Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Common Core GED

NY Times:

The American Council on Education and Pearson, a major education and testing company, are starting a partnership to design and deliver a computer-based G.E.D. test, aligned with the Common Core State Standards. The new business, which will continue to use the G.E.D. Testing Service name, will not offer the new G.E.D. until 2014, but will begin to roll out computer-based versions of the existing test this spring in California, Florida, Georgia and Texas.

Hm... one thing they can take advantage of here is that the grade-level Common Core standards are imperfectly aligned with the graduation standards. That is, the graduation standards are less rigorous than the grade 11-12 standards, at least in ELA.

Maybe Pearson is rushing this to market to steal a march in the race to define what the Common Core really is. Who knows?

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what the requirements for a GED ought to be, but I think a more practical set of standards (i.e., less focused on academic textual analysis) would be more appropriate.

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