12 things Rhode Islanders should know about the PARCC exam

by Dan McGowan, WPRI.com Reporter;   PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) 

NOTE:  THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED MARCH 9, 2015

So what should you know about the PARCC? Here’s an overview.

1. It’s not NECAP.

For the first time in nine years, public school students in Rhode Island will not take the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) exam, the standardized reading and mathematics assessments that were also administered in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine (though students will continue to take NECAP science test). The PARCC is considered more aligned with the Common Core State Standards (see more below), but one of the most glaring differences between the old test and the new test is when they’re given. Students in grades 3-8 and 11 took the NECAP each October, which led some to believe that summer vacation learning loss led to artificially low scores. Students in grades 3-8 and in high school – most 9th and 10th grade students, as well as some 11th graders – will take the first part of the PARCC between March 16 and April 10 and the end-of-year assessments will be administered between May 1 and June 4. 

2. It is computer-based.

While there is an option to take a paper version of the PARCC, the majority of students will take the test on computers – a significant shift from previous standardized exams. The test focuses on mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) and will require students to use critical thinking skills and explain their answers. There is a much larger emphasis on writing skills with the PARCC. For the first part of the exam, students will have two math sessions and three reading/writing sessions. The end-of-year assessments will include two sessions of math for all grades. Students in grades 3-5 will have one reading/writing session and students in grades 6 and up will have two reading/writing sessions. 

3. It is not a graduation requirement… yet.

At the end of the 2014 legislative session, state lawmakers approved a bill that placed a moratorium on using the results on a standardized test as part of Rhode Island’s high school graduation policy until the class of 2017 (the state’s current high school sophomores). Education Commissioner Deborah Gist has proposed delaying those requirements until the class of 2020 (current 7th graders). The state has not yet mapped out how well students will be required to perform in order to be eligible for a diploma. There are two other things you should know about how the PARCC will affect students. 1) Beginning in 2017, results in the PARCC will be included on a student’s college transcripts. 2) Results on the PARCC will not be reflected on a student’s report card, but they will assist schools in making course recommendations and offering support to their students.

4. There is a major difference between the Common Core and PARCC.

The Common Core State Standards are just that, standards. They were created by a consortium of government and education leaders in 48 states and Washington, D.C., and have been adopted in 43 states, including Rhode Island. The Common Core functions as a set of expectations – not a national curriculum – for what students should have mastered over the course of time at various grade levels (read the ELA standards here and the math standards here). The goal is to ensure that all students graduate from high school prepared for college and ready to enter the workforce. (It’s worth noting there is plenty of controversy around these standards; former assistant U.S. Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch is among the vocal critics.) The PARCC is an exam designed to test whether a student has mastered the Common Core standards for their grade level. The assessment will be used by 11 states and Washington, D.C. Other states will use the Smarter Balanced exam.

5. There is a controversy over opting out.

Rhode Island has no formal policy that allows students to opt out of taking the PARCC exam, but just as with any test given in school, teachers have no way of forcing a student to participate. In other states, there has been a groundswell of support for refusing to take the test. In New Mexico, for example, more than 1,000 students walked out of school on the first day of testing; the same thing happened in New Jersey. Generally, the argument for not taking the exam is that it takes away from actual learning time (see more below), but you can also read Ravitch’s blog post on other reasons why students should opt out. That doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences, however. Any school that receives Title I funds from the federal government (this is money that goes to schools with disadvantaged students) is required to have at least 95% of their students participate in annual standardized exams. Several school districts have warned that failing to participate could affect federal funding, but Gist’s office said it doesn’t believe that is the case. While Gist has recommended that all Rhode Island students participate in the exam, there are school districts that have asked parents to inform them if they plan to have their children skip the PARCC. In South Kingstown, for example, parents are required to submit a request in writing by March 11. Meanwhile, the state’s largest teachers’ union has asked the state to inform parents of their right to have their children opt out of the test.

