College, Career, and Life Ready
Iowa students who are college and career ready have acquired the necessary knowledge, skills, and strategies to be successful in post-secondary opportunities as demonstrated through multiple sources of evidence, including those generated by students.
Definition of College and Career Readiness Flyer (1).pdfClick on image to see the flyer.
Read AIR's Iowa College and Career Readiness Indicators Literature Review (2018).
The Iowa Area Education Agency (AEA) Compact outlines a partnership with LEAs and the Department of Education in which we pledge “every child who graduates from an Iowa pre-K-12 public or non-public accredited school will be prepared for success in postsecondary studies, a career, and citizenship.” Iowa’s definition of college- and career-ready describes what this preparedness looks like for students (see figure and click on the hyperlinked PDF to the left).
The knowledge, skills, and dispositions in the four "buckets" of the definition are transferable among PK-16 learning experiences, and are also a set of competencies that serve lifelong learners who desire to design their own path to a successful career, meaningful civic participation, and a rich personal life.
a-promise-for-equitable-futures-enabling-systems-change-to-scale-educational-and-economic-mobility-pathways.pdfCasey, K., & Patrick, S. (2020). A Promise for equitable futures: Enabling systems change to scale educational and economic mobility pathways. Vienna, VA: Aurora Institute.
Call to Action
"This report issues a call to action for states to enact a Learner Promise: a commitment that every learner will have access and support to pursue a certified pathway with system-wide opportunities that guarantee entry into a meaningful, chosen career that will build social and economic capital over the course of their lives.
Operating under this promise, states would enact systems of governance, policy, and infrastructure to certify that learners who demonstrate competencies in K-12, postsecondary, workforce, and community settings along a supported pathway will have access to continuing education and a purposeful, living wage career. States would commit to taking the systemic action necessary to disrupt inequities in access, engagement, and attainment for Black, Latinx, Indigenous people, and people from low-income households. And, states would reimagine education not as a linear, time-bound sequence of learning that occurs within institutions of formal education, but as a learning ecosystem.
This ecosystem would be an equitable, dynamic, and responsive system in which learners can customize their learning experiences as they navigate experiences across schools, workplaces, and communities."
A Shifting Job Market: Becoming Future-ready Means Staying Nimble
By 2025, we’ll lose over five million jobs to automation.
From the article: "Skills needed to be gainfully--and happily!--employed in the future:
Mental Elasticity and Complex Problem Solving
Critical Thinking
Creativity
People Skills
STEM (integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and Coding
SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud)
Interdisciplinary Knowledge"
State of Your State
Check out XQ's work on outlining the state of states as they prepare (or fail to prepare) our youth to be future-ready.
The Future of Work Demands Shifts Today
XQ Super Schools published a document outlining the future of work and our moral imperative to prepare learners differently for that future. Read it online, download it, or request a paper copy.
Future Ready Iowa: Metrics that Matter
Future Ready Iowa is a partner in helping put students at the center of their learning and their lives. Click on the image to the left to see a 2017 Scorecard of our learners' readiness for a viable future.
Developing the Portrait of a Graduate
Battelle for Kids at PortraitOfAGraduate.org is leading the 21by2021 Movement to rethink the knowledge, skills, and dispositions our learners will attain and be able to demonstrate when they graduate from our schools. Click on the link to access their materials.
Do you want help developing the portrait of a graduate in your learning organization? Contact us at The Center!
iNACOL-RedefiningStudentSuccess.pdfAn excerpt from the ISSUE BRIEF: "Redefining Success. Today, conversations are happening in states that explore how to build education systems that prepare young people for success in postsecondary education, the workforce, and civil society.
A new definition of success is crucial to drive system improvements that are built around students’ needs — including instructional shifts, systems of assessments, expanded pathways and better learning environments connected to communities and to the real world.
This issue brief will explore the importance of creating definitions of success that reflect communities’ aspirations for their students to drive coherence in policies and to improve outcomes. Policymakers can use new definitions of student success that enable student-centered learning systems to:
» Support student learning and meet individual needs;
» Empower educators to facilitate learning and growth toward a new, more comprehensive definition of success; and
» Create coherence and alignment in state education systems."
Patrick, S., Worthen, M. & Truong, N. Redefining Student Success: Profile of a Graduate, iNACOL, 2017.
Measuring More than Academic Learning
"The MTC model is substantively different from the traditional model of assessment that is typically organized around content oriented courses, Carnegie units for credit and A to F letter grades."
Visit mastery.org to find out more about joining the Mastery Transcript Consortium.
According to the MTC website: "The Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) is a network of schools creating a high school transcript that reflects the unique skills, strengths, and interests of each learner."