How to hide the flaws in common core

Jane Robbins, a senior fellow at American Principles in Action, obviously shares my concerns about the recently announced demise of three important college readiness tests that have been used in Kentucky for a number of years.

With ACT’s EXPLORE, PLAN and Compass tests all being shut down, Kentucky is going to lose important trend lines about real college readiness. Going forward, only unproved tests with no track record will be all that are available to fill the information gap for our eighth and tenth grade students. Furthermore, the calculation of Kentucky’s College and/or Career Readiness Rates also has to be changed because Compass was used for that statistic. That’s three different Kentucky trend lines that have been trashed because the ACT, Inc. made some questionable decisions about which tests it will offer in the future.

Something clearly isn’t right here. If Common Core is about college readiness, why is the ACT, Inc. shutting most of its major college readiness tests?

Is this shut down of important tests an attempt to hide the fact that minimum-standards-only Common Core cannot support fully testing college readiness the way EXPLORE, PLAN and Compass did? Robbins clearly thinks this is the case and I don’t like this incredibly bad ACT decision, either.