New York is ahead of most states in its work to design detailed curricula and professional development for the common core and to build brand-new tests to reflect them. What's unfolding in the Empire State as a result of that work illustrates the way the common standards can pressure changes in the education landscape, and torque the tensions…

In the first year of a pilot program, 18 New York City schools are digging into new ways to accomplish two objectives emphasized in the common-core standards: (1) engage students in increasingly complex texts as they move through school; and (2) help them conquer literacy skills specific to disciplines such as history and science. Spearheaded by…

Two national studies paint a portrait of the bumpy road that many students face after high school and suggest that better academic preparation and guidance could have smoothed the way. The studies, each based primarily on separate surveys of 1,300 or more 18- to 25-year-olds, come from Public Agenda, a nonprofit opinion-research group in New York…