Today at WHYY’s Newsworks I look at concerns that the new standardized tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards will lead to an increase in the number of Jersey kids who fail to graduate high school.

Stan Karp, Director of Secondary Education Reform for New Jersey’s Education Law Center (ELC), is worried about the new national standardized tests in language arts and math that New Jersey students will take in 2015.

These tests, produced for N.J. and 19 other states by a consortium called Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), are tied to the new K-12 curriculum called the Common Core State Standards. Both the curriculum and the tests will be more rigorous those currently in place in every state in the country (except Massachusetts, where the state curriculum already sets ambitious benchmarks for students).

Read the rest here.