All students should graduate from high school ready for college, careers, and citizenship.
Creating a P-20 Continuum of Actionable Academic Indicators of Student Readiness
This policy brief is a guide for state education policy leaders to use in selecting and prioritizing academic performance indicators that illuminate student readiness for college and career across the P-20 spectrum. These indicators can be built into the state’s accountability system through public reporting, statewide performance goals, school-level incentives and accountability formulas used to differentiate and classify schools and districts. As each of these uses will drive actions in districts, schools and communities, the indicators must provide meaningful, actionable information to the right people at the right time to improve student outcomes. Teachers and administrators need these data in real time to take action – to change, adjust or fine-tune systemic approaches to specific practices to support individual students, to identify emerging successes and to benchmark best practices. Students and their parents need timely and clear data to understand where they are on the trajectory to college and career – not just in high school but all along their academic path. Finally, policymakers and the public need access to these data to align resources, evaluate impacts from specific strategies and inform a wide range of strategic decisions to improve outcomes and opportunities for all students.
