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The Common Core places an extraordinary emphasis on vocabulary development

Teachers are engaged in practices like these because they are pressured and afraid, not because they think the assessments are educationally sound. Their principals are pressured and nervous about their own scores and the school’s scores. Guaranteed, every child in the class feels that pressure and trepidation as well.

I am troubled that a company that has a multi-million dollar contract to create tests for the state should also be able to profit from producing test prep materials. I am even more deeply troubled that this wonderful little girl, whom I have known since she was born, is being subject to this distortion of what her primary education should be.

In short, we seem to have students who believe that projects are for assessment purposes only.

he gave the project the highest praise a teenager can give anything: he stayed up until 2:00 AM working on it.

if learning isn't accompanied by the psychological stress of an exam, then they're somehow "let off the hook" and can devalue the content.

Conclusions that computers can score as well as humans are the result of humans being trained to score like the computers (for example, being told not to make judgments on the accuracy of information). 

Computer scoring systems can be "gamed" because they are poor at working with human language, further weakening the validity of their assessments and separating students not on the basis of writing ability but on whether they know and can use machine-tricking strategies.

Who’s to blame? Not the students. If they’re naive at Googling, it’s because the ability to judge information is almost never taught in school.

And by the time kids get to college, professors assume they already have this skill.

Students quickly gain the ability to detect if a top-ranked page about Martin Luther King Jr. was actually posted by white supremacists.