The largest education company in the world put reading passages from its new Common Core-aligned curriculum into sixth- and eighth-grade tests it administered in New York, prompting concerns that schools who used Pearson materials gained a testing advantage over those that did not. This is the first year of New York’s new Common Core-aligned statewide tests, and year two of education company Pearson’s five year, $32 million contract to provide grade 3-8 assessments in English language arts and math, “making it the first year this specific overlap between a Pearson Common Core curriculum and a Pearson Common Core-aligned assessment could have existed,” said Kathleen Porter-Magee, a fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “It’s less likely that this kind of passage duplication happened in the past.” Common Core is a set of national math and English requirements for grades K-12 that 45 states, including New York, have adopted. National tests corresponding to them will come out in 2014...