concentration, and fluency to produce high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline and the capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing over multiple drafts when circumstances encourage or require it. (“College and Career Anchor Standards for Writing” 63)

Reading the Common Core State Standards, teachers of writing come away with a mixed message. Writing is described as rich in thought and content, but sometimes it is quick and dirty and sometimes it is careful and reconsidered. Both are true, but  it leaves open  the question of how to teach writing.

The above passages, from the  CCSS sidebar titled “Range and content of student writing,” illustrate how our national standards for writing are torn between the deliberate and the driven. In the first sentence, the words “careful consideration” and “deliberately” stand out.  This emphasizes that writing is a process. In the second sentence, the key words seem to be “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline,”  which suggests the need for a “quick and dirty” approach.  However this is followed by a disclaimer which urges the “capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing.”  Then,  lest we become too leisurely in the process of writing, the final phrase cautions “when circumstances encourage or require it.”

The beauty of these contradictions about “range and content of student writing” is that they are probably all true. Writing is both deliberate and driven, according to the purpose and occasion. It would be petty to insist that the standards for writing be unwavering and consistent, because writing is not like that.

What does annoy me is that we assess only the “driven” side of writing, the world of desperation and deadlines. The language about “high-quality first draft text” is an obvious rationale for the impromptu essay, written in thirty minutes or less and unapologetically assessed as “first-draft writing.” This how the ACT, the College Board, and most state assessments evaluate writing.   The question is “Of what social or professional value is first draft writing?” Or “Why be driven?”

Some professional roles dictate a “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline.” Newspaper reporters come to mind.  Office scribes — secretaries, document drafters, those who write for their bosses — may be required to write under short deadlines.  For some reason, this remarkable skill is often uncompensated and yet under-girds the other forms of writing that allow newspapers to publish and businesses to function.  It is a valuable skill, but not always valued.

Every other kind of writing falls under the “capacity to revisit and make improvements,” and it is the kind of writing most respected in journalism and commerce.  Feature articles, Op-ed articles, Topical columns, Investigative articles. Project or marketing proposals, contracts, human resources documents, end-user documents, public relations documents.  No one writes these in one draft or under unreasonable time constraints. Oh yes, deadlines will sometimes be sudden and arbitrary, but no one considers high pressure the formula for good writing. And writing in journalism, law and business is incurably collaborative. Numerous pairs of eyes must examine work in progress and editors may insist on putting their mark on it, even a controversial comma.

In the “real world” the writing process is alive and well and respected. Only in school is it considered a sideline, producing the kind of writing pored over by teachers, but rarely high stakes, rarely a standard for “success.”  The writing that counts is “driven” writing.  It is the kind of writing most students claim they are good at.  Why? Because that is the kind of writing we assess for success.  To many students the quickwrite is the money genre, the one that counts.  Students who claim they can write well, but need time, seem to be asking for special consideration. They are somehow deficient because their writing process is an actual process.

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

Deliberation. To me that describes what writers really do.  It comes from a Middle English word meaning to “balance or weigh.” Writers balance “task, purpose and audience . . . words, information, structures and formats.” That’s a lot of balancing, and it will not be easily executed in thirty minutes. It will be executed  . . . deliberately.  Writing teachers’ message to their students is to “trust the process.” The message of our standardized assessments is “Get ‘er done.”

. . . choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

It is comforting to see deliberation validated in the Common Core State Standards. It gives dignity to writing and the teaching of writing.  Now if it would only be reinforced by the Common Core State Assessments. The Deliberate . . . not the Driven.

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In Search of a Draftable Teacher

Performance evaluation of teachers could count toward tenure, if we would take performance evaluation half as seriously as the National Football League does. As it stands, performance evaluation of teachers is a crude, untested mechanism languishing in the past, compared to the sophisticated multi-dimensional assessments of professional football teams.

In the months leading up  to the NFL Draft I was struck by the innumerable dimensions used to evaluate football talent– size, speed, quickness, strength, vertical leap, intelligence,  work ethic, “coach-ability”– these are only a sampling of criteria.  Draft prognosticators have learned to qualify the individual traits to make a complete assessment, such as “He’s only 4.7 in the 50-yard dash, but he’s quick off the ball.”   You could learn something about evaluation by listening to the media talent scouts who devote their entire year to preparing for three days in April, when the football draft ends the mind-numbing speculation.

