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"It's good to hear Randi Weingarten reinforcing her strong support for the Common Core Standards and rigorous assessments of college and career readiness. She's right - it is imperative that we get implementation right. That's why we continue to provide听 extensive resources and support for teachers. And that's why we've gone to great lengths to account for the increased difficulty of this year's assessments in teachers' growth scores - part of the multiple measures evaluation system the statewide teachers' union helped to craft - so that teachers are not penalized. In fact, we expect roughly the same percentage of teachers to be identified in each performance category (Ineffective, Developing, Effective, Highly Effective) this year as last year.听 We have asked districts to be thoughtful in their use of the data from this first year of Common Core assessments when evaluating teacher performance and we have every confidence that they will be.

"Our goal is to build an accurate measure of where students are on the ladder to career and college readiness and to focus instruction to help them climb that ladder.听 Our students are already accountable for the Common Core, but too many of our high school graduates don't find this out until they are forced to take remedial classes in college. They're forced to take high school classes at college prices or they enter the job market without marketable skills.