About a year ago, things lightened up at home. My parenting responsibilities were more manageable. (She says vaguely.) So, I started getting more involved in community affairs mostly around the local schools. I attended meetings for three PTAs (Special Ed, Middle School, High School). I started going to Board of Ed meetings and attending other school informational meetings. I began working with a group of parents that helped set up social activities for special needs kids. I did a few other town activities, mostly around helping special ed kids and adults in the community. I joined Facebook groups for local parents. I talked with education and political leaders in this town and other neighboring towns about issues.
Through these activities, I met many genuinely wonderful people who give their time and their energies towards amazing programs. And you all know that I’m a huge geek for politics. I love watching people directly participate in politics. It’s been a transformational experience for me.
Over the past few months, the issue of the Common Core and the upcoming PARCC kept coming up at local school board meetings. People began talking about it on the Facebook pages. So, I started doing my homework. I read a lot and asked questions. Then I wrote about it.
I’m not a curriculum or standards expert. My PhD is in political science with a specialization in education policy. My dissertation was on the politics of school vouchers. I worked for eight years as an education policy researcher, while in grad school. I taught graduate classes at Columbia’s Teacher’s College on the Politics of Education. One of my lectures traced the history of the standards movement. I wrote scholarly papers on the politics of education. Because of certain family issues, I’m now a SAHP who writes occasional articles on education.
The Common Core was developed by a consortium of state leaders, education experts, and private organizations. It is a very broad brushwork of goals for education. It does not prescribe specific textbooks. It was intended to provide some uniform direction for education across the country. It was not developed by the federal government, though it was certainly supported and encouraged by the Department of Education. It was developed and supported by both Republicans and Democrats. In fact, it was supported by every major education association in this country, including the teachers’ union. Educators were involved in writing the goals. It was instituted in most states several years ago.
Then politics came into the picture. State legislatures, which had their own political agendas, wrote legislation that linked teacher evaluations with the test. Teachers’ unions protested and, in my opinion, these protests were valid. Teachers should not be evaluated based on these tests. But that’s another topic.
Parents haven’t had much problem with the Common Core, which has been in place for three years. Now, they began to seriously worry about the PARCC test. The PARCC is the new standardized test that accompanies the Common Core. It’s very similar to the existing standardized tests in this state, but there are certain differences. This test will be taken on computers. It is broken up into small chunks over five days, rather than medium chunks over four days.
I attended a meeting yesterday to discuss how the test would be administered to kids with special needs. It sounded great. A lot of accommodations for our kids are built into this exam. If a special education kid needs to have directions read out loud, then can press a button on the computer which will read the directions out loud. In the past, a teacher had to hover over the kid and read directions when needed. If a kid has trouble with technology, they can take a written version of the test. My kid loves the computer and hates writing things out, so he’ll be extremely happy.
But he’ll still fail the reading test. Yes, my special ed will fail the test and I don’t care. We all know that he reads two grades below level, because he’s a hyperlexic. He’s great at decoding, but poor at language comprehension. He failed the previous standardized test and he’ll fail this one. And it won’t matter. He’ll still have the same supports in school, the same great teachers, the same everything. One hour of test taking won’t demoralize him. I won’t tell him that he failed, so there’s no harm.
These standardized tests are not supposed to tell you anything about your kid that you and his/her teachers don’t already know. If a kid who normally does well in school bombs the test, then he/she probably just had a bad day. They are designed to provide information — hard data — for educational leaders to evaluate the performance of large groups of kids. It will give me the tools to compare my town with towns of similar socio-economic demographics and size. Within a town, administrators can see whether or not an entire grade of kids does well compared to other grades. If the whole sixth grade class continues to dip in performance on the reading test, then the school district should re-examine the fifth grade curriculum. It’s a tool. That’s it.
We have standardized tests right now, but each state has its own system. So, we can’t compare performance between New Jersey and Georgia, let’s say. I kinda want to know how the schools in New Jersey stack up against schools in Georgia. I think we’ll do well, but I want to know. How do kids in urban areas of Pennsylvania compare with urban kids in Indiana? If one state is doing much better, then I want to know what the schools are doing there. Can we replicate successful models?
As I said, I’m not an expert on curriculum, so I can’t tell you whether or not this particular system is way better than other programs. I trust the experts on this one. And, as I also said, the experts came from diverse political groups and from all areas of education. I do know that studies have shown that it is very bad for kids and teachers to keep switching systems on them. Let’s keep what we have and make changes where necessary. Let’s not start from scratch.
Apt. 11d 
The concern I’m hearing about the PARCC is that it’s way too difficult and takes up too much time (not just the seven hours in class, but organizing for it, prepping, etc). This is coming from a good friend who is a high school English teacher. She now teaches in a rural area and has experience teaching in a dangerous and economically depressed urban area. She said the material on it is much too advanced, including things she read as an English major in college.
It would be one thing if this was only discouraging and challenging for the smart kids – they have parents who can tell them it (something that they have to spend a whole week doing, and months preparing for) really doesn’t matter. Not that this is completely unimportant – her own brilliant daughter gets totally stressed out about standardized tests, much to her consternation. But her concern is the impact this has on kids who have no shot at passing it. She especially hated giving these tests to her hardworking urban school kids, and making them longer and harder only makes things worse. Anyway, she’s no suburban mom and she’s starting to talk about organizing an opt-out here.
Are you impressed that I manage to critique your argument without referring to it as “filth”? I can’t believe those commenters!
