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Common Core revolt goes local - Politico
Even as political leaders in both red and blue states continue to back away from the standards — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is the latest example — the hottest battles have shifted to the local level, where education officials are staging public revolts against state and federal mandates to administer Common Core exams.
Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett this week announced she did not want students in the nation’s third-largest district to take the federally funded PARCC exam, which will debut next spring in 11 states, including Illinois.
Byrd-Bennett called the test “unproven” and said adding such a long exam to a year already crammed with standardized tests would be overwhelming to students, teachers and principals. The PARCC test takes nine to 11 hours, depending on a student’s grade level.
Her defiance was striking in a district that has long been viewed as a national leader in test-based accountability. It was also rich in symbolism because Chicago public schools were once run by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a huge cheerleader for both the Common Core and the new exams, developed with $370 million in federal funds....
A huge suburban school district in Colorado — in one of the wealthiest counties in the nation — is pressing to be excused from the PARCC exam, calling it a “one-size-fits-all” approach that’s less rigorous than its students deserve. A second, smaller Colorado district has also asked the state to exempt most of its students from the exam....
Kentucky legislators have floated a plan to let certain districts develop their own assessments, rather than administering the statewide test. The Manchester School District in New Hampshire has demanded similar flexibility....
In Oregon, the Portland School District is refusing to set state-mandated academic achievement goals based on the Common Core test the state requires.
And in Florida, Lee County opted out of state Common Core testing entirely at the start of the school year. The district reversed course a few weeks later, after the state warned that students wouldn’t be eligible for a high school diploma unless they took the tests, but the issue continues to simmer in Lee County and other Florida districts.
Meanwhile, rural districts across the country are complaining that they don’t have the bandwidth or the computers needed to administer the most widely used Common Core exams, known as PARCC and Smarter Balanced. Those assessments will be available in paper-and-pencil versions next spring but are expected to be given exclusively online within a few years....
