This presentation was presented at the 2011 National Conference on Student Assessment (CCSSO). The focus of this presentation is how to validate the common core state standards (CCSS) in math and ELA and the subsequent assessments that will be developed by state consortia. The CCSS specify the skills students need to be ready for post-secondary career training or college credit courses, yet much of the evidence has been based on professional judgments and reviews of standards and assessment frameworks specified by states and international assessments. A comprehensive validation strategy requires multiple sources of convergent evidence. This presentations reviews the sources of such evidence, the weight that should be attributed to such evidence and some preliminary thinking about how to proceed in developing a validation framework. The College Board's college readiness benchmarks, and how they have been empirically developed, are also discussed.