On the ESSA innovative assessment pilot

It's worth giving a read to this article on the innovative assessments pilot that's part of ESSA. Note first that states have been given a thirty day window on signalling their intent to apply; the first thing I heard on that was "it's not enough time."

One reason for states’ likely reluctance is that the language of ESSA places some fairly strict requirements on them for their testing experiments. For instance, the new assessments must be comparable to existing state tests, and they must eventually be taken statewide. And the assessments have to be rolled out among a broad set of student populations and subgroups, as Alyson points out in her Politics K-12 blog post.

Note, as well, that there's no money attached to the pilot, and one thing everyone agrees on is other assessments are NOT CHEAP.
There's a bit more on this over at EdWeek, and some razzing from New Hampshire over here.