Big promises for new tests
Blog by John Fensterwald/Educated Guess
If the two competing national organizations do design tests for the Common Core standards in math and English language arts as they promise, California will be better off. It and other states will then be able to eliminate, or at least minimize, some of the ills in the classroom that No Child Left Behind has caused, particularly in urban schools – test obsessions, dehydrated learning, and narrowed curriculums among them. With $350 million the federal government is investing in a new generation of assessments, “we get a do-over,” an executive with one of the two consortia said. It became clear, during two-hour presentations before the State Board of Education on Wednesday, that there are distinct differences in tone, in approach, and in choice of technologies between the two state-led consortia: Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium. (more...)