6. Testing does take time out of the school day.

In Rhode Island, the first part of the PARCC is expected to take between six and nine hours and the end-of-year assessment is expected to between three and six hours. That’s assuming the state doesn’t face some of the same glitches New Jersey encountered a few weeks ago. By comparison, the NECAP took approximately 8.5 hours to administer. That does not include any preparation work happening in classrooms during the weeks and months leading up the exam.

7. The results will help teachers adjust teaching methods.

If the amount of time spent on testing is a downside to any standardized exam, the upside is that results should help teachers do more of what works and less of what doesn’t when in it comes to classroom instruction. Teachers and school leaders will be able to compare performance with other schools both in and out of the state. They’ll be able to look at schools with similar populations and share best practices. Compare that with the NECAP, which wasn’t administered in Connecticut or Massachusetts, and you can see why some education leaders do see potential with the PARCC.

8. Students are being used as guinea pigs.

When students across the country participated in field testing for both the PARCC and Smarter Balanced exams last year to help iron out any kinks before full implementation of each assessment, Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post referred to them as guinea pigs. That’s still the case this year, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The Common Core probably isn’t going anywhere any time soon and the exam will give schools the first comprehensive look at how close (or far) students are from mastering those standards. The PARCC will help schools build interim assessments and inform them on how to set the bar when it comes to the Common Core. School leaders in Rhode Island have taken to referring to PARCC as an “educational GPS system,” designed to help teachers and parents understand where a student is academically and find the best route to get them to where they’re supposed to be.

9. Teachers evaluations will eventually include PARCC.

As it stands now, results on the PARCC assessment are expected to be used to calculate student growth scores for teachers. But educators will first need three years of test results in order to measure growth, so the PARCC won’t be a factor in teacher evaluations until the 2016-17 school year. During the 2013-14 school year, 98% of all teachers in Rhode Island were rated effective or highly effective.

10. There are lots of accommodations for students who need it.

Schools are allowed to give students with learning disabilities or English language learners more time to complete the exam. Certain students are also allowed to take the exam in small groups, have frequent break periods, test at different time of day or in a different location or use adaptive or specialized equipment or furniture. And of course, for those school systems that aren’t quite prepared for the technology associated with the exam, paper tests are available.

11. Massachusetts is replacing the MCAS with the PARCC.

Our neighbors to the north are widely considered the model for public school systems in the United States and even they’re moving away from the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam that they’ve used for two decades in favor of the PARCC exam. High school students will still use the MCAS for graduation policy purposes until the class of 2019, but education officials have said they believe the PARCC exam will ultimately help Massachusetts close achievement gaps between poor and wealthy students. (No surprise, Ravitch thinks this is a bad idea.) New Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker also isn’t completely sold on the PARCC.

12. We have no clue how students will do.

Teachers and school leaders are pointing to the abysmal scores on Common Core-aligned exams in New York as an example of what Rhode Island could face, but no one quite knows exactly how students will perform during the benchmark year. The results from the field exam last year weren’t released at all. Here’s what we do know: 1) Roughly 71% of principals in Massachusetts think the PARCC is more demanding than the MCAS. 2) There have been complaints that the questions are worded in confusing ways. 3) Rhode Island’s track record on other standardized exams is mixed. The state has made improvements on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), but 36% of students in the class of 2015 scored substantially below proficient on the math or English section of the NECAP exam last year (if the state’s high school graduation policy was in place this year, those students would have forced the retake the exam).

Dan McGowan ( dmcgowan@wpri.com ) covers politics, education and the city of Providence for WPRI.com. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter: @danmcgowan

Item #5 has been updated to reflect that while several school departments have said a failure to participate could result in a loss in federal funding, the Department of Education does not believe that is the case.

