Standards

Moving From the Common-Assessment World to US Dept of Ed

By Catherine Gewertz — May 06, 2011 1 min read
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Here’s an inside-baseball tidbit for those of you who love to track the doings of the folks involved in common-standards-and-assessments work: Matt Gandal of Achieve is joining the U.S. Department of Education’s Implementation and Support Unit.

As reported earlier today by the intrepid Michele McNeil over at Politics K-12, Gandal will become part of a relatively new chunk of the U.S. DOE that oversees the way states put key federal initiatives—like the Race to the Top Assessment program—into action.

Achieve was a central player in the Common Core State Standards Initiative, and is now the project management partner for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, one of the two state consortia that are using federal Race to the Top funds to design assessments for the common standards.

While Gandal is Achieve’s executive vice president, it’s typically not his name that’s most closely associated with the organization’s common-assessments work, but those of Michael Cohen, and Laura Slover.

We don’t have details yet about what role Gandal will be playing at the Ed Department’s ISU, but we’ll keep you posted as we know more.

The goal of the unit is to provide better U.S. DOE assistance to states as they implement the plans for which they received federal stimulus funding, Education Secretary Arne Duncan told chief state school officers in a March letter introducing the unit.

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A version of this news article first appeared in the Curriculum Matters blog.