As director of the Michigan Portfolios website, my special interest in the Common Core is the assessments that will travel with it.  This is the part that is quite up in the air and may not be resolved until 2012-2013 in terms of implementation.  However, if we can consider together both the Core Standards as written and the early descriptions of what kinds of tests may accompany them, I have three basic concerns about the new Common Core.

First, let me acknowledge, I view standards and testing to be a failed method of improving U. S. education.  Standards and standardized tests have been around for quite awhile now, well before the establishment of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002.  However, NCLB directly represented itself to be about standards, the tests by which standards would be measured, and the prescribed consequences for schools that did not “achieve” under these guidelines.  Many people who write and think about this date mark it as a remarkable heightening of “pressure” related to testing and so-called achievement. Read More