A profound change in educational standards and assessments is
quietly underway. By 2014, almost every state in the country
will have the same demanding standards for what students need to
know before they graduate high school. How will the Common Core
State Standards Initiative change education as we know it? What
can we expect going forward? And why is Minnesota one of only
five states not adopting the measures? Susan Headden, senior
writer and editor at Education Sector, wrote about these updated
standards in Washington Monthly: "While not a unified national
curriculum, the common core will lay down a set of high, unified
standards--rubrics that define what students should be able to
know and do by, say, the end of third grade. Those standards
will be enough to defragment the American testing market. With
them will come a set of completely new, interactive,
computerized tests that promise to be much like what you'd find
in Singapore or Australia or an AP classroom--exams that test
higher-order thinking by a