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Monday, November 4, 2013

The Educated Reporter: Common Core: Should States Slow Down on Implementing New Assessments?

The Educated Reporter: Common Core: Should States Slow Down on Implementing New Assessments?:

Common Core: Should States Slow Down on Implementing New Assessments?





EWA is holding a one-day seminar for journalists today at George Washington University on the new Common Core State Standards, and I look forward to sharing content from the event with you in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the rollout of the assessments tied to the new standards was the focus of one of the panel discussions at EWA's 66th National Seminar held in May at Stanford. We asked John Fensterwald of EdSource Today to contribute a guest post from that session. For more on Common Core, check out EWA's Story Starters. Stream sessions from National Seminar in your browser, or subscribe via RSS or iTunes

The call by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten for a moratorium on using Common Core test results to evaluate teachers and judge schools resonated with two of the three speakers in the EWA discussion on the assessments at the organization’s National Seminar at Stanford University.

“I have reluctance to see assessments used for lots of high-stakes purposes,” said James Pellegrino, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of an advisory committee for two groups developing the new tests. “There is a great deal of caution by technical advisory groups on how the