All students should graduate from high school ready for college, careers, and citizenship.

Business Resources for a College- and Career-Ready America

The GE Foundation and AT&T, along with Chevron and the Prudential and Travelers foundations, collaborated with Achieve to create resources for a college- and career-ready America.

American business leaders strongly support the college- and career-ready agenda, in part because they grasp the importance of qualified, skilled talent. These leaders are deeply aware of the importance of talented individuals to our nation's economic competitiveness.

Yet too many of our students graduate high school without reaching the critical college- and career-ready bar and are academically unprepared to succeed in the real world. Graduating "college ready" means being prepared for postsecondary academic experience, and "career ready" signifies possessing the knowledge and skills most valued — and most urgently needed — by employers.

In today's increasingly knowledge-based economy, a career is not just a job. A career provides a family-sustaining wage and pathways to advancement and, more than ever, requires postsecondary training or education.

With this in mind, the GE Foundation and AT&T, along with Chevron and the Prudential and Travelers foundations, collaborated with Achieve to create the Business Resources for a College- and Career-Ready America, a toolkit that helps business leaders think more strategically about how best to support college and career readiness for all students. The unique value of these resources for business leaders is rooted in Achieve's deep understanding of standards-based education reform, both within and across states. To strengthen the bridge between awareness and engagement, the toolkit features a range of key data and practical examples of how business leaders support standards-based education reform within and across states.