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As I said, my kid will fail the test. He has always failed the standardized test and will fail this one. It really doesn’t bother him. His teachers always give him and his classmates little treats after the test to make them feel better. And then he forgets about it.
If this test is harder than previous tests, then all kids will do badly. The privileged kids in suburban areas will also do less well than previous tests. It will be a constant variable.
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My son the high school junior is on the spectrum, and a very average student. His math isn’t all that great but he has always read — and comprehended — on the upper edges of grade level. He used to be like Ian: when a standardized test was done, it was done, out of sight, out of mind. But now he is a much more self-aware teenager (as Ian will be one day, before you know it) and being on teen on the spectrum is hard. All sorts of failures are plentiful and they are not easy to blow off anymore.
My kids will fortunately only have to take one of the PARCC tests, in American Government next year (I’d be happier with NONE but I’ll certainly take this). It won’t take the place of the regular classroom tests, which the teachers and parents find useful, because they give us real time information, and because they force our students to review and really learn the material. The PARCC won’t take the place of the final exam either, because the results won’t be returned until after the school year is over.
It’s just a gratuitous opportunity to stress out my kid (and plenty of others, both typically-developing and not). Real life presents enough challenges to my kid, what is the point of this one? I’m sorry, but nothing in this blog post or the Atlantic article convinced me of the usefulness of the PARCC tests. We already know Blue, Northeastern states have stronger schools than say, Mississippi or Alabama; they are stronger in every measure of quality of life except arguably the weather in January.
As others have pointed out, the NAEP tests already give us plenty of information to compare schools and states against. It’s also not necessary to test every student, MULTIPLE times each year: there *is* a such thing as sampling. As I understand it, it’s a very developed technique for quality control.
I went over to the Atlantic and read every single comment. There are a few that are totally off the wall, we can forget those. But most of them were informed, well-reasoned and full of very good points, and I count among the ones with good points most of the rudest and vituperative ones (and most of the comments were not rude). Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater! If you want to be intellectually honest, you must consider the arguments against the PARCC and for that matter, the Common Core as well. You have to take it as a compliment that people think you are worth having the flaws in your reasoning pointed out to you.
If I was Czarina of the World, I’d issue an edict that no one could discuss the PARCC tests until they went to the PARCC website and tried the high school ELA sample questions out. I gave them a whirl and I thought that above all else, it was a test of my working memory. Which is completely besides the point. YMMV of course.
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Wow. I just tried the test. I did not do well, though I do not know if I got a passing score. And, what’s more, though I suppose I could learn to do better, and might have done better when I was in the midst of doing literature analysis or worked harder, it is not a kind of reading/critical thinking I actually want to do or think is correlated with general reading skills of the type I do need to do.
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bj, I appreciate you taking my suggestion and trying out the PARCC ELA test. If everyone on this thread did the same, the conversation would shift dramatically.
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Great assessment, and in general I’m in agreement. I think the CC is a step in the right direction, and the testing style is good.
At the lower grades, however, there are more issues. First, kids need to be trained to take the test. Test-taking skills are not innate for kindergartners (neither is sitting still. grr). Second, districts place a lot of value in these tests, and therefore have many preliminary tests leading up to the PARCC, which essentially means TESTS ALL THE TIME. Obviously this is a district choice that we in our town in Mass are fighting, but there is this vicious cycle that the PARCC seems to be imposing, and I can’t really think of a solution to this!
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Yes, exactly – both the training to be tested and the preliminary tests to make sure the real tests reflect their capabilities take up a lot of time. And the fact that schools are used to dedicating 5 hours over four days for a test doesn’t mean that it’s no problem to have 7 hours over five days. An entire week built around testing is a week that’s not spent teaching (and typically gives no information to the teachers themselves that they don’t already have).
My teacher friend said that at her former school, where kids often started off reading three or four years behind grade level, it was really painful to sit with her students for hours and watch them struggle through a test they knew they all would fail. She and other faculty tried to be as supportive as possible, but it’s just not a good thing to do to kids. I’m sympathetic to the idea of having some national test and in fact think Common Core is a good idea in principle, but you shouldn’t write off the objections to the test as just “white suburban moms whining.” The non-white, non-suburban parents are concerned too.
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I had to put some limits on the scope of the article. I didn’t touch the issues of urban parents in the article simply because of space limitations. I certainly didn’t dismiss their issues.
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Every state has already been doing standardized tests for ages. This exam is really similar. The differences are the tech component and the small chunk method. It will also be the first time a test is administered across many states.
I’m sure that kindergarteners are terrible at sitting still and test taking. My kids certainly had trouble sitting still at that age, even my typical kid. But again, this is a constant variable and will affect all kids equally.
If some districts are over-prepping kids, then that’s a problem. I haven’t seen that at all in my town and haven’t heard stories about other near by towns. I talked to a number of people on school boards in the area and they are completely baffled by this backlash.
