Having withstood challenges to its implementation of the Common Core, the Nashua School District appears to be doubling down on the new standards. Notice the highlighted bit from this Nashua Telegraph article today:
NASHUA – As New Hampshire continues work on implementing Common Core standards, a series of discussions among city education officials focused on curriculum and new technology Saturday morning at Nashua High School North.
The meeting, between members of the city education board and school administrators, took a closer look at the city’s existing curriculum and how to bring it up to the standards of the Common Core program.
….
At the meeting, Assistant Superintendent Karen Cerbase announced to the board a new process of evaluating teachers.
“At the end of a unit, there’s an assessment to make sure the teachers have met the standards of the unit,” Cerbase said.
Those assessments would be focused in the subjects of English Language Arts and mathematics and are slated to show critical thinking and problem solving skills of students, largely through extended response queries and technology enhanced items.
via Board of Education discusses Common Core at Nashua HS North – NashuaTelegraph.com.
This kind of testing requires real attention and resources. It will also help students learn to use their skills in real world situations – and prepare for the new tests in 2015.
I’ll add a link to the video of the meeting when it becomes available.
Advancing New Hampshire Public Education 
Though your highlighted piece does not tell the whole story – I.e., Nashua’s full context and design of its new teacher evaluation process – the system appears to be in line with the federal requirement that student performance must be included as a percentage (in Title I schools, 20%) of the indicators used for teacher evaluation. There are questions about the effectiveness of this mandate, many of which are documented by a number of recent research studies, and I do wonder about the extent to which we end up doing the very things the CCSS was ostensibly designed to replace.
I actually don’t think there’s any connection. The quote refers to instructional feedback, a different matter from evaluation/accountability. And on the 20% as performance in Title I schools, you do know that that 20% does not need to be testing, right?
My mistake if student performance is NOT included in the assessments noted in her description of the new evaluation process, but I think it needs further clarification in view of the details in the paragraph beginning “Those assessments would be focused…” In view of your own slight question mark on the issue, this might be worth looking at more closely.
Though test results are not an obligatory piece of the accountability system, you know that schools will use them, if only for the practical necessity of quantifying compliance with the 20% (or something less, in the case of all other schools). The state will also, in any event, provide Smarter Balanced scores as basis for exploring any potential discrepancies between local and state assessments.
Whether the test scores have existed for a long time and never been used. There’s no reason to assume they will now.