The breakaway group of California districts known as CORE—for California Office to Reform Education—has created performance assessments for the common-core standards that they’ve now posted online for anyone to review or use.
The assessments, which were piloted in classrooms last school year with more than 15,000 students, are intended to be complex, nuanced gauges of how students are doing as they learn, and to serve simultaneously as instructionally valuable exercises. Teachers in the 10 districts worked together to create the 60 performance tasks, according to CORE, which says they can be used as formative resources or “mini summative” tests.
The U.S. Department of Education granted eight of the CORE districts a waiver from the No Child Left Behind Act that essentially allows the group to set up its own accountability system.