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I won’t lie, I stumbled across your blog after reading the article on The Atlantic. I want to run through with you my own, personal scenario with our son and see how you would feel, if you were me. Our 10-year-old son has autism, diagnosed at 24 months. He is high functioning. No supports in school, after years and years of wraparound therapy. I know Arne Duncan would have a good laugh when I say this, but he’s smart. Really smart. Since the third grade, never anything less than an A-. He was flagged for inclusion in our school’s gifted and talented (GATE) program at the end of third grade, which was also the same year he took the NJASK. As a chronic over-achiever, he tends to put a lot of pressure on himself especially during big tests. They prepped for NJASK pretty hardcore, the second half of third grade. He took the test, barfed on the second morning of the test before school, barfed IN school on the third day, couldn’t sleep at night, wouldn’t eat. Just worked himself up into a total tizzy. But then it was done, and we moved on. In the fourth grade, we learned that he didn’t even score ‘proficient’ in the third grade NJASK. Regardless, he performed beautifully in GATE. Took a lot of pride at being included in the program. He went over and beyond what was asked of him, got an A+, and his GATE teacher issued him a strong recommendation to stay in the program. Also, at the end of his fourth grade year, he took the NJASK a second time. Still pretty anxious about it, but not as bad as he had been in the third grade because — I suspect — he felt like he had had a great year, kicked butt in GATE, and wasn’t so worried about the results anymore. We assured him, repeatedly, that everything was fine and to just do his best and don’t stress out about it. So, moving on again. In the summer between fourth and fifth grade, we received a call from his principal. Our son was being exited from the GATE program in FIFTH grade because of his low NJASK score in the THIRD grade. Despite an A+, despite a strong teacher recommendation, he was kicked out of a program that he loved being in, that he deserved to be in. This was devastating for him. It still is. They built him up, made him feel so good about himself, and then pulled the rug out from under him because of his performance on ONE test, that was administered a year-and-a-half earlier. And do you want to know the kicker? Two months into his fifth grade year, we learned that he got a perfect score on the NJASK last year. Too little, too late, his district says. The placement is the placement. So now I’ve got this kid, this kid who is COMPLETELY demoralized, feels like a failure, feels like he’s dumb. I’ve spent all school year building him back up again, trying like hell to get him to hang in there, to do his best. And he’s got this massive test awaiting him next month. Unlike you, I can no longer pat him on the head — like we did in fourth grade — and say, ‘just do your best! it doesn’t matter how you score.’ Because he’s painfully, painfully aware that yes, in his school district, it happens to matter VERY MUCH how you do. Would you be as blase about these tests with your children if this had been your experience? I really am genuinely interested to know.
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I think you need to talk to more teachers. And respect the expertise that a dissenting teacher brings to an issue like this a bit more as well.
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Yes! That’s my view about anyone who wants to talk about education at a public policy level. Listen to the teachers. As a parents and someone who learns easily in a variety of standard ways, I have a tendency to model educational systems on what works for me or my child. Observing even a few of my children’s friends in settings where they are trying to learn/accomplish something has shown how different kids are, in their learning approach, motivation, and tolerance for frustration/failure. Teachers know how things work in practice and not theory, and we *have* to listen to them.
There’s a tendency among the educated elite to buy into the notion that teachers are losers, the old maxim of “those who can’t do, teach.” But when we fall into this trap, we don’t listen to what’s happening in the classroom.
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You know that one of my sons has high functioning autism, too, right? I’m HAPPY to talk about the problems with special education. In fact, you usually can’t get me to stop talking about it. But today, I want to keep on topic of the common core.
Let me just say, that you should probably hire a lawyer.
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If you wanted to stay on the topic of Common Core, why devote 80% of this blog post to your thoughts on standardized testing? In any event, I am not completely opposed to CC, in theory. But I believe that PARCC (or SBAC) and CC are so intertwined it’s impossible to separate the two. I also find it disingenuous to imply that just because standardized tests have been around “forever” that the level of testing THEN is the same as it is NOW. That’s quite simply untrue. The high stakes attached to these tests, the amount of time spent preparing for these tests, and the pressure on students to perform well on these tests has never been greater.
My husband is a non tenured teacher in the same school district. Lawyering up didn’t seem like a smart choice for our family, as a whole. So my son took this one on the chin. I live with the fallout daily, all these many months later. And believe me when I tell you that he is an absolute mess as PARCC approaches. He is putting so much pressure on himself to perform well on this test that he is literally making himself sick. As his parent, I find it heartbreaking. This is not the academic experience I want for my son. Can you blame me?
And for what it’s worth, it’s a very small district. There were 21 students in my son’s fourth grade GATE class. Five of them were exited over the summer, for low NJASK scores in third grade. Almost one quarter of the class. I think this happens a lot more than you might think. Now, based on his perfect NJASK score in fourth grade, I’ve no doubt that he’ll be invited back to the smart kid party in sixth grade. Bounced around like a ping pong ball, gifted one year, not gifted the next, then gifted again — all because of how he happens to perform on one test. This is wrong, and it needs to stop.
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What does PARCC have to do with Common Core? They were doing the same types of tests in the 80s. That is, is PARCC anything different from the SRA we took?
I don’t know how they were picking people for GATE classes back then, because my school was too small to have one. They sold us donuts every day and the teachers all come back from lunch smelling like the bottom of an ashtray. Good times.
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Gah, you must feel totally powerless here. The district has all the power, not just in terms of picking and choosing which kids go in GATE but also over your husband!
But it’s the *district* that is doing this, not the curriculum or the test.
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Yes, Wendy. It’s a tough spot to be in. There are many, many things I would like to say to our district but I’m essentially muzzled. The thing is, my district is not filled with bad guys. They are good people, completely well-intentioned, making bad decisions in reaction to the pressure being put on THEM from the state. At least, I like to believe that. It helps me sleep at night hahaha.
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I’m deeply involved in special education in the area. I have never heard of this happening to any other kid. I know plenty of kids who have had to leave a public education setting, because the school district was unable to provide the necessary supports for the kid. In those cases, the public schools had to pay for a private school placement. But I’ve never heard of the decision being based entirely on a test score. A lawyer would deal with that problem in five minutes.
