Maryland schools face $100 million tab to implement Common Core tests

◼ The education overhaul known as Common Core is creating so many financial and logistical problems for schools that some observers are comparing it to the cumbersome and costly new health care law.

According to a new report from the Maryland State Department of Education, cash-strapped schools in that state will have to spend about $100 million to get ready for Common Core’s computer-based standardized assessments – known as the PARCC tests – which most students will begin taking in the spring of 2015.

To prepare for the online PARCC tests, many school districts are buying new laptop computers or tablets, increasing their Internet bandwidth, making software upgrades to existing computers and hiring new support staff to help schools navigate the new process, reports the Baltimore Sun.

Leaders in some already-crowded schools are not only struggling to find storage areas for the large influx of new computers, but they’re warning that it may be logistically impossible to get every student on a computer for the PARCC test without causing huge disruptions to the school’s learning schedule....

In a few years, when many public schools are crying poverty and the Common Core has failed to make more students “college- and career-ready,” we just hope taxpayers will remember the individuals who foisted this pricey, untested scheme on them – and hold them accountable.