Happy Friday and first weekend in October! These good-reads go well with anything pumpkin flavored:

• Bill Clinton, the former president (and maybe the future first ... spouse?) recently said he’s not a big fan of annual standardized tests. In fact, he thinks that one test in elementary school, one in middle school, and another in high school would pretty much cover it. But Charlie Barone, the policy director of Democrats for Education Reform, a political action committee, said testing only sporadically could hurt students, since it would be unclear for years that they are attending a failing school.
• And speaking of tests..which companies are making money off of assesments aligned to the Common Core Standards? Short answer: Big industry players, such as Pearson, McGraw Hill CTB, and the Educational Testing Service. Longer answer from Edweek’s Sean Cavanagh.
• Waiver renewal guidance is arguably the next big K-12 thing to come out of the U.S. Department of Education. So what should the department be asking states to do? Prove that waivers actually improved student outcomes in the lowest-performing schools, says Anne Hyslop of Bellwether Education Partners in a must-read-for-wonks post on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.
• Tennessee is sometimes considered the poster child for Obama-era reforms, but support for Common Core there is on the wane, according to Chalkbeat Tenneessee.
• Are think tanks moving into edu-journalism? Alexander Russo makes a persuasive case that they are, over at thisweekineducation.