Dive Brief:

• Last month, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam signed H.B. 1549, which mandates the state use its current assessment, TCAP, for the 2014-15 school year and then review proposals for new tests for the following years.  
• While the bill did not officially sever ties with PARCC, Haslam and other education officials sent the testing consortium a letter announcing its withdrawal from the program and stating it "will no longer be a governing state or a participating state.”
• All Tennessee officials are resigning from their respective PARCC committees.   

Dive Insight:

While PARCC was at one point adopted by 23 states and the District of Columbia, today only 15 remain with the testing consortium. Oklahoma, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Florida are some of the other states that have dropped their contracts with the assessment company.  

A major reason states are leaving the consortium is the feeling that it embodies federal overreach. While states may be okay with the Common Core, the idea of a national test appears to cross a boundary. Complicating this argument is the fact that the Common Core was created to assess students on the same standards so there would be a baseline.  If all students are taking different assessments, however, the baseline is disrupted.