AUSTIN – Texas is the first, and so far only, state to meet all the American Diploma Project’s five key college and career readiness measures, Achieve, a national bipartisan organization, announced today.

In a report called Closing the Expectations Gap, Achieve said “Texas has the most comprehensive approach to college and career ready accountability.”

This year’s survey found that Texas was the only state that met all the accountability measures that were determined as necessary to assess college and career readiness.

Those include publicly reporting the percentage of students who graduate from high school with a college and career ready diploma, which in Texas means graduating on the Recommended High School Program or Distinguished Achievement Program.

Texas is one of 21 states that have increased graduation requirements to better prepare students. Achieve’s research shows that for high school graduates to be prepared for success in college and careers, they need to take four years of challenging mathematics – including content typically taught in an Algebra II course or its equivalent – and four years of grade-level English aligned with college and career ready standards.

Texas’ strong showing in the Achieve evaluation comes on top of its grade of “A” for its curriculum standards, assessment and accountability system in Education Week’s annual evaluation called Quality Counts.

Last fall, the National Governors Association in a report called Achieving Graduation for All noted that Texas has implemented many of the necessary steps recommending for tackling the dropout problem, including providing a variety of support systems to students who are at risk of dropping out.