The old California Standardized Tests are a thing of the past. Governor Jerry Brown just signed Assembly Bill 484, which immediately suspends the old tests and funds a trial run this year of the new Smarter Balanced Assessments, which will be taken on computers and are aligned with the new Common Core curriculum. “I’ve said...

A bill moving through the California State Assembly would suspend nearly all of the old standardized tests to free up money and student energy to “field test” the new computer-based Common Core assessments. But testing data from those field tests won’t be used for accountability purposes – they’ll simply be used as practice for students...

People are still scratching their heads over what happened with California students’ test scores, which went down for the first time in a decade, as the state reported on Thursday. But the greater uncertainty could lie ahead. The plan is for all students to be tested on a new curriculum — the Common Core State...

Scores from statewide California tests taken by LA Unified students in the 2012-2013 academic year were only slightly higher than results from the year before. While the gains were more modest than in previous years, they still reflected overall improvement while the state average fell by a fraction of a percentage point. “We’ve outpaced the...