Ezra Klein has set up a new website, vox.com, wherein he praises the federally-funded test Common Core test called PARCC—which is now being field-tested–and declares that it is “working.”
Mercedes Schneider begs to differ.
She says the main way it is working is to make millions for Pearson and ETS and to bleed public schools of funding.
“If “working” is the cutting of non-tested (and therefore, less valued) school courses, programs and staff in order to feed the testing monster, then yes, the “tests are working.” I teach high school English. For the past three years, at the end of the year, I have heard my administration say, “We’re going to lose another teacher,” meaning another full-time English position was to be cut. I heard that statement again several weeks ago when an administrator explained to me why my Teaching Academy course– a statewide program created over a decade ago to spark interest among high school students in teaching as a career– would be cut next year.
“The day that I received the news, I saw shipments of new computers arriving in our library. It turns out that our district was required to purchase these computers from our state in an arrangement out state board of education made with some fortunate technology company.
“Each computer cost the district $1100. Our school alone has seven computer labs. Each lab seats approximately 20 to 30 students.
“Big money– all spent on shiny new computers required for PARCC testing.
“Three years ago, our school library that served 1800 students lost two of its three librarians.
“That library was closed for three days last week in order to accommodate standardized testing.
“A school of 1800 students without library access for three days.”
The question is, who is it “working” for?
Follow the money.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I couldn’t agree more. My campus has 1200 students and 32 computers in the lab. You do the math. We have to buy HUNDREDS of new computers, so that our primary aged kids can take a test in the spring. Our district has frozen our salaries, cut staff, and cut our benefits…because our funding was also cut by our state…but we still have to come up with the $10 million that these computers will cost our district.
How and when will this madness stop?
The parents of that school should be shown the costs of these expenditures alongside the salaries of each lost position, and class size as a result. Economic figures have a way of cutting through the rhetorics on a very quick and visceral level…
Meant “rhetoric” 😦
My sister in a FL middle school reports that their classes have been in “lock down mode” for weeks as they administer the new PARCC tests there. Apparently the system has crashed because it couldn’t handle the numbers of testers and the tests had to be readministered-!
The students not being tested are kept in classrooms all day doing busy work-worksheet packets,etc. A valuable use of the school day, I’m sure!
Here’s my question. Are the districts also hiring a sufficient number computer techs to deal with all the computers?
For years at my daughters’ schools there were oodles of computers, but many were sitting idle b/c not enough support staff existed to set them up, or to do troubleshooting when things went haywire. The issue was never not having enough computers. It was easy enough for people and companies to donate computers and the gifts usually earned them a lot of publicity and fanfare. But what was never donated was the salary and benefits for the increased number of skilled personnel whose services will perpetually and fairly frequently be required for those machines to be functional.
So basically, there were plenty of *cars* in the garage but very, very few *mechanics* employed who could do the necessary maintenance and repair. What a racket!
I’ll be very surprised if, based on what I’ve seen from the released questions (about 35-40 for Algebra II), the PARCC tests don’t change radically in the coming years. The Algebra II test (the only one I’ve looked at thoroughly) is extremely difficult. It’s clear that the test-makers’ overwhelming priority was to create questions you couldn’t game by plugging numbers in and getting without Algebra (something I applaud, btw), but to do this requires raising the difficulty of the problems themselves. By releasing the questions, they’ve at least (finally!) given us a glimpse at the target (including a little more understanding of what a calculator can and can’t be used for), but the tests certainly aren’t adequate to cover all ranges of students taking a particular class.
I’ll be very surprised if, based on what I’ve seen from the released questions (about 35-40 for Algebra II), the PARCC tests don’t change radically in the coming years.
“change”?
Didn’t you mean disappear?
