Rejecting national test, Massachusetts shifts its model

Boston

IT has been one of the most stubborn problems in education: with 50 states, 50 standards and 50 tests, how could anyone really know what US students were learning, or how well?

At a dinner with colleagues in 2009, Mitchell Chester, Massachusetts' commissioner of education, hatched what seemed like an obvious answer - a national test based on the Common Core standards that almost every state had recently adopted.