Is Common Core failing the test?
The office of Oklahoma State Superintendent Janet Barresi, for instance, issued a statement saying she wanted tests that were reviewed by Oklahoma teachers and “designed with Oklahoma values in mind.”
Alabama wanted an “assessment program that was right for Alabama,” said Mark Sibley, a spokesman for the Department of Education.
In Pennsylvania, officials said they saw no need for tests that would let them compare their students’ results to other states. “Ours are rigorous enough,” said Carolyn Dumaresq, a deputy secretary in the state Department of Education. She added that Pennsylvania has already tweaked the Common Core standards so they are “right for Pennsylvania kids.”
Such rhetoric concerns Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford University. Over the past decade, “the quality of the testing, and the quality of the thinking measured by the test, went way down,” too often dragging classroom instruction down with it, she said. Darling-Hammond has consulted on the new exams and believes they will reverse that trend – but only if a critical mass of states stick with them. “We should be concerned about the