School librarians are losing their jobs to Common Core, as this article illustrates, yet the School Library Journal is full on in support of Common Core and explains schools have simply not explained the disaster well enough to parents:
“Editorial | Meet the Parents: Critical for Implementing the Common Core,” by Rebecca T. Miller Editor-in-Chief, School Library Journal, February 7, 2014.
http://www.slj.com/2014/02/opinion/editorial/meet-the-parents-these-key-stakeholders-are-critical-for-implementing-the-common-core/
Teachers and school librarians working to stop Common Core, know the School Library Journal is working against you. Notice it presents only flowery stories and training about Common Core, and if criticism is given, it is only to knock it down.
Did he fail to mention that the real deal, official PARCC roll out in 2015 requires TWO ROUNDS of testing? PBA at 70% (7 months) and EYO at 90% (9 months).
Here’s the PARCC schedule from their website
Spring 2015*
1st Operational Administration (PBA and EOY) – Spring 2015 Administration
August 2015
Student Performance Levels and Associated Cut Scores Set (Standard-Setting)
Student Cut Scores for College and Career Readiness Determination Set
(Standard- Setting)
Fall 2015
Summer 2015 Retest Administration
Yes, PARCC calls it a “testing system”.
There’s a place for the CCRAP “testing system”. It’s called the sewer system.
I am working on a doctoral research project inspired by Diane’s book, Death and Life of the Great American School System (2011). If the public school system–as many of us knew it, at least–is dead or near death, it would stand to reason that public school teachers who remember the system as it was prior to No Child Left Behind (2002) have experienced loss and grief. If you remember what it was like to teach prior to No Child Left Behind, if you feel as if teaching completely changed when No Child Left Behind was implemented, or if you ever felt saddened by some of the changes that resulted from educational reform, then you may be interested in taking my survey.
Professional Loss and Grief in Teachers (a survey)
https://ndstate.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5nCLnPAFadWZX93
The grief comes in waves with each loss.
I grieved losing the right to write my own exams. That occurred several years ago, when “reform” usurpation of my professional decision making began creeping into my classroom.
That first grief was the hardest-hitting for me. After that, I expected “reform” to continue to chisel away at my professional identity, so I felt more prepared for the fight.
Wielding my keyboard has really helped me counter my classroom losses.
From the Rheeformish Lexicon:
Special thanks to philologist Don Duane Swacker, Hidalgo, for his discovery that P.A.R.C.C. is spelled backward, in keeping with the Goblish grimoires of antiquity. Thanks, as well, to Ken Watanabe, who first identified the cognates in Goblish and Rheeformish and established, definitively, that Rheeformish is, indeed, a variety of the Goblish tongue.
C.C.C.C.R.A.P. Common Core College and Career Readiness Assessment Program; aggregate name for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), and whatever Lord Coleman is going to call his new SAT (SCCAT, for Scholastic Common Core Achievement Test?).
PARCC. CCRAP spelled backward. Pronunciation note: There is scholarly debate as to whether the lengthened initial consonant, indicated by the digraph CC, is a genuine phonetic feature of Rheeformish or simply reflects the typical hatefulness with which members of the Rheeformation Church of Mammon speak. See Appendix B, “Prosody of Financial Statements and Other Rheeformish Poetry.”
Whatever it is that is done on these tests is only very, very remotely related to authentic reading and writing. If anything, the ELA versions of these tests assess what might be called InstaReading for the Test and InstaWriting for the Test. Since the tests do not test authentic reading and writing and cannot do so given their formats, then they are not tests of authentic reading and writing. QED.
Perfect! 🙂
Instead of sitting for a bunch of bubble questions, French students take le bac. Admission to university is dependent upon successful completion of the exam. There are three versions of the French baccalauréat:
the baccalauréat général (general baccalaureate);
the baccalauréat professionnel (professional baccalaureate);
the baccalauréat technologique (technological baccalaureate).
Students choose which of these they sit for.
There are oral and written components. In the written component, the student writes an essay in answer to a question chosen from among some alternatives. The student has four hours in which to compose an answer that demonstrates a broad range of knowledge, ability to reason, and, of course, ability to write. Some sample questions from recent baccalaureate exams:
Are there questions which no science can answer?
Are we prisoners of the past?