Oh wait, I read too quickly. Your problem is with the GATE program? This is an individual school issue.
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Are you serious MH? I think you need to do some reading. Here’s a good place to start.
http://www.parcconline.org/achieving-common-core
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That’s 34 pages. There’s no way I’m reading all that. My point is that standardized testing with all the pressures and whatnot is not something new to the Common Core.
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Yes, you’re right, MH. Standardized tests didn’t just appear out of the blue along with the Common Core.
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But part of this new testing movement is the uses to which the tests will be put, not the low stakes, the teacher looks at the test results to see if there’s issues with a particular student or part of the curriculum (that’s how our private school uses them), but for evaluating students, teachers, and schools. That’s what’s new to this movement, and, I feel we’re rushing into those uses without good ideas about validity.
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The tests *are* different MH. Without going into the issues surrounding the content (e.g., that the tests ask primary students for things that they are not developmentally ready for), here are a few ways they are different:
They require you to learn how to use the specific PARCC computer program, for example, there is a way to highlight text (that would have helped me when I went through the HS ELA sample at the website). My school district has been testing out how to teach the elementary school students how to use the program, and that is time they could have dedicated to teaching something — anything! — with broader applications than the techniques required for just one testing format. And what happens to students who are less computer-savvy, who are on the other side of the digital divide? I certainly didn’t have to learn any special skill for any test beyond how to fill in a bubble — don’t go out of the lines, and if you must erase, do it really, really well. That took up what, five minutes of class time?
The math tests require a fair amount of writing, in that you are asked for example, to describe how you knew how to solve the problem — though I am assuming that a lot of teachers will be drilling the kids on boilerplate for that sort of question: “I knew it was a division problem because I had to distribute a certain number of items into a smaller number of categories.” But again, is that the best use of time? The writing requirement will certainly work against kids who are strong in math but weaker in writing (some kids on the spectrum, certainly, and I imagine some ELLs as well).
It’s been said before, but their sheer length. They take up days and days. If you think a kid leaves the testing room after one “chunk” and then goes on to function well the rest of the day in class… And there are so MANY of them.
Finally, the added pressure and sense of urgency comes from teachers and administrators who are scared that their schools and livelihoods are on the line. The chain-smoking teachers of your youth never could have imagined that. The kids can’t help but pick up that sense of fear when their lessons turn from the usual subjects to how to use the PARCC computer program, how to answer the math essay questions, etc. Geez, when my kid was in middle school, in the run-up to the state testing season, the art classes were making posters that were hung up in all the hallways with advice like, “Eat a good breakfast before the test!” and “You’re first guess is usually the Right Answer!”
Oh no, not done yet, I thought of another reason the CC/PARCC tests are different, though admittedly this reason is out of the scope of this post. The GED is being revamped to incorporate the CC requirements,and moved to a computer format. The expected result is that the pass rate is going to go way, way down and people who could have benefitted from having a GED, as far as what kinds of jobs they will be able to get, will be forever shut out, leaving them in extreme poverty. If you think I am exaggerating, do a little goggling, I promise it won’t be as time-consuming as reading 34 pages on the PARRC site.
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Let me just say to people who are new to this blog. This is not the comment section of the Atlantic. The number one rule is be nice, even with people that you disagree with. I delete rude comments.
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I am, in general, a fan of standardized testing, low stakes standardized testing. I think testing provides useful feedback to students and parents (I can’t speak for teachers, because, I hear from many teachers that they know what the tests tell them anyway, and, without experience, I wouldn’t want to counter their testimony; they are the experts in teaching).
But, the arguments I’ve heard from teachers is the issue of time spent on prep, the time spent on testing, the content/method of testing, and the effect on the children who struggle, and, money, either with the material, or with testing.
I don’t think that it’s sufficient to rely on one (or two or three) experience to examine the impact on students who struggle. Some kids are more effected than others. I also worry about the money and time — and I want more experimentation before we embrace the testing.
I think my biggest issue with common core/testing is the belief that these standards will replace the support of and hope for a professional work force.
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In New Jersey, placement decisions for inclusion in the state-mandated Gifted and Talented Program is “left to the discretion” of each individual school district. The state recommends that schools make their decisions based on a “multitude” of factors, including but not limited to overall grade, teacher input and standardized test scores. Unlucky for us, the rubric in our district is heavily weighted toward said test scores. Per the state, however, our district is operating within its rights. Our district doesn’t completely discount teacher input and grades, but they choose to put most of their faith in standardized test scores. Frankly, it’s laziness. Why bother sorting through page after page of teacher recommendations when you can just look at the NJASK (or, now, PARCC) scores and cut out everyone below the magic number?
There is pending legislation in New Jersey that would forbid districts from using PARCC scores for placement in gifted and talented programs for three years. Clearly, we aren’t the only family to encounter this problem. Nobody hopes it passes more than me.
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“Why bother sorting through page after page of teacher recommendations when you can just look at the NJASK (or, now, PARCC) scores and cut out everyone below the magic number?”
Because there are only 21 students in the class, and it can’t be that much more work to look at the students individually. Argh.
Funny–this conversation had me curious about the PARCC pilot our district did last year. My 6th grader did the pilot testing. I just emailed the principal and asked about the results, but he said the district never got the results. Weird, but ok. I am lucky though that my now-7th grader, who is on the spectrum, has little anxiety (kind of unusual for a spectrummy kid, but he does get very anxious when he’s not sure what’s the plan/schedule is for whatever; fortunately, schools are very schedule-oriented, so he knows far enough in advance what’s happening).
