Education Week (1/10, Gewertz) reports on efforts to implement the Common Core by the ten California Office to Reform Education districts. The story notes that ED “recently granted eight of the CORE districts a waiver from the No Child Left Behind Act that essentially allows the group to set up its own accountability system.” As a result, the group has “created performance assessments that are intended to be complex, nuanced gauges of how students are doing as they’re learning, and to serve simultaneously as instructionally valuable exercises in and of themselves.”