Follow the money
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Race to the Top Assessment Program Review Guide
as of August 2011
In September 2010, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), the U.S. Department of Education (Department) funded two consortia of states to develop next-generation assessments through the Race to the Top Assessment (RTTA) program: the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC).
http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop-assessment/review-guide.pdf
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The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) believes that assessments should work as tools for enhancing teaching and learning. Assessments that are aligned with the new, more rigorous Common Core State Standards help to ensure that every child is on a path to college and career readiness.
http://www.parcconline.org/assessments
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Our assessment system, aligned to Common Core State Standards...
https://www.smarterbalanced.org/assessments/
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If you want the money your state will adopt Common Core.
To upgrade state standards, leaders will be able to leverage the Common State Standards Initiative, an upcoming joint project of NGA, CCSSO, Achieve, the Alliance for Excellent Education, and the James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy. - http://www.achieve.org/files/BenchmarkingforSuccess.pdf page 24
CCSSO - Council of Chief State School Officers
NGA - National Governors Association
Achieve, Inc.
Achieve’s Common Core Comparison Tool was used by nearly every state in the nation, with direct, hands-on support from Achieve, and Achieve has provided Common Core “boot camp” to a number of states in the Network to support implementation efforts - http://web.archive.org/web/20120101000000*/http://www.achieve.org/AboutAchieve
In 2009, 48 states, 2 territories and the District of Columbia signed a memorandum of agreement with the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), committing to a state-led process – the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). Achieve partnered with NGA and CCSSO on the Initiative and a number of Achieve staff and consultants served on the writing and review teams. - http://web.archive.org/web/20120327013320/http://www.achieve.org/achieving-common-core
Common Core is hardly state led, Achieve Inc. wrote it and conducted “boot camps” to train state personnel how to implement it.