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Our GATE program (the self-contained, cohort program) requires 99% on both verbal/math ability on the CogAT and 95% on math/verbal achievement (on the MAP) for access, with no accommodations. It’s not clear to me why this flies by the rules, but, that’s the practice.
(there is an appeals process in which other scores, from standard IQ tests and other achievement tests can be used, but, ultimately, a score cutoff is required).
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I hope we can have a non-rude discussion (the Atlantic did not qualify — being rude undermines the substantive discussion).
As I’ve said, I like tests. So unlike some folks, who just hate tests, it should be possible to convince me that these tests will benefit education. But I consistently feel that the common core and the testing around it have been developed by theorists and not practicers.
I’ve made the comparison to others about safety procedures in hospitals (some of which I am familiar with). Sometimes, people make rules that I consider CYA rules; they are impractical, and no one will really follow them, but by having those rules in place, if anything goes wrong, the hands-on-the ground person can be blamed for not following rules. NPR recently ran a piece on nurses and injuries, and many of the comments on the piece were on that issue. Say, for example, a rule will be in place that says that two nurses must always move a patient. But, the patient will be in distress, and need, say, to go to the bathroom, and two nurses won’t be available. So, the nurse, dealing with the person in front of them, moves the patient. And then, any injury is their fault, because they didn’t follow rules.
I feel like the testing rules are being proposed in the same way, an idea that seems like a good one, but, in practice could turn harmful. As an extreme example, high-stakes testing culture inevitably turns to cheating. That’s the lesson of the Asian testing regimes. We hear about it for SATs, but it’s a problem at every level.
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In NJ, will proficiency on these tests be required for graduation/high school diplomas? I believe that is the requirement in our state. At Out In Left Field, Katherine Beals, posed this baffler:
http://oilf.blogspot.com/2014/12/bonus-baffler.html
The “baffler” is about a child, putatively her’s, who has a large disparity between math/reading scores, on the NCLB/CCSS state test, which will be required for graduation (soon?) for most children.
Good use? Bad use? I commented at her post, and, I do feel that if the tests are actually meaningful and reflect competency and we think competency in the task is necessary (and, I would need to see validity data to feel comfortable on that question), that they can’t be ignored on evaluating a student.
In the case Missy is reporting, I’d argue that the tests are not valid, that they are not reflecting the competency of the student. But, if, as I believe they do in Student X’s case at Out In Left Field, they actually reflect a lack of competency in the language task being tested, and we’ve decided that the competency in those tasks is required for graduation, how should that lack of competency be reported?
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That’s very interesting and hits close to home, because despite my child’s wildly disparate NJASK math scores (below proficient one year, perfect the next) he has scored below proficient both years in Language Arts. What you wouldn’t know from looking at those scores, however, is that he is an A+ student in Language Arts, LOVES to read and write and in fact made the school newspaper this year as a fifth grader — an extracurricular that has historically been open only to eighth graders. He’s not a weak Language Arts student; he’s the exact opposite.
But seriously….I can feel Arne cringing when I write that. I really, really can. Hahaha.
My point is that, for whatever reason, he bombs the LA portion of standardized tests. He can’t tell us why. His teachers can’t tell us why, because he aces everything they put in front of him. And — most importantly — the companies that authored the tests he’s bombed thus far can’t tell us why, either. I’m not saying his scores should be ignored altogether. And I can’t even say for sure which one of his NJASK math scores is the anomaly. Maybe he was so anxious in third grade that he just fell apart and couldn’t recover? Or maybe he over-achieved in fourth grade? I’m just saying that the results of these tests are being misinterpreted and, at times, misused by school districts. They aren’t being considered in the proper context. When you factor in all the lost instructional time (a real thing Laura! I promise!) it’s just adding insult to injury.
That said, my son is taking the PARCC. He does not want to refuse. And you know what? His autonomy is something he’s had to fight very hard for, harder than most of his peers. I’m not going to rob him of it just because we happen to disagree.
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The director of special ed for the town told us yesterday that there is no way that this test will be used as a graduation requirement.
I just got an e-mail from someone who accused me of being secretly employed by a testing company.
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You should try to get that job. It’s an example of where I think our education money is going. It doesn’t have to be secret, and I bet you would be good at relaying information.
As I’ve said, I am unsure about Common Core/testing. But, I find the ideological anti-test reaction to sometimes be based on misinformation and fear, in an analogy similar to the anti-vaxers, as you pointed out in a previous post. I think information is a useful addition to the conversation, even if I’m going to ultimately argue that the testing will harm rather than help the educational enterprise. So, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a perfectly moral job, to help spread information on common core, and, as you said in the Atlantic article, one that has been done poorly, in the same way that initial reactions to anti-vaccination was.
Is Beals wrong about the test being required (in, I think, Pennsylvania)? She’s oblique in her reference to the information, so I can’t actually tell if my interpretation, that 99% of the kids are going to have to pass the test to get their diplomas is correct.
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PS: I was surprised at how virulent the reaction was to your Atlantic article. I hadn’t realized how visceral and emotional people’s reaction to testing was — I still don’t get it, but I think it’s lesson in how testing affects different people. Frankly some people seem to react to testing the way I’d react to the suggestion that education would be improved if we could hit the students occasionally when they got answers wrong.
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The commenters inadvertently proved my point.
On Twitter, my reactions have been either super strongly positive or the super hateful. I’m going to be a radio news program in MD on Monday morning.
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Good luck on the radio. Sounds fun.