Here are some insights I filed under “evaluation of complex skills,” based on the evaluation of football prospects.

1) No single trait outweighs the sum of the traits;

2) No statistic has more significance than the so-called “character” variables;

3) The context of the performance (weak opponent vs. a Major Bowl game) matters more than the performance itself;

4) The trajectory of a player’s development is more revealing than the performance of a single year.

Every professional football coach and director of player personnel takes these principles for granted. Why don’t they matter when we evaluate teachers?

Well, of course we don’t evaluate every teacher to the extent that we evaluate two hundred athletes with consummate physical and mental skills, but can’t we learn something about evaluation from the experts here?

Foremost, should the test scores of a teacher’s students sum up the talents of a teacher without considering:

  • The context
  • The trajectory
  • The complementary data
  • The “work ethic”?

Of course not, no more than the time of the fifty-yard dash overrules the many other parameters of football talent.

Second, should our coaching and intervention strategies be focused on a student’s success on a two-hour test once a year? Hmm, would a linebacker’s skill be multiplied if we got his 50-yard dash down to 4.5 from 4.7? That’s not what I hear from football coaches, whose jobs depend on successful evaluation of the whole player.

Third, should we just hire enough excellent teachers to manage 40-student classrooms, instead of hiring more teachers of heterogeneous ability to manage 25-student classrooms?  Maybe you could explain to Bill Belichek why two healthy players at each position is enough to keep his team competitive through a sixteen-game season. Depth turns out to be more essential than selectivity in hard-knocks football, and a deep, collaborative faculty also make a viable school.

Fourth, should we assign new teachers the most challenging classes and hold them to same standards as the veteran teachers with their college-prep schedule of classes?  Right, and we also expect the rookie quarterback to run the entire offensive playbook in his first game as a professional football player. And we break him in against the defending league champions, right? And we compare him to the retired previous  quarterback, who will probably get into the Hall of Fame.  Professional football coaches are far too shrewd to spoil young talent.

Sounds pretty stupid when we compare school policies to professional football, doesn’t it? Is this an unfair comparison or should we take a few pages out of the NFL playbook? Can we learn something from the most sophisticated machinery of talent evaluation in the civilized world? Can we consider the evaluation of the teachers of our children as important as the evaluation of our entertainment gods?

When the evaluation of teachers rises to a comparable level to the evaluation of professional athletes, public education will find status and peace. Then we can consider performance evaluation as integral to the tenure system in education.

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A Shared or Shackling Curriculum?

The call of 75 national leaders for a common curriculum to accompany the emerging national standards for English language arts and mathematics should be considered judiciously by educators.  The position that schools should categorically resist a common curriculum for some fraction of the school year may be too extreme. However, the impact of such a curriculum on the individual classroom may be seriously underestimated by its proponents.

Curriculum reformers  need to borrow a phrase from the physician’s oath: “First, do no harm.”

School reformers at the highest levels usually underestimate the disruption that a “voluntary” curriculum can cause in K-12 classrooms.  What is pronounced as a friendly suggestion comes down through superintendents and principals as a high priority mandate to teachers. Why? Because their schools will now be judged by how well they perform on the goals of this “voluntary” curriculum.  Curricular pressure on teachers is completely understandable, in this case, because superintendents and principals are judged entirely on their students’ performance on the “voluntary” curriculum.

Moreover,  the ELA and mathematics standards now being touted are a culmination of numerous prerequisite standards that are not firmly in place in some schools, especially struggling high schools.  Take the new standard for reading that involves analysis of so-called “foundational documents” of U.S. History:

Analyze seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, , and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes and rhetorical features (Reading Standards for Informational Text, 6-12, #9)

As worthy a goal as this appears, it comprises so many sub-goals that it might generate a whole new course of study: 1- arcane vocabulary (“a well-regulated militia”?) 2- rhetorical strategies (ever read a “declaration” before?) 3- historical context (what was happening before that “Second Inaugural Address”?) 4- ambiguity (why does no one agree on the First Amendment?) 5- genre (what is  the effect of a”preamble” and the “amendments” on the whole?) 6- syntax ( how does the adverbial clause affect the main clause?) 7- themes (how is the Red Badge of Courage connected to the Inaugural Address?)   8- context and interpretation (how has the meaning changed over time?)

