Dive Brief:

• New Jersey students will still take the new Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) exams next year, however, state lawmakers want to hold off on tying the results of the Common Core-aligned exam to teachers evaluations.  
• Since the test is meant to measure students' abilities on the Common Core, lawmakers are saying it would be impossible to judge teachers on just a year of scores with nothing to measure improvement to.  
• The state's Assembly approved the decision already, and the Senate is expected to vote on Monday.  

Dive Insight:

New Jersey is not alone in this decision. The District of Columbia recently made the exact same decision and New York is also toying with the idea.  

Many states are reassessing the teacher evaluation portion of testing ever since the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wrote a statement urging states to scale back implementation of the Common Core and wait a year or two before using standards-based test scores to judge teachers.  

Somewhat surprisingly, the U.S. Education Department is not into this shift. While its decision-making has seemed linked to the Gates Foundation for quite sometime, at the end of the day, it isn't backing away from the No Child Left Behind requirement that states have teacher evaluation programs tied to test scores. Two weeks ago, when D.C. decided to hold off tying teacher evaluations to test scores, Raymonde Charles, an Education Department spokeswoman, emailed the AP the following statement, "Although we applaud District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) for their continued commitment to rigorous evaluation and support for their teachers, we know there are many who looked to DCPS as a pacesetter who will be disappointed with their desire to slow down."