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But here, we’re being measured, right? 🙂
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Katherine Beals, talking about the issue of common core standards and special needs children more generally:
ttp://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-common-core-is-tough-on-kids-with-special-needs/283973/#disqus_thread
Interesting how the comments thread on that post is much less rude than the one on yours, even though there is significant disagreement.
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I’ve actually worked for a testing company designing standardized tests – which is interesting when you have an HFA kid or two. The companies are so careful not to include material which might give an advantage to anyone from a particular socioeconomic group, race, gender, nationality, etc (i.e. No passages about family pets which are dogs since some cultures don’t do that; no passages about birthday parties in case you were in foster car and didn’t get one that year; no questions about sleepaway camp, sailing or electronics, etc. etc. etc. )
At the same time, they’re completely unaware of the degree to which so many of these tests are actually a test of social skills. (I.E. After finding out that her dog was missing, Jane felt which of the following things: a. upset b. angry, etc.) At meetings, I would always raise this issue but never got anywhere.
It’s strange to me because if the reading comprehension questions consisted of a section of Ikea directions on how to assemble a bookcase, my kids would hit it out of the park. Questions about people are feeling after things occur? Not so much. Really makes you wonder what intelligence is and how much of it is a construct.
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But, this is the problem that occurs whenever you start discussing common standards. My scientific field is neuroscience, hot now, but I entered it in the early days, when it was still being developed out of biophysics, molecular biology, cognitive science, psychology (with a smattering of engineers, physicists, and mathematicians, and even the occasional linguist and philosopher thrown in). Discussions about “common standards” always went nowhere, because the knowledge base in the incipient field was so broad that it was impossible to know everything, and each individual field had a strong core of its own. We couldn’t agree generally, whether they should know the details of electrical circuits, or the psychology of memory or some completely different set of knowledge. In theory, a student was supposed to know those two things if they studied the neurophysiology of memory circuits, and another set of info if they studied something different. In practice, students could end up knowing nothing but what was in their thesis.
I see this same problem in the general concept of a common core. Do we have agreement as a society on whether reading IKEA instructions or the meaning/history/emotional impact of the Gettysburg address is more important? Does it depend on the student? I don’t know that we should get bogged down in these details, but we inevitably end up discussing them. How much of what we personally believe unimportant are willing to force our children to do? And how much of what we think is important will that drive out?
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Oh, Ian would love a reading passage with IKEA packing instructions!
I would love it if tests would be more inclusive of various neurological learning styles, but it doesn’t make me upset, because standardized tests don’t tell me anything about my kid. They tell me about large numbers of kids in a particular school district or region. Since I’m fairly certain that my kid is an outlier, it doesn’t make sense to make a test that is great for him.
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In WA state, we are told that the tests will be required for high school graduation.
http://www.k12.wa.us/assessment/statetesting/faq.aspx#2
The language on special populations is complicated for me, so I might be wrong in my interpretation. But, I think, maybe, though, students with IEPs can receive a “Certificate of Individual Achievement” instead of a Certificate of Academic Achievement, if they can’t meet the standardized testing requirements.
http://www.k12.wa.us/assessment/GraduationAlternatives/default.aspx
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Yes, whether or not to use the PARCCs as a graduation requirement appears to be a state-by-state thing. IIRC, Ohio will be requiring passing PARCC test scores for graduation a couple of years from now. I am under the impression Ohio will do the same for IEP kids as it has done with the current graduation tests — if you take them and fail them twice, you’ll be quietly excused. If I find where my husband put the district hand-out from the PARCC Information Presentation, and I’m wrong, I’ll come back and amend this comment.
I think the idea of a “Certificate of Individual Achievement” for IEP students is telling and very much worth commenting on. For years I’ve been told how wonderful the NCLB tests were for special ed students because they force the schools to really work at educating them, Why in the olden days, IEP kids were shown movies all day, Nobody tried to teach them anything, Now we see how much our kids can learn!
Well, I never believed the NCLB tests were good for anybody and it certainly sounds like the PARCC tests might have some unintended consequences. Schools that are working furiously on getting the more average students to pass the PARCCS so they can graduate might not put resources toward kids who can get by with a “Certificate.”
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I’m an English teacher and I would probably fail a test where the reading sample was IKEA packing directions!
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Well, since IKEA instructions are in pictures, it probably wouldn’t be relevant that you’re an English teacher!
DId note that the PARCC test had video.
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I think so much really differs by district, both in terms of the extent to which the testing is “high stakes” and also the extent to which the districts prepare for it with practice tests, etc.
In NJ, the PARCC test starts in 3rd grade, so there is no issue about kindergartners being antsy. They can get antsy, but they won’t be taking the test.
In my district in NJ, the PARCC can be used as one potential metric for a graduation requirement. It is not necessary to graduate, however, since students can alternatively use their SAT or PSAT scores, or arrange to put together a portfolio of work completed in lieu of test scores. The latter needs arranging, but it is a way to avoid test anxiety.
Two things our district administrators stress, which ring true to me for a number of reasons undisclosed on this blog: 1.) the “training to take the test” component of the school day is limited to maybe 1 or 2 hours in the entire school year. Students may spend about an hour learning the interface and then another doing a practice test. This is for the elementary level — I’m not sure about HS; 2.) the PARCC may be used to inform about the gifted program, but that program has an IQ test requirement, so the PARCC would be one of several metrics (including teacher observation) that will flag potential gifted students (and once in, students in the gifted program aren’t booted, so a bad grade on the PARCC will not hurt that); and 3.) student grades, teacher evaluations, holistically, are used alongside the PARCC to make determinations about course choice and trajectory.