Sometimes I think curriculum and standards writers imagine that topics will merely be “covered” in the classroom and students will be tested on the gist of the meaning. These same writers will then complain that students do not read closely or rigorously and thus stumble on the challenging tasks presented by international tests of reading. Because the curriculum and standards writers have no, or very distant, classroom experience, they forget that “covering” a text does not produce good readers. When new and historically remote texts are added to a curriculum they multiply the topics and the time needed to address them. Nothing worth reading  should be merely “covered.” It should be studied.

The time consumed by these curriculum “suggestions” displaces effective curricula, which may involve students choosing texts to read, genre for writing, and language strategies to address, related to these choices.  The growing edge of writing and speaking, especially, involves reading and writing about non-canonical texts, i.e. texts that relate to students’ daily experiences.   I know curriculum writers tend to belittle young adult texts, even though they are proliferating in subject matter and quality. They assume students are not being challenged by age-appropriate subject matter.

But students learn to write and speak by addressing books and topics from their own experiences, topics which include, conformity, integrity, decision-making, respect, loyalty, independence. These lessons are assimilated and expressed through age-appropriate reading and viewing.  Writing and speaking are complex skills that are first tested on familiar ground before racheting up the difficulty of reading and listening.  Active classroom teachers understand how to bring students up to more challenging texts by “successive approximation.”  Those who abandoned teaching years ago have forgotten that teaching is a continuum of experiences from the familiar context to the remote centuries and cultures. These familiar and age-appropriate texts should not be carelessly discarded in favor of new curricula.

New curricula have a ripple effect on existing curricula, starting as a trickle and ending with a tidal wave.  Curriculum writers may anticipate the trickle and perhaps the stream of curricular change, but seldom do they understand the torrent of prerequisite goals they have unleashed with their “modest proposals.”  They expect to influence the teaching of English and mathematics, but they have no concept of how they may throttle the curriculum from top to bottom.

If a “shared curriculum” can be introduced with the caveat that the best of local curriculum can be preserved, then the change could be beneficial. We could have cross-district and cross-state dialogues about how to infuse these new topics with the old.  We could have celebrations of successful learning units around these topics.  We could have the joy of shared goals, successfully implemented.

But a shared curriculum requires respect for the those who implement it. It should come in increments, with funding for teachers to develop their own units, with  grace periods for implementation, and with caveats for school administrators who fret about test scores. It should be shared constructively and deliberately with schools, not delivered like a subpoena.

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The Seed on the Path

When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in the heart. This is the seed sown along the path (Matt 13:19).

The difference between hearing and understanding has been pondered by educators since long before Jesus and ever afterward. It is not limited to the word of God. It is current in our demand  for  “rigor” and “college readiness.”  It is inherent in the notion of literacy as a structure built on a foundation–each year new standards are added to the structure, which ascends toward the gates of the college of your choice.

The notion of “cultural literacy,” that we are what we have read, supports the edifice metaphor of literacy.  Our knowledge is sequentially built upon classical authors, like Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and Ben Franklin, and we are judged illiterate in proportion to the texts we have not read.  Sometimes we mock those who claim to be educated, yet have not read our honored texts. What, you call yourself a high school graduate, but never read Hamlet?

Literacy is more like an organic process, like the body absorbing food for growth. Readers and writers process language selectively, and turn it into living tissue. It is not like we absorb protein at a certain age and vitamins later on. We absorb them as our body requires them and turn them into something living and functional. The body’s demand for iron and calcium very much depends on our age and gender.

“Understanding” a text is the kind of rigor we should advocate. “Understanding” means that we assimilate what we read, as the body assimilates nutrients from food.  You know what happens to the food we don’t assimilate. In cases where understanding is not part of the reading experience, nothing is assimilated. It is all waste.

The point is not what we hear, as Jesus said, or what we “decode,” as cognitive theorists currently say, but of “understanding.”  You can read Animal Farm in sixth grade or Romeo and Juliet in eighth grade, but what do you get out of them? Perhaps a good story and certainly “exposure” to a canonical text, but what about “understanding”?  In many cases you get a lifetime of alienation from allegory and Shakespeare, because the reading was so distant from the understanding.

Many adolescents hate reading, not because they are addicted to visual and social media, but because their understanding of assigned texts is so cloudy. They would give up on video games as well, if their computer monitor lost its resolution or if the enjoyment of the game relied on an extensive background in the canonical games of yore. They can be seduced by reading that addresses developmentally appropriate issues and that challenges their thinking at their own level.

