Education Next – Chad Aldeman
“The “common” part of the Common Core is essentially dead. No, not the standards themselves. With 42 states and D.C. still sharing the same standards, those are still pretty common. I mean the other promise of the “Common” Core, that parents, taxpayers, and policymakers would be able to compare schools across state lines. That promise was always tenuous, and we were never that close to having full commonality anyway. From the beginning, the federal government funded two consortia, not one, to design assessments aligned to the Common Core (PARCC* and Smarter Balanced). Not all states joined the assessment consortia in the first place, and states slowly trickled away from them over time. Still, this year was supposed to be the first where at least some states would share common assessments and common cut scores. But even these smaller groups can’t agree on common cut scores or common ways to share the results. EdWeek’s Catherine Gewertz has all the messy details of the latest delays and breakdowns. PARCC originally wanted to keep its cut scores private (!) and, although it has sample parent reports, states aren’t required to use them. The same is true for Smarter Balanced: Gewertz notes that “the 18 states that used the Smarter Balanced exam last spring are each reporting results their own way.” So the political process to negotiate comparability is effectively dead. But where politics and compromise failed, leave it to American ingenuity to come up with a clever workaround.”(more)