My school is very calm about the test; from what I observe, the most nervous and anxious people are the parents and they transmit this concern to their kids. However, I am lucky to be in a school district with a BOE and admin that shares my values and is reponsive to these issues. I think many parents should express their concerns to their districts regarding their issues about the PARCC — so much regional and district variation means that the problem is not with the test or the curriculum, but likely how it is administered at the local level. And in the U.S., that is heavily heavily decentralized.
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Or maybe it really is all Arne Duncan’s fault?
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If it’s any single individual’s “fault,” I think it’s mostly Bill Gates’ fault, but David “nobody gives a sh*t what you think or feel” Coleman is a close second.
You can goggle that pretty easily. Here’s a short article to start with: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulled-off-the-swift-common-core-revolution/2014/06/07/a830e32e-ec34-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html
My impression has always been that Arne is less of a mastermind and more of the deputy who carries things out. But that doesn’t make any less complicit of course.
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Julie G, I completely agree with your assessment and I wish — like you can’t believe — that our district performed like your district. Where students are treated as human beings, and not data producing problems, in need of solving. Unfortunately it does not, and I guess the onus is on us as the electorate to put different board members in place.
I would add, however, that I sincerely doubt my son is anxious as a result of me (or my Common Core loving math teacher husband hahaha). We have a second grader, and I have absolutely NO reservations about him taking the PARCC next year. He’s just a different kid, not on the spectrum, and he can handle the pressure a whole lot better than my 10-year-old. My 10-year-old has anxiety when it’s sunny outside and the weatherman says it will be cloudy. He has anxiety if I make a left turn, when he thought I’d make a right turn. If his socks have bumps. It could literally be anything. Some kids are just anxiety prone, and it doesn’t matter what you say or what you do. I happen to have been blessed with one of them 😉
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Good points, Julie. Let me add a couple more…
I do think that implementation works differently in different towns. Here in New Jersey, things are super complicated, because we have so many tiny little towns with their own style of doing things. Our town, like Julie’s, hasn’t done any test prep. The school board AND the teachers have no issues with it. I talked to a teacher yesterday, who thought that the PARCC was fine for her own kids and her students. There is no stress about the technology component.
But, still, there are parents, who are upset for all the reasons I laid out in the article. A lot of misinformation. We’ll find out how many parents opt their kids out in the end. And, BTW, the kids who opt out will be marked as “not making progress” and pull down the overall test scores of the town.
I think there are some people who should opt out. Unusual dibilitating anxiety is a good reason. A person close to the family has that condition, so I’ve seen it. It’s a medical issue. That sounds like a very valid, personal reason to me.
And just to clarify, because this is one of the issues that keeps coming up around here, local school boards CAN make a big difference in implementation, but they CANNOT refuse to administer the test. They have no control over the content of the test. If they refuse to administer the test, the state will remove funding from the town. State funding is about 50% of any school budget.
If you hate the PARCC test even when it is administered through a sane local school district, then you should call your state assembly person.
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This thread is a lot of anecdote, which is fine. There is a place for anecdote (I certainly use them) but we shouldn’t confuse the things our own school districts are/are not doing with some bigger truth or trend. How any of our individual children fare isn’t the point, whether you have a kid who can sail through these exams or if a lot of personal pain is involved (and Missy, though my kid will never be in your kid’s situation, I feel for you).
One thing that really concerns me is what kind of follow-up all these very major changes are going to have. If, for example, special ed kids are pushed aside because they can get those new-fangled Certificates of Attendance or Effort, or whatever, well, who is going to be tracking how many IEP students are affected and the long-term consequences?
Or if there are changes in curriculum for example, with the widely-expected-in-some-quarters drop in the amount of literature read, or an increase in test prep to the detriment of other activities, who is going to track that? Or find a way to measure what is affected and to what extent?
If students start showing up in college even worse prepared than they are supposedly are now, how is that going to be measured? (And by the way, I’ve always wondered if this isn’t a result of the enlargement of the pool of HS students applying to college. Or maybe 14 years of NCLB is a contributing factor?)
How will the amount of funding that has to be dedicated to all the technology to support this testing affect the rest of a school district’s budget? It’s one thing to have a rolling cart of lap-tops that classes share, it’s another thing to create the infrastructure to support a lot of students taking a test at the same time (two years ago the MAP testing at my HS caused a total technological meltdown, and we are the archetypical deep-pocketed upper-middle class suburban district). These expenses are not trivial and school budgets are not infinite. Peter WILL suffer when Paul is paid but who will tell us how much and how?
Will the architects of CC and PARCC be interested in researching these and other questions? If they are, why didn’t they roll out a few pilot projects first? You’d think Bill Gates would have learned something from his failed small high-school experiment about treading lightly at first. There may be plans in place to track the effects of CC and PARCC but I’m not hearing about them. Happy to be wrong but not expecting to be.
THIS is what the highly-educated commentators here should be concerned about, not “Whew, this isn’t going to affect my kid because my district does it right.” Unless there are high-powered researchers working on these questions, you will not know how your district is really faring because you do not have the perspective, background, or the data to really know.
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I think that this is why the piece on The Atlantic struck such a nerve, with me at least. There seemed to be no allowance made for the fact that Laura’s experience just might not be the same experience the rest of us are having, or have had, with CC and high-stakes testing. That because her district, hypothetically, has the capital reserves to pay for all the additional costs that come with PARCC without cutting spending elsewhere, it must necessarily be so in my district. That because her district hasn’t devoted substantial classroom time to PARCC prep, nor does mine. That because her child won’t suffer academically because of his test scores, nor will mine.