Why do we now have a version of Huckleberry Finn that purges the “N-word?” Because we treat reading as though it were hearing. I am offended by those who use that word in my hearing, and I would demand that they restrain themselves, regardless of their cultural background. But in a book the “N-word” is a portrayal, not an actual event. It is fiction, where characters may display their ignorance with impunity.  If we are offended, we consider the source and learn more about people we might not otherwise associate with.  The same rule should apply to other offensive literary texts, the portrayal of the Jew in Merchant of Venice, the portrayal of the clergy in The Scarlet Letter. We can read without sanctioning the behavior of literary characters or being corrupted by it.

The problem often arises from adult texts being forced on the young. Maybe Huckleberry Finn shouldn’t be assigned in ninth grade.  Maybe Lord of the Flies should not be required reading in middle school. In our relentless pursuit of rigor, we assume that more difficult reading is also appropriate reading for adolescents and pre-adolescents.  Even a young adult text like The Giver can be assigned prematurely, because adults love the notion of collective memory, but young children may not.  Yes, they can read it. But understand it?

As the “Parable of the Sower” teaches us, not all seed takes root and grows to full stature.  So it will be with the scattered seed of the “rigorous” curriculum and the treasured fruit of “college readiness.”

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Engfish

Almost fifty years ago Ken Macrorie invented a term for a pretentious and vapid style of writing that secondary and college teachers unconsciously reinforce in their push for formality in student prose: “Engfish.”  It is writing that goes through the motions, but discloses nothing, writing that skims the surface with cliches or empty words. In Uptaught Macrorie describes how a student essay inspired this term:

This girl had given me a name for the bloated, pretentious language I saw everywhere around me, in the students’ themes, in the textbooks on writing, in the professors and administrators’ communications with each other. A feel-nothing, say-nothing language, dead like Latin, devoid of the rhythms of contemporary speech. A dialect in which words are never  “attached to things,” as Emerson said they should be (18).

This style, unfortunately, often gets the “A’s,” because it sounds important and frequently shows a command of mechanics. As Macrorie observed, it pervades all levels of education. E.B. White fought it with prescriptive advice in The Elements of Style and Richard Lanham located it in the upper levels of bureaucracy and called it “The Official Style” (Revising Prose, 1999). It is hardly limited to struggling college freshmen.

Almost exactly two years ago, I confessed to my own addiction to Engfish as a high school student. In that blog, “The Science of Writing” I revealed:

I fancied myself a writer in high school, but when I look back at my preserved fragments I am shocked by the pompous and impersonal style that was rewarded by my teachers. In a series of responses to college admissions questions, I pontificated.

Question #1: Why do you want to go to college?

“The most evident purpose of the collegiate experience is to broaden the scope of education while making it especially relevant to a field of study. I sense the crying need to systemize [sic] the great chaotic whirlpool of information into the universal outlook of college training and impending need to study seriously my chosen field of work.  I expect college to carry me beyond education to the developing of a technique of study.”

One might argue that the first person singular is present in this excerpt, but I refuse to accept that cold, pretentious voice as my own. I want to have compassion on that sixteen-year-old with lofty dreams of college, but I feel completely alienated from that affected style, that pretend academic diction. If I were this kid’s teacher, I would tell him to write about why he loves the New York Yankees or pizza, get him grounded in real language about real experience.  Maybe I could deflate his diction and connect with his passions.

So this is origin of my contempt for Engfish. In high school I was considered one of the best writers in my class, wrote for the yearbook and the school newspaper, won a local essay contest,  all for the publishing of Engfish.  I was a master of saying nothing in the best style.  I shudder to think of what my Freshmen English teachers thought when my beige prose arrived in college.

Ultimately I learned to write as a reporter for the Spectator, the college newspaper, and later I retrieved what was left of my voice in a summer at the Boston Writing Project.  I learned very little about writing in actual writing classes. I felt betrayed by the system that let me loose on the world with nothing to offer but Engfish.

The National Writing Project chopped away at this unfortunate style by declaring that “all teachers of writing should be writers.” This meant we delivered our prose to real readers and heard what they heard. Ultimately this was my cure for Engfish. The summer I attended the Boston Writing Project I was among a host of would-be writers who would only affirm what touched their reader sensibilities. We learned to write what we felt without embellishment, and we discovered how powerful that could be.

