Education

• • Educational reform will include a means of standard-izing testing. • • Testing is useful for more than just assessment. • • Tests can promote learning directly. • • The development of standardized tests should take into account the ways in which tests are known to ben-efit learning. Educational outcomes in the United States are a source of concern. In a recent comprehensive assessment (Pearson, 2014), the United States ranked 14th on a composite measure of cognitive skills and educational attainment, behind coun-tries such as Russia and Poland. Every country ranked ahead of the United States has a lower per-capita gross domestic product (GDP; World Economic Outlook Database, 2014), a fact that points strongly toward deficiencies in American education policy. The regularization of educational standards is one means by which such poor educational outcomes in the United States are being addressed. Nations achieving top rankings in educational attainment typically have greater oversight of standards, curriculum, and testing than the United States. In South Korea, which ranked first on the Pearson assessment, a single national ministry oversees the national curriculum and revises it regularly. In the United States, the develop-ment of a national curriculum is fraught with political conse-quences due to widespread concerns about federal intrusion upon local authority. For these reasons and others, the Common Core delineates general standards for achievement but carefully avoids recommending specific programs or materials for achieving those goals. Assessing whether or not students are attaining the new criteria calls for standardization of testing. The Race to the Top program of the Obama administration provided substan-tial grants in 2010 for the development of such tests; at one point, almost all of the states had joined one or both of th