Mom spells out problems with PARCC Common Core test

By Valerie Strauss;  January 8, 2015; Washington Post

Sarah Blaine is a mother, former teacher and full-time practicing attorney in New Jersey. She just testified to the New Jersey Board of Education urging members to pull out of PARCC, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, which is one of the two multi-state consortia designing new Common Core standardized tests with some $360 million in federal funds. PARCC has been losing members as one state after another has withdrawn, choosing to use its own tests.

Blaine wrote on her blog, Parenting the Core, about the board meeting where about 100 parents, students, teachers, school board members, and other New Jersey professionals gathered at the River View Executive Building Complex in Trenton to “prove just how out of touch New Jersey Commissioner of Education David Hespe is with New Jersey parents, students, teachers, and community members.” She wrote:

In particular, as you may recall, David Hespe claimed that there was no opt-out or test refusal movement in New Jersey. Today, we proved him wrong. For those who don’t recall, on October 30, 2014, then Acting Commissioner Hespe issued guidance to school districts and charter school leaders in which he suggested (but did not require) that they institute punitive measures in an attempt to squelch New Jersey’s opt-out/test refusal movement before it got started. Hespe’s guidance backfired. Instead, he just pissed me — and countless other New Jersey parents — off…. (Hespe’s real boss is Governor Chris Christie, and there is no doubt in my mind that regardless of what the NJBOE does next, Hespe will continue to dance to PARCC’s tune until Governor Christie tells him to change course).

Blaine has written several popular posts published on this blog, including “Pearson’s wrong answer–and why it matters in the high-stakes testing era,” and “You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.” Her daughter, 10-year-old Elizabeth Blaine, testified before the Montclair school board about the PARCC test, which you can read about here. She gave me permission to publish her testimony and other material.

Here’s her testimony (and you can watch the video of her delivering it below):

I am here today to urge New Jersey to join the other states that have pulled out of the PARCC consortium. Because my older daughter is a 4th grader, I have reviewed the 4th grade PARCC practice materials. I urge you to do the same. Based on my review and the detrimental test prep I’m seeing, I stand here today to tell you that the PARCC does not support the goals of taxpayer-funded public education.

Why do we pay for public education? We pay for education because democracy cannot function effectively unless citizens are sufficiently educated to conduct the business of democracy. Educated citizens evaluate issues within their broader historical and political contexts when they enter the election booth or the jury box.

Now, a happy by-product of educating citizens is that educated citizens are also prepared for college and career. But we taxpayers don’t pay to educate other people’s children because we want to educate the next Steve Jobs or Warren Buffet: rather, we pay for the education of all kids because when we are elderly and today’s kids are voting, we want them to vote thoughtfully.

The PARCC evaluates future employees; it does not educate citizens. Why?

Beyond appearing from its sample questions to be a terrible test, the PARCC only purports to test a narrow subset of what our children should be learning: their reading, writing, and math skills. In addition, New Jersey has attached high-stakes consequences — including teachers’ evaluations — to kids’ scores. This combination pressures teachers and schools to teach to the PARCC.

But when school time is spent on test prep, school time is not devoted to other, more worthy endeavors. When tests are high-stakes, if a topic won’t be tested, it isn’t taught. That is why the PARCC harms citizenship education.

So what don’t our kids do in school because of high-stakes testing such as the PARCC?

Well, I’m a New Jersey native who was educated in the Millburn Public Schools. When I was a 4th grader, our social studies theme was New Jersey. We were each assigned a county, and we spent weeks researching and writing about our counties. I had Cumberland County, which is why I know about New Jersey’s cranberry bogs. We studied Lenni Lenape society and built a model Lenni Lenape village. We learned a then-candidate for New Jersey state song — don’t worry, I won’t sing. We studied New Jersey colonial history and took a field trip to Allaire Village, where we learned about smelting iron. We even created a giant latchhook rug of a map of New Jersey’s 21 counties. Miss Shades’ fourth grade helped me on the road toward thoughtful citizenship.