Since English teachers are often the perpetrators of Engfish and its followers, I have made it my life’s mission to go after it. Not to punish students for giving in to its seductive rhythmic nothingness, but to help them find the language that still lives in them, what Macrorie has called their “voice.” This term is not without controversy, but I’ll save it for another blog.

For today I offer  the funeral rites for “Engfish” from Macrorie’s entry, May 7, 1964, “The Day We Killed Engfish.”

Not until I heard the third paper that afternoon did I realize that everyone on the grass had quit gazing around and was listening hard. Each student had written a powerful short paper and I had broken through and the students were speaking in their own voices about things that counted for them (21).

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Attention Deficit in the Statehouse

The National Governors Association is moving on after establishing National Standards in English Language Arts, Social Studies and Science.  With the final draft of the Standards posted on the community bulletin board, the sheriffs can move on to bring justice to another town. Left behind (uh-oh!) are the superintendents, principals, teachers, students and their families to implement these Standards on behalf of politicians on the move.

When the National Governors Association convened this week, the new chair,  West Virigina Governor Joe Manchin III “made good on his promise, announcing that his chair’s initiative would be Complete to Compete—an effort focused on increasing the number of students who complete college degrees and certificates from U.S. higher education institutions. His goal: Improve higher education degree attainment rates by 4 percent annually in each state” (“New NGA Chair Targets Completion,” Education Week, July 12, 2010).

Now this is a terrific agenda, addressing a real problem in the higher education continuum in the U.S.  The estimated 45% of students who do not complete four-year colleges is a tragic waste of time and money, both for students who leave college and the institutions that invest in them.  But what of the horse behind that cart? The students who have graduated, supposedly “college-ready,” yet somehow can not survive four years of post-secondary endeavor?

There must be something in the water at these annual conventions of the Governors that activates the attention deficit gene. They will not follow-through on a plan for education that requires them to get their hands dirty with the mechanics of schooling.  How will they align their state standards with the national standards, so that their states are best served? How can they preserve the jobs of numerous qualified teachers being cut this summer? How will they fund and preserve their most-deficient schools?  What kinds of continuous professional development can they fund in these schools? What new approaches to assessment can deepen the insights from standardized tests? What kinds of high school-to-college programs can they implement? These are a handful of implementation problems that the local sheriffs have left unsolved, as they moved on to the next town: college campuses.

Needless to say, the first year of their study will bring the startling revelation that students entering college are not prepared and thus more likely to drop out.  So when the K-12 system fixes itself,  the college attrition rate will be halved or quartered, at least. Needless to say, if they had spent that first year investing in formative assessment systems for high school performance, they might already be addressing the “college readiness” gap.  And maybe they wouldn’t bother studying “college readiness” for another year, since they were already addressing that problem.

But politicians (including some school boards and superintendents) have a need for an agenda to get them elected or hired or their contracts renewed. Whatever school reform accomplished over the last three years must be cast aside for a new plan, one that impresses their peers, the voters, or the school boards that they have the “change” that matters.  This cycle has sadly victimized public schooling, where change is measured over five to ten years and where real change must start in the classroom, not the statehouse.

Many of the teachers who leave the classroom this year will choose retirement to avoid this latest cycle of school reform, of unfunded mandates, of unresponsive regulation. They recognize when the sheriff has left town and left the hard work for the citizens. They know the NGA is too busy in the town on the other side of the county to be concerned with the town they “reformed.”

If the politicians in Washington seem unresponsive to local needs, we might assume they are just too far from us, but when the statehouse or even our school boards avoid  personal involvement with reform “on the ground,” we can only assume they don’t care.  Their careers are made by proposals, agendas and mandates, not the glacial changes from inside the school.  They suffer from the attention deficit that energizes campaigning and re-election and disillusions the stakeholders of reform.

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“Ready” for What?

When are you “ready” for college? When you have competitive scores on college admissions tests?  When you have completed a state-approved college preparation program? When you have demonstrated you can work independently on academic projects? When you can articulate goals for attending college? When you really want to go? None of these may be sufficient by themselves, because “readiness” means so much. It means you are prepared in multiple ways for an entirely new academic environment. Small wonder the ACT and SAT have never successfully predicted success in this environment.

“College Readiness” has become the new standard for measuring school success.  Achieve, Inc. proposed this standard in 2004 to define success for high school graduates, and it continues to refine this standard through surveys of unspecified college professors and admissions officials. More than half of state governments have subscribed to this standard.  Michigan, among others, has used the ACT and its WorkKeys exam as exit tests for high school and for college readiness.

