The Foundation for Excellence in Education has launched Why Proficiency Matters, an interactive website that will help parents understand what proficiency means in their state and how it impacts their children.
As the Foundation notes, 50 percent of students entering two-year colleges are placed in remediation, and $7 billion is spent annually by first-year college students to learn what they should have mastered in high school.
When states set the bar too low — by setting a low cut-score to demonstrate proficiency on a state test — it conveys a false sense of student achievement to kids, parents and teachers This website will help parents see how their states are doing and what they can do to get involved.
For more on this topic, an article in the Summer 2015 issue of Education Next looks at changes in where states set the bar for proficiency and finds that over the past year, more states rose the bar than lowered it.
— Education Next
