District Administration magazine, which is written for district administrators, contains a startling poll conducted by the magazine.
When asked whether they expect the opt out movement to grow in their state, 60% said yes. Only 24% disagreed. The remainder neither agreed nor disagreed.
When asked whether political pressure against the Common Core would grow in their state, 62% said yes. Only 18% disagreed.
When asked whether the implementation of new standards and tests were “generally successful” in my state, 32% agreed, and 37% disagreed.
What this poll suggests is that the people who are in responsible positions in school districts see test resistance growing, and the Common Core faring poorly.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“States are increasingly making their academic tests tougher to pass, and the Common Core State Standards are the key force driving those higher expectations, according to a study released Wednesday.
The study, published in the journal Education Next, finds that since 2011, 45 states have raised the levels at which students are considered “proficient” on state tests. Thirty-six of the 45 did so within just the last two years.”
Wasn’t Common Core supposed to be more than tests? I think we were promised “additional support” if we all dutifully sent our children in to take the more difficult tests.
Maybe public schools shoulda got that “support” part in writing. Probably too late now.
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all true…yet experts that know the standards and the writers themselves tell us common core doesn’t go far enough. So IF the tests in fact reflected that which CC lays out, the results then would yield something more in line with Gates’ comments on alignment of the two.. NOT what we are experiencing today. This purposeful design with the current mis-alignment fail the majority and is a feather in the cap for privatizers-choice-charter…
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Chiara, don’t forget that Common Core and the testing had two goals:
1. Rigorous
2. Close the achievement gaps
How’s that going?
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“Smarter Balanced plans to devote more energy to its interim assessments and to helping educators use its Digital Library, an online trove of instructional materials teachers can use to address identified gaps in student learning.”
This is the hazard. The rest of this article points to non-stop testing, politely called “interim” testing with tasks from “digital libraries” of instructional materials that function exactly like high stakes tests without all of the hoopla–the big show about “this is a test,” and associated security measures, and test preps, and cheerleading to score high and so on. Smarter Balanced ( and PARCC) used your tax money and mine to develop test items that “identify gaps” in learning by something called “adaptive testing.”
“Adaptive testing” is based on having a complete map of learning (content and skills) and a very, very large pool of test items arrayed from relatively easy to difficult for a given grade and subject. A whiz-kid in taking tests keeps getting harder items, or is asked to respond to about the same content more rapidly that before. Slower students are routed to easier content and to paths that lead back to the items that indicate “mastery.” usually for a small chunk of knowledge or singular skill.
A typical digital library is comprised of “modules” with content and skills presented much like souped up workbooks, only more fun–animated, puzzle-like, mini-quests.
When students complete a module, they earn a badge or prize or points, then progress to the next module and so on. By “stacking” their badges, they earn a credential analogous to completing a more standard course of study.
“Testing as a system of instruction” is being marketed as personalized, or competency-based, or performance-based.
A recent push is to engage teachers in publishing, field-testing, and marketing their teaching modules (often ingenious how-to-do-its, including You-Tube posts) under contacts with “content aggregators” and/or “curators” so that online digital resources can be organized to produce scores or other metrics for learning. In all of this, professionals in test design at the margins of these activities and all with very blurred lines between non-profit and for-profit activity.
The Gates Foundation is trafficking in projects that make testing a system of instruction, not just for K-12 but for teacher education. See for example, the November 2015 three-year grant for $6,872,650 to Relay Graduate School of Education to support Teacher-to-Teacher (Teacher@2) as the major feature of a “teacher preparation transformation center” intended to provide technical assistance, serve as a data center, a disseminator of practice. http://www.relay.edu/blog-entry/relay-forms-new-teacher-prep-center
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