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, yet another initiative of the National Center on Education and the Economy, has recently defined success as “90 per cent of all major groups of students on track to leave high school ready to enter college without the need to take any remedial courses;”  Without even addressing the claim that 90 per cent of high school graduates should be prepared for a college curriculum, the issue of “readiness” for any academic experience ought to be parsed for its real meaning.

“Readiness” is a notion high-jacked from the extensive research on “school readiness,” which informs some very successful early childhood education programs.  The real strength of “readiness” is its inclusion of all the dimensions of educational success, from  proper nutrition to early literacy experiences.   The National Goals Panel defined “readiness” from a wide spectrum of needs:

(1) physical well-being and motor development; (2) social and emotional development; (3) approaches to learning; (4) language development; and (5) cognition and general knowledge. While cognitive development and early literacy are important for children’s school readiness and early success in school, other areas of development (i.e., health, social development, enthusiasm) may be of equal or greater importance. [National Education Goals Panel, 1995. Reconsidering Children’s Early Development and Learning: Toward Common Views and Vocabulary. Washington, DC: National Education Goals Panel.
http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/negp/Reports/child-ea.htm]

The first three goals relate to physical well-being, social behavior, and learning habits, none of which are reducible to cognitive testing, the standard currently offered for high school success.  “Readiness” is inherently something parents and teachers can observe and is not captured by indirect measures like a multiple choice exam.  The reason for the demonstrated success of early childhood programs is careful attention to the whole child and providing support to all the contingencies of learning including health, social skills, and study habits.  This is not a novel observation, but has been documented by numerous studies.*

But “college readiness” has been defined by measurable standards, performances on standardized tests that measure a narrow band of cognitive skills. We already know that college admissions tests are poor indicators of college success through data readily available from both Educational Testing Service and the ACT. We know that “readiness” is the least reliable indicator of these tests. Even reputable colleges are making these tests optional for admission, more and more every year.

The clues to “college readiness” are in the high school classroom: the persistence, the ability to self-evaluate, the ability to integrate learning, the ability to give and process feedback, the ability to work on a team. None of these goals will be found on standardized tests. In fact they are all processes of learning, only observable by those who are present when learning takes place–teachers, students, and parents.  None of these goals are apparent in the products of learning alone.

To its credit, the New Commission on Skills of the American Workforce addresses multiple goals for “college readiness,” including better cognitive measures of skill.  Yet its assumption that 90 per cent of high school graduates should be prepared for college suggests a narrow target for academic success. “College readiness”  is not the only respectable goal of a high school graduate.

There are ways to estimate the readiness of graduates that involve the real stakeholders in education: the students, the parents, and high school teachers. If we invested in ways to record the observations of those stakeholders, we might begin to define “readiness” more accurately and for more outcomes than college. We might arouse more local participation and cooperation in assessment, rather than alienating those who are not college bound.  We might give high schools some dignity, rather than reducing them to preparatory schools.

“College-readiness” has captured the hearts of too many state governments without appeal to their good sense.  Michigan and its kin need to ask what “readiness” entails and whether they are actually addressing it.  They need to ask whether they have abdicated their responsibility to their whole school population by subscribing to the “college readiness” myth and whether they have given up on their teachers for the likes of Achieve and the National Center on Education and the Economy.  And they need to decide for themselves: what should our students be ready for?

*See, for example, Huffman, L. C., Mehlinger, S. L., & Kerivan, A. S., 2000. “Risk Factors for Academic and Behavioral Problems at the Beginning of School.” In A good beginning: Sending America’s Children to School with the Social and Emotional Competence they Need to Succeed (monograph). Bethesda, MD: The Child Mental Health Foundations and Agencies Network.; Child Trends, 2001. School Readiness: Helping Communities Get Children Ready for School and Schools Ready for Children (Research Brief). Washington, DC: http://www.childtrends.org/Files/schoolreadiness.pdf; and Zaslow, M., Calkins, J., & Halle, T. (2000). Background for Community-Level Work on School Readiness: A Review of Definitions, Assessments, and Investment Strategies. Part I: Defining and Assessing School Readiness-Building on the Foundation of NEGP Work. Report prepared for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Washington, DC: Child Trends. http://www.childtrends.org/files/LIT_REVIEW_DRAFT_7.pdf