Sherm Koons left this comment. Check out Sherm’s blog, Tales from the Classroom. He is a veteran high school English teacher in Ohio.
Down the Rabbit Hole with PARCC.
It’s taken me a while to begin to wrap my head around what’s really going on with PARCC and what makes it so absolutely wrong, but standing in the hall after school today talking to some fellow teachers I think got a glimpse. As we discussed the inappropriateness of the exams for our students, it occurred to me that actually it all makes perfect sense if your goal is to generate the most data that you possibly can. If you believe that, given enough data, you can predict human behavior, environmental, societal and other factors, and all the infinite variables of existence to a degree that mimics reality, of course you would want the most data that you could get. And you become obsessed with data. And eventually you lose track of what you initially were hoping to measure. It becomes data for data’s sake. And soon it has absolutely nothing to do with education, students, or anything human. And as you disappear further and further down the rabbit hole, you can’t understand why nobody gets it but you. The reason we don’t “get it” is that IT MAKES NO SENSE. You have become lost in your never-ending quest for data. You are delusional. And you must be stopped.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Common Sense and Intuition are two qualities lost in the “quest” for data or to be “data driven”.
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Greed trumps common sense in this country.
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It’s not “data for data’s sake;” it’s data for the sake of power and capital accumulation.
The kids are data, and data is for sale.
Never forget the words of management “guru” Peter Drucker: “That which can be measured, can be managed.”
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I quickly looked at the PARCC high school math sample online. I used to edit math books and this would be what I might tell the author.
I looked at the Sample Items here: http://practice.parcc.testnav.com/#
#1 Seems fine
#2 Difficult to enter equations. The fonts are inconsistent and random boxes appear. Question is clear.
#3 Popcorn seed: Hannah would know how much she ordered previously and how much is left.
#4 f(x + k) questions: It’s not clear exactly what you’re asking. It would be clearer to perhaps ask how does the value of k change the position of the vertex in a parabola. Separate three cases into separate short answers. Odd things happen when you type in text in that single letters become variables.
#5 Golf seems like an odd context for high school. How many kids play golf? Explain what you mean by revenue. Also, I am not in business but I don’t know if the question makes sense. Would raising the price by 25 cents per round decrease the number of customers by 3 each time? The function notation seems incorrect for the context.
#6 rotate the dimensions of the interior picture, so it’s clearly a dimension. It’s in the middle of the picture now.
#7 Geometry – there’s no congruent symbol in the Geometry tool kit. The video finishes and you can’t see the figure to write the proof. If you pause it then the “Pause Symbol” covers the figure. Should be able to enter this as two column proof.
#8 Medical research on green tea: It seems to me that there’s not enough information given to draw any conclusions.
#9 Cooling graph: You need more than 4 data points for any conclusion on a best fit model for a data set. If you look up graphs of cooling substance – they vary in shape. Cooling would be effected by ambient temperature and type of substance cooling.
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Please keep in mind thet the sample items released are just like the entranceway to the rabbit hole. The deeper you go, the less sense it makes. PARCC will not tip its hand anymore than Pearson did with the recent ELA disaster in NY. The moral of this story is that sample items (like two plot points in a best fit graph) are insufficent for drawing accurate conclusions. Its not ven a matter of small sample size. The samples they offer do not reflect th general level of difficulty or confusion that students will encounter.
In addition sarah5565, as a former editor of math text books, your perception (as an adult expert) about whats “fine” probably doent jive with the brain of an adolescent who is bored wth and hates math.
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Thanks, I agree. I agree that #1 is a goofy problem too, but it seemed that it could at least be clearly answered with the information given. Every time I look at these sample problems, I see more things wrong with the questions and user interface. I think that usually the data from the medical study would be in a two by two contingency table – not a tree diagram.
As a parent I worry that the math will not prepare my child at all for a college level math or science course. The “rigor” seems to me to take a simple problem and obscure it.
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Your concern about math preparation is very legitimate. Just hope this all goes away sooner rather than later.
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Data is control. Data control enables blackmail. Data blackmail translates into guaranteed cash flow for the blackmailers.
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Data control by definition means limited access to the data. Access to the data is power. That power enables people to control markets in which that data is considered essential or is made, by law, a requirement. Really sickening. This is nefarious.
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Not all data is bad. My concern is that this paranoia over any information being collected is going to undermine the “good data” that comes from formative assessments that are delivered through technology. I have yet to meet a teacher that can churn out data like a computer for every student in the class and have not met a computer that can do an analysis of data on learning like a good teacher. We had parents in our district that did not want to have their student use any programs that generated data about the learning. This is where some of our ill-informed parents are starting to go. Let’s celebrate mindfully that we have more information on student learning in areas that were time consuming for teachers to generate on their own and in the end an inch deep in how they really assessed students.
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delusion
purest numerology
quackery
pseudoscience
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This post captured it for me- An English II teacher. So unreal.
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And, as Don Duane Swacker, Hidaldo, has pointed out
P.A.R.C.C., spell that backward
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This is a response I received from the school when I asked why the students were on unit 4 of their curriculum map at the end of April and if they’d have sufficient time from April to June to complete the rest of the math course. Count how many times they use the word “data”
“I’m assuming you received the “blueprint” curriculum map, which we start off with in September. This can be a little misleading, as curriculum development is a fluid and ongoing process informed by specific data we collect about student learning. Our school wide accountability practices are very tight, and faculty and administrators work very hard to ensure that curriculum decisions are responsive to the data, and that all critical standards are taught and assessed. We administer an external benchmark assessment (ANet) every 6 weeks, with follow up analysis and planning sessions, as well as track student progress on an ongoing basis via unit assessments. In addition, the principal meets with teaching teams three times per year to discuss/review curriculum, assessment, and instruction. In short, our practices and routines related to data driven decision making, collaborative inquiry and planning, and curricular and instructional oversight are highly advanced and sophisticated, which means, among other things, that our curricula are tightly aligned with state standards. Thankfully, we have highly skilled and knowledgeable school leaders who are able to do this complex work. I attended the last 7th grade curriculum review in January, and can give you a concrete example of how assessment data has been used – we have lots of data that show that the vast majority of students are already proficient on the standards covered by an upcoming data unit, which means that the unit will be cut short (in terms of time). These types of decisions, related to pacing, happen on an ongoing basis, and with the end in mind to ensure that all standards are taught.”
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Data driven decision making has been practiced in schools well before Common Core. This emerged in response to NCLB where schools were hyper focused on accountability. The language in the school response has been developed from the last decade of focusing on getting students over the proficiency line that was demanded of the schools, some that were threatened with being taken over if their numbers of proficient students were not in accordance with every student being in this category.
I think if you read below the surface you have a school that is not in lock step with merely teaching in the hopes that students learn and then moving on without reflecting on if students learned at all. They may be assessing a lot, but seem to be using the data to make decisions about the curriculum. If students are showing mastery over part of the curriculum why not move beyond it instead if rigidly sticking to a pacing guide that requires teachers to teach something students already know.
I have taught in times where we pretty much followed the textbook from page 1 and on. Looks like the school has evolved from that. Ideally now they will find more advanced and qualitative measures for students. That is where a lot of school systems are stuck. They have been able to more finely diagnose student learning, but in purely quantitative terms. The bigger question you should be asking is are students merely learning the skills or are they going into application and performances-based opportunities that are more reflective of deeper understanding of concepts.
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My response to that response would have been:
“And what the hell does your response have to do with the price of tea in China?”
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Yes, that was my response too. They had completed 4 out of 9 math units by the end of April and no amount of hand waving and use to of the word data made it possible to complete the other 5 math units.
We switched schools.
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