A Road Map to College and Career Readiness

State efforts to prepare students for the world beyond high school often are too general to be effective.

By David S. Spence

Our nation’s steepest challenges in education are to help more students graduate from high school and to ensure that all high school graduates are well prepared for postsecondary education.

The skills students need to learn effectively in college- or career-preparation programs are the same: the ability to read and write effectively and to think logically and symbolically, as taught in mathematics.

In its 2005 report on college readiness, ACT Inc. found that up to 70 percent of college-admissions-test takers were not ready for college work in reading, writing, and mathematics. This means that meeting the readiness challenge extends far beyond simply having students take the “right” high school courses; most...