Leadership magazine Nov/Dec 2015 V45 No 2 | Page 20

Community
and industry
partners:
ANOTHER ‘LINK’ IN
LINKED LEARNING

Business and industry
need students who
are college and career
ready; that’s why the
new state standards
make sense, and
why they are more
important than ever.

20

Leadership

Our world is changing. That is

not really news to educators around the
state. However, while it is easy to say we
know the world is changing, it is much
harder to change what our students experience within the classroom to prepare
them for that changing world. And that
is really the key to all that we do – preparing our students for the challenges of
their world; not preparing them for the
world of the past. That’s why, over the last
few years, districts and county offices of
education have been focused on shifting to
the new California Standards. It really is
about what students need; not what adults
need. With that in mind, it’s about what
our communit y, business and industr y
need as well.
If you look across the state, millions of
dollars in training and new materials have
been spent to implement the new standards. A new assessment system has been
created, and millions more have been in-

vested in technology to accommodate this
new learning and testing model. All the
while, the airwaves are filled with questions and concerns about the new educational approach.
So why, under tremendous scrutiny, did
California shift to a new set of standa