Dive Brief:

• When the Common Core State Standards were introduced in 2009, nearly every state had a hand in developing them, and in 2011, 45 states planned to use new assessments from PARCC or Smarter Balanced aligned to the standards.
• In a comprehensive piece for EducationNext, two researchers write that the number has dropped to just 20 states, with PARCC retaining only six — in part because of political resistance from both ends of the political spectrum as people criticized the federal government’s role in the adoption of the standards and worried about student data privacy.
• Tying the tests to school and teacher accountability systems helped doom public support, as did tech challenges in preparing and administering the new online assessments, but as states have left the testing consortia, many have retained their alignment with the standards themselves.

Dive Insight:

The Common Core State Standards were supposed to provide some national consistency in what students were learning and when. They were designed to elevate instruction in most states, asking students to tackle more rigorous material than they had before. And the tests were expected to provide a way to compare student achievement in states that had gone in very different directions with their state assessments throughout the No Child Left Behind years.

These consortia-developed assessments could have saved states money, pooling resources and capitalizing on federal support to create new tests. But now, many states are back to going it alone, faced with the high-cost and labor-intensive process of developing high-quality assessments from scratch.

Many schools are now adapting curriculum and instruction to the Next Generation Science Standards, which were modeled after the concept of the Common Core. The NGSS, however, have run into less political resistance, in part because high-stakes tests have not been attached to them — a lesson, perhaps for future education reform initiatives. Though those standards have still seen pushback in some states over evolution and man-made climate change.