Education Next – Robert Pondiscio
“Results from the initial round of Common Core-aligned tests (administered last spring) have been trickling out for the past few weeks in more than a dozen states. The results have been sobering, but not unexpected. Recall that the No Child Left Behind years were an era of rampant grade inflation. States whose students performed poorly on the benchmark National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) routinely rated the vast majority of their students on or above grade level, simply because states were allowed to set their own bar for success and thus had a perverse incentive to declare ever-greater numbers of kids proficient. The result was a comforting illusion of student competence that was shattered when “proficient” kids got to college and needed remediation, or entered the workforce with substandard skills. Common Core testing, if nothing else, is supposed to make it harder to tell self-serving lies about where kids actually stand.”(more)