When it is suggested, implicitly or otherwise, that your experience is the universal experience you invalidate the things that many of us have already lived through, and already know to be true. Parents, generally, don’t react well to that sort of thing. I won’t make excuses for some of the wackadoo comments on The Atlantic. But I do think there are a lot of thoughtful, reasoned responses to that piece that should not be discounted.
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As an FYI, reactions to my article by education policy writers, parents, teachers on Twitter has been extremely positive. I never read the comments on the Atlantic for any article.
This was an essay. I made it very clear that I was describing the reactions of people in my area and in my Facebook community. Most of their concerns were based on mistaken info. Then I backed up my impressions with the quantitative study of Peterson from Harvatd. Other studies show the same thing. People have basic facts wrong. Maybe you do, but statistics show that most parents don’t.
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Do suburban parents have the facts wrong? Okay, for argument’s sake, let’s say they do. Lord knows I’m stuck out here in the suburbs because we needed a school district with the resources and know-how to teach our son on the spectrum, and I am constantly dismayed at my neighbors’ lack of certain kinds of awareness. The friends on my wavelength are all left-over from when I lived within the city limits. So yeah, I’ll agree that my fellow suburbanites aren’t a great source of factual information on CC and PARCC.
That still doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate and serious reasons to caste at least a skeptical eye on CC and PARCC. To me, it means something that the same education scholars and writers who were critical about NCLB from the start, and were proven correct, are apoplectic about the CC and PARCC combo. That’s what credibility is about, proven track records. Those are sources I’m more confident trusting.
Back to anecdote, but the education my kid has received has certainly been shaped by the NCLB testing regimen, and this semester’s English course is totally shaped by CC. The brand new text has the actual words “Common Core” sprinkled throughout; although not technically required (as Laura points out), my school district did not think it could teach to the PARCC without new texts to support the curriculum they are essentially being forced to adopt. Because that’s a main purpose of the PARCC tests, to ensure CC is taught (yet another answer to the question, How are these tests different?).
One of the first English assignments: reading (“founding document”) Federalist Paper #10 with next to no context, though to be fair, they did discuss the changing meaning of the word “faction,” which I’m not sure would pass David Coleman’s definition of “close reading.” (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s his demonstration: https://vimeo.com/27056255 The first few minutes will make it painfully obvious that this man who is largely responsible for directing the shape of our new national curriculum has no grasp of the concept that learners are diverse, but I digress.)
I didn’t read the twitter feed, I’m not a twitter-ite, but I may go over there and see what those comments are like. I know some of the comments at the Atlantic weren’t very nice but a good number were very well-thought out and I think deserve a fair hearing. It’s a rare complex idea that lends itself to a 140 character limit, but as I said, I’ll go see if I can find the twitter feed and see for myself.
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I tried, but I just don’t get twitter. The only comments excited by the Atlantic article I could find were by a Bonnie Hain, who works for PARCC (!) and an Alexander Russo who apparently works for Scholastic, again, hardly a disinterested, objective observer of the educational-industrial complex.
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Laura — did you take the PARCC test? I really do recommend doing it. It was an eye-opener for me. I don’t think my one anecdote discomfort with a mini version of the test is determinative, but, I do think that I need to know what the tests are actually like if I advocate for them.
I do not think, based on the comparative examples of the education-intense asian countries (India, Korea, Japan, China), with which I am fairly familiar, that testing and the range of testing related modifications to our educational system will improve education in general. It might help of a subgroup of students (compliant, highly able, flexible enough to meet whatever standards are put before them) find and achieve their goals, but I don’t think it will improve the system in general, especially for struggling learners (an analogy for online education, which I think fulfills the same goal of providing opportunity to those well-suited to education).
I think testing is useful to provide feedback and because I think it can cement learning (lots of data on this now, but only for frequent, low stakes tests), but not if it is high stakes (used to determine the outcomes for students, careers, or schools).
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I’ve taken the practice test for LA and I had to shut my computer down in frustration. My husband, a math teacher who is actually fairly pro-CC, found so many problems with the math portion that he said he can barely stomach the thought of proctoring the test next month. What I find most disconcerting is that if we have this reaction — and we are looking at questions PARCC presumably had enough confidence in that they were willing to release them as a sample — what in the world must be on the actual test? And how in the world can we expect children to navigate what educated, rational adults cannot?
Therein lies the problem. We “suburban moms” (and urban moms, and rural moms, and all the other moms in between) will never know what questions were asked of our children, whether those questions were fair, or developmentally appropriate, or even logical. Neither will their teachers. Because not only are they specifically instructed to avoid looking at the screen, they are legally prohibited from disclosing or discussing any inadvertently seen question after-the-fact.
That’s a stunning lack of transparency given the stakes, which are quite high indeed for most children.
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I’m going to have shut down comments soon, I think.
I’m not an advocate for this test in particular or any particular curriculum. As I’ve said a billion times, I don’t really give a particular shit about the particulars. I do give a shit about switching gears. That has been shown definitely to be a BAD idea for kids and teachers. All the curriculum experts and education leaders came up with this system, so let’s see this through. Throwing it out and getting everybody to come up with something else will cost hundreds of millions.
I’m not in favor of high stakes tests and nobody has shown me that this is indeed a high stakes test.
Let me repeat myself before I shut down comments. I am a political scientist. I wrote about the politics and misinformation in suburban communities. I speculated about the causes of the misinformation. End of story.
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