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"New tests being designed for students in nearly half the states in the country will take eight to 10 hours, depending on grade level, and schools will have a testing window of up to 20 days to administer them, according to guidance released today. The new information comes from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, one of the two big groups of states that are building tests in mathematics and English/language arts for the common standards. It answers one of the big, dangling questions that's attended the process of making these new tests: Given their promises to measure students' skills in a deeper, more nuanced way, partly through the use of extended performance tasks, just how long will these tests take?"

"The Curriculum Framework specifies what is to be taught for each subject in the curriculum. In Pennsylvania, Curriculum Frameworks include Big Ideas, Concepts, Competencies, and Essential Questions aligned to Standards and Assessment Anchors and, where appropriate, Eligible Content. "

"The Common Core's "six shifts in literacy," or the big ways in which the standards aim to overhaul teaching, can be boiled down a la Michael Pollan: Read complex texts. Mostly nonfiction. Very closely. Through that close reading, teachers get clear opportunities to foster critical thinking. Attempting to help students access texts, previous standards and curricula in many states have focused on previewing the material, skimming it, and connecting it to the outside world, the self, and other texts - at best, achieving a rich holistic understanding, and at worst, dancing around the challenges posed by the author's actual words."

"There may be no crying in baseball, but there's certainly math and science. On a recent Friday morning, students at the Center for Academic Success, a charter school for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in Sierra Vista, learned that Pythagoras might have played as big a role in baseball as Babe Ruth. They began by learning the distances between the bases on a Major League Baseball field and mapping its geometry. They found isosceles and right triangles, talked about the Pythagorean theorem and how it's applied to the triangle formed by home plate, first base and second."

Most Americans aren't fluent in the language of money. Yet we're expected to make big financial decisions as early as our teens - Should I take on thousands of dollars of student debt? Should I buy a car? - even though most of us received no formal instruction on financial matters until it was too late.

"The Common Core has embedded within it some Big Ideas that shift the role of teachers to curriculum designers and managers of an inquiry process. How can project-based learning (PBL) help with this shift? "

"Interview with Janet Hale concerning the Common Core State Standards"

High school testing is on the brink of a profound shift, as states increasingly choose college-entrance exams to measure achievement. The new federal education law invites that change, but it comes with some big caution signs and unanswered questions.