I now have a fourth grader in the Montclair Public Schools. Her teachers are dedicated and caring. And their fourth grade social studies theme is also New Jersey. However, we’re now about halfway through the school year. My daughter hasn’t studied the Lenni Lenape or memorized New Jersey’s 21 counties. She hasn’t learned about cranberry bogs or iron ore. She hasn’t written a research report on a New Jersey county or latchhooked a map of New Jersey or learned a New Jersey song. She hasn’t taken a field trip to Allaire State Park or learned about colonial settlement of New Jersey.

Instead, she had a generic unit on map skills because reading a map might be tested on the PARCC. She gets to bubble in answers on “Common Core aligned” Scholastic News pamphlets. And she’s learned the states that comprise the Northeast. In half a school year, that’s been it for social studies.

But she’s had hours of PARCC preparation. She and her class have given up 6 class periods — with more scheduled — to learn how to drag and drop and use the PARCC protractor, even though they haven’t gotten to the study of angles in math class yet, so the kids don’t know what a protractor is. She’s brought home formulas for essay writing, which she’s required to follow, regardless of how bad the resulting writing is. She isn’t allowed to use the essay formulas as guides rather than rules, because Pearson’s essay graders will be looking for formulaic essays rather than compelling content.

PARCC test prep is not preparing her to be a thoughtful citizen. PARCC test prep is not using my tax dollars to ensure that she will be prepared to vote thoughtfully. PARCC test prep is not teaching her the American history she needs to know who FDR was, and why he said:

“Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”

Testing: How Much Is Too Much?

Testing: How Much Is Too Much?   NOVEMBER 17, 2014 8:03 AM ET 

by ANYA KAMENETZ             NPR Ed

"In some places, tests — and preparation for them — are dominating the calendar and culture of schools and causing undue stress for students and educators."

The quote comes not from an angry parent or firebrand school leader but from Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Of course, he's the guy currently in charge of a big chunk of those tests: the No Child Left Behind requirement of annual standardized testing in grades 3-8, plus once during grades 10-12.

And those tests are just the start. Lately everyone from the president on down has been weighing in on the question: Are kids really being tested too much? And their answer, mostly, is a big "Yes."

President Obama said last month that he "welcomes" a pledge from state and big-city school leaders to work together to "cut back on unnecessary testing and test preparation."

The groups, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of the Great City Schools, announced the initial results of an attempt to quantify the current state of testing in America.

Their survey of large districts showed students taking an average of 113 standardized tests between pre-K and grade 12, with 11th grade the most tested.

Another recent study by the Center for American Progress looked at 14 school districts. It found that students in grades 3-8 take an average of 10, up to a high of 20, standardized assessments per year. That doesn't count tests required of smaller groups of students, like English-language learners.

What may be a little trickier is defining just which tests qualify as "unnecessary." The CCSSO survey describes testing requirements that have seemingly multiplied on their own without human intervention, like hangers piling up in a closet.

They found at least 23 distinct purposes for tests, including: state and federal accountability, grade promotions, English proficiency, program evaluation, teacher evaluation, diagnostics, end-of-year predictions, or to fulfill the requirements of specific grants.

They also found a lot of overlap, with some of these tests collecting nearly the same information.

Resources 'Sucked Up'

Kathleen Jasper left her post as an assistant principal of a Florida high school in early 2014 because, she says, of her mounting frustrations with testing. "I was being forced to implement bad education policy, especially with respect to testing," she said.

Florida is one of at least 36 states, by NPR Ed's count, that require or plan to require high school end-of-course exams in an array of subjects, as a condition of graduation.

If you want a high school diploma in the Sunshine State, you must pass tests in algebra, geometry, civics and U.S. history. That's on top of the state standardized tests (the FCAT) in math and reading, and every other test on the list.

These end-of-course tests are given throughout 10th, 11th and 12th grade, and each year there is time set aside for retakes. Schools, naturally, want to give students as many chances as possible to pass the tests, because the students need them to graduate.

