Common Core Standards: Is College and Career Readiness the Right Goal?

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While the Common Core State Standards were developed to be internationally competitive, empirical data were not available to determine whether the goal of college and career readiness or the Common Core Standards would be internationally competitive—that is, whether they represent a level of performance that will prepare our students to compete with the highest-performing countries around the world.

ACT, Inc. examined the international competitiveness of college and career ready standards in the policy research report, Affirming the Goal: Is College and Career Readiness an Internationally Competitive Standard? In this study, ACT performed a linking analysis to identify the PISA scores in reading and mathematics that are equivalent to the college and career readiness benchmark scores on PLAN®, ACT's tenth-grade college and career readiness assessment. These benchmark scores represent being on target for readiness.

The linking analysis was based on 2,248 US tenth-grade students from 77 high schools across the US who tested under standardized conditions with both PLAN and a special administration of PISA. By linking the tenth-grade college and career readiness benchmarks to the PISA scale, ACT determined if the college and career readiness performance standards for US students in these two subjects was competitive with the performance of students in other countries.

Results

The linking analysis affirms that the performance standards of college and career readiness—and therefore the new Common Core State Standards—are competitive with the highest performing nations in the world. In fact, the average scores of only four countries were significantly higher than the benchmark scores in reading and in mathematics. Because the benchmark scores fell well within the average scores of the highest performing countries, college and career readiness is the right goal for US education.