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.