The standardized testing landscape is fragmenting. The federal foundation remains; the state-by-state changes have shifted the picture. An honest current state.

Chronic absenteeism doubled during the pandemic and has not fully recovered. What the current numbers show, why they persist, and which interventions are working.

We argue that our testing-obsessed education system is failing to prepare kids for a complex future, and we propose an "UnCommon Core" of skills and understandings—from living lightly on the Earth to networked learning and democratic participation—that every child should develop, taught through rich, integrated, real-world contexts rather than test-driven, siloed curricula.