Can desire be disinterested?
Can natural desires exist?
Can one be right in spite of the facts?
Can we prove a scientific hypothesis?
Do artworks have to be pleasurable?
Do technological developments threaten our liberty?
Does historical objectivity presuppose an impartial historian?
Does language betray thought?
Does objectivity in history suppose impartiality in the historian?
Does power exist without violence?
Does technical development transform humans?
Is every belief contrary to reason?
Is it absurd to desire the impossible?
Is it our duty to seek out the truth?
Is man condemned to create illusions about himself?
Is the only purpose of working to be useful?
Is truth preferable to peace?
What does one gain by exchanging?
What does one gain from working?
Would we have more freedom without the state?
A very different approach from the one we have embraced, huh? I see one distinct advantage: Such an exam involves no expectation of uniformity in responses or in students’ learning.
All of which raises some questions: “Why not many alternatives for different students with different life goals and skill sets–portfolios, substantial creative or research products, bubble tests for those who chose them, open-ended essay tests like le bac for those who prefer to go that route, etc? Why this insistence in the U.S. on invariant, uniform assessment, as though students were outputs of factories and had to be identically milled to spec? Why not create a variety of means by which differing students can show what they are capable of?”
I’m also wondering which among U.S. Ed Deformers would be able to produce an acceptable essay for the French exam.
Our Ed Deformers are a singularly unimaginative lot.
So, choose one of the above and write an essay, in four hours, on the question, and in your essay, try to demonstrate as much learning and original thought as you can. Remember, your task is to prove that you know a lot, you can think, and you can write. Cool, huh?
“Why this insistence in the U.S. on invariant, uniform assessment. . . ”
Because standardized testing foundation is one supposedly of science and that the teaching and learning process can therefore be numrized. Numerization (numerology as I believe you call it) is an idiology (purposely misspelled) based on many false assumptions. And if it’s scientific, well, it must be true and good according to this insistence. Wilson has proven such epistemological and ontological assumptions to be such that it renders the whole process completely invalid.
“An invariant, uniform assessment” is just one of those fallacies.
“Why not create a variety of means by which differing students can show what they are capable of?”
From Wilson:
“It requires an enormous suspension of rational thinking to believe that the best way to describe the complexity of any human achievement, any person’s skill in a complex field of human endeavour, is with a number that is determined by the number of test items they got correct. Yet so conditioned are we that it takes a few moments of strict logical reflection to appreciate the absurdity of this.”
And see Taylor Mali’s “I’ll Fight You for the Library”. . .
Immediately post-PARCC: (Apologies to Peter Griffin)
What grinds my gears as a teacher is feeling like I have no power over what goes on in my classroom.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is acting like I have no power over what goes on in my classroom.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is actually having no power over what goes on in my classroom.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is being criticized and marginalized by people who have never been in a classroom and know education only in theoretical terms.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is having to give tests that are poorly written, irrelevant, and absolutely inappropriate for my students.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is having those tests determine the future of me, my school, and my students.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is being told that I’m ineffective because my students aren’t all geniuses.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is having to be suspicious of every piece of education-oriented legislation that gets proposed at both the state and national levels.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is having taxpayer money used to fund private religious schools.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is taking money from public schools so someone can make a profit.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is education being thought of as an “emerging market.”
What grinds my gears as a teacher is the duplicitous doublespeak of the education reformers.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is how public education and teachers are being misrepresented and vilified by the media.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is how teachers unions seem so out of touch with the threat of the privatization of public education.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is people in power thinking of my students as data.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is that even when VAM is shown to be trash science it makes no difference to those in power.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is the worshiping of the god of standardization.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is that it’s become all about money.
What grinds my gears as a teacher is that I have to fight for the survival of public education when what I really want to do is teach.
That about covers it all. Keep fighting!
Thanks… where are you in Ohio? I’m near Marietta. Check my blog, hypnohio.blogspot.com
I’m in Cincinnati. Like your blog. Chuckled at your interests.