The promise of the Common Core included not just multi-state standards but also multi-state assessments, but just 21 states are currently still participating in the two assessment “consortia.”

Aided by a highly misleading New York Times article, the anti-Common Core crowd is pushing the narrative that Massachusetts’s recent testing decision spells the end for the common standards effort.

Advocates of the Common Core hope that the standards will eventually produce long term positive effects as educators learn how to use them. That’s a reasonable hypothesis. But it should now be apparent that a counter-hypothesis has equal standing: any positive effect of adopting Common Core may have already occurred.

It’s critical that NAEP’s math (and reading and writing) frameworks not flex with recent changes in standards, curriculum or pedagogical emphasis.

On the Knowledge Bank blog, AEI's Jenn Hatfield and Max Eden argue that Ohio's decision to lower its cut score for proficiency on the PARCC test is more likely to make the state a trailblazer than an outlier.

Next month, education officials in Massachusetts will decide whether to abandon the state's much-praised MCAS test and adopt the Common Core-aligned PARCC test.

Outside of Ohio, most states are living up to their commitments to provide more honest information to parents. A key promise of the Common Core is being kept.

What do new assessments aligned to the Common Core tell us? Not much more than what we already knew.

The Arkansas Department of Education has announced that students who score at level 3 or above on new Common Core tests will be deemed "proficient," even though the makers of the test say that only students who score at level 4 or above are on track to graduate from high school with the skills they need to be ready for college or a career.

An examination of assignments given by middle school teachers appears to show that most of the work asked of students does not reflect the higher, more rigorous standards set by Common Core.