The result? "I watched tests take up 40 to 50 percent of the year," says Jasper, who now maintains a blog and podcast about education. "Media centers were closed for the entire month of January. Laptops, every resource was sucked up into testing."

Debbie Brockett reports the same scenario unfolding on the other side of the country. She is the principal of Las Vegas High School, a 3,000-student, predominantly Hispanic and low-income school.

Nevada is another state that requires end-of-course exams, two each in reading and math.

"Thirty-seven percent of the month of October was taken up with testing," Brockett said. "And the same is true in March. January is another heavy testing month. But the test prep may kill us even more." She estimates one day entirely devoted to prep for every day of testing.

The average pass rate for an end-of-course exam at Brockett's school is 33 percent. That means most students have at least one retake, which are given several times a year. They may retake as many times as needed to pass, even as the material covered on the test fades farther and farther behind them.

"The kids who retake are the ones who need more instruction, but the more they retake, the less instructional time they get."

- Debbie Brockett, high school principal

"The kids who retake are the ones who need more instruction, but the more they retake, the less instructional time they get," she said.

These tests are not graded quickly. In some cases, a student who fails a test may have just a few days before the next retake — not enough time to work on what he or she got wrong.

Both Brockett and Jasper said test days disrupt an entire school. Even students who aren't sitting for a specific test may find themselves moved all over the building, or they may end up marking time watching movies for several days.

Signs Of Change

There may be a glimmer of change on the horizon. Individual districts, such as Palm Beach County in Florida, are voting to simplify testing requirements. And states including Rhode Island have adopted moratoriums on high-stakes, end-of-course exams.

The Center for American Progress report suggests that the shift to Common Core assessments, which are designed to be better aligned with instruction, could help eliminate duplication. Brockett is optimistic about that idea too.

"If we do this right, good instruction should lead to higher test scores, where every day that you teach, you're preparing," she said. "I can put that 30 to 40 percent [of time spent on prep] back into sound instruction."

But in the meantime, she says, testing is defining the school experience for thousands of students, and not in a positive way:

"Two weeks ago I talked to a kid who had just walked out of exams. He was very frustrated. He had tears in his eyes. He has Bs and Cs in chemistry, but he can't pass the science exam. If he doesn't pass, he doesn't graduate."

How many tests is a HS teacher now required to give to his students, as compared to ten years ago?

New Jersey high school teacher Dan Ferat reflects on how many tests he is now required to give to his students, as compared to ten years ago.

So, in only ten years, we have gone from students taking five exams per year (six for juniors with the HSPA) to 34 exams per year (30 for seniors) with many more in sight because there will be a PARCC for EVERY SUBJECT supposedly because there are CCCS for every subject except electives (plus those PSAT/SAT/ACT tests which I’m not even counting).

Forget the amount of time teachers will have to spend grading all these exams and writing them and adjusting them over the years. Honestly, that’s beside the point when it comes to education. It’s true we don’t get enough time “on the clock” as it is, but the real issue is the students. See, I always thought education was about LEARNING a subject in a classroom from readings, teachers, and experiences (like labs). But with all this testing, there will be less learning and more studying for tests. We teachers are evaluated on how well our students do on all the tests, so of course we’re going to teach to them. One would be a complete moron not to since one can wind up fired if one gets too low scores in two years. This will narrow curricula, which means less information and fewer skills learned. It will standardize curricula more, which means fewer choices for students and less of a need for EXPERIENCED TEACHERS, who share so much of their insight and experiences with students to bring their subjects to life. But if everything is just straight out of a book, like a script, all you need is a warm body to watch the kids and lead them through the standardized curriculum.

If parents understood this, they would not be happy. They would begin to recognize what the legislators and the federal government are doing to undermine genuine education and to dampen students’ ardor for learning as well as to demoralize teachers.