New Common Core Standards Changing U.S. Education

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 asking students to show, in a variety of different ways, whether they have mastered a set of working concepts..."