The fast-shrinking PARCC testing consortium dropped by another one as Ohio pulled out.
Governor John Kasich signed a bill to replace the trouble-plagued PARCC with another test.
The number of states in the federally-funded PARCC consortium has declined from 25 in 2011 to only 11 in 2015.
The Ohio decision was the result of voluminous complaints about PARCC, from technology glitches to the hours of time the tests require. PARCC has agreed to cut
AIR may well get the Ohio contract, but some parents and educators are unhappy with AIR.
PARCC also agreed in May to shorten its tests by 60 minutes in math and 30 minutes in English.
But that change wasn’t the dramatic reduction many sought. Students took about 10 to 11 hours of PARCC exams in just English and math this year, depending on their grade. With that much testing, the combined 90-minute drop amounts to a 15 percent cut at the most.
PARCC is rapidly losing states who are unhappy with the quality and time required for the PARCC tests.
PARCC states, as of 2011(25): Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, District of Columbia.
Note that some states, like New York and Massachusetts, use PARCC in a far more limited way than Ohio has.
PARCC states now (11): Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, District of Columbia.
Arkansas is in the middle of a battle between the governor, legislature and state school board over PARCC’s future there.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It sounds like AIR as the replacement test is now a done deal. It would be interesting to know how much will be invested in the AIR tests.
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Good riddance to bad rubbish!!!
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Tennessee never actually administered the PARCC test, we geared up for it but the state legislators voted it out the year before it was supposed to begin (which would have been this past year.) Supposedly we are getting a more rigorous test text year but it won’t be PARCC.
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Ah, yes, Tennessee needs a “more rigorous test,” preferably one that fails most students and discourages them from the start.
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And Pearson gets a SELL advice from an investment analysis company.
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Although I am pleased to see PARCC dying, it will likely be replaced with another similar instrument. The problem is the whole standardization and testing approach, not any singular test.
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I agree with you mathman. It really doesn’t make any difference to me which profiteering testing corporation steals tax dollars earmarked for public education. “Corporate reform” and high stakes testing supported by oligarchs, Democrats and Republicans must end.
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Agreed. Profiteering is a form of child exploitation. I think of Article 32, Section 1 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child:
“States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.”
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Online PARCC tests will most likely be replaced by online AIR tests.
A new acronym, but the S.O.S.
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Only $1,128, 527.00 per US citizen!
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Oops. Cancel that bad math. Only $1.13 per US citizen. But it sure doesn’t look like Gate’s dream of edu-domination is coming true.
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Please, as an Illinois tech director about to do PARRC online for the first time this coming year, can Illinois also dump this waste of time. I also teach full time so this is going to be a real challenge for our school to plow through all the hurdles putting this test online takes! I read the daily, heck minutely, reports for the other techs in the state, trying to get though this online mess…ahhhh no thank you.
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Missouri is abandoning the SBAC.
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Math and Reading tests are a federal requirement, attached to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the process of being reauthorized. Those tests will not go away, but the reauthorization in the works probably means statewide tests in these subjects will stay and that states will still be using the scores on these tests for invalid VAM ratings of teachers.
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My understanding of the probable re-write is that the federal requirement for using test scores to evaluate teachers under Duncan’s NCLB waiver will be eliminated. That will leave up to the states to determine the use of VAM.
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In Ohio, the legislature has mandated the use of test scores to evaluate teachers and if you have a job assignment for which there is a statewide test, then you get rated by an EVASS score, a black box calculation of VAM.
Ohio has legislated some definitions of “effective teachers.” The legislature also requires accountability measures that are better viewed as non-stop forms of surveillance intended to control details of instruction, clearly favoring “sage on the stage” but also with a host of contradictions in criteria for effective and professional teaching.
Example: About half of your evaluation every year comes from the pretest to posttest gains of your students…as if they enter your classroom as blank slates and you are the ONLY person who is responsible for their scores on tests.
But you are also graded on your collaboration with other teachers, parents, and the community to improve student learning.
So which is it? On the one hand you are told that others can and should influence student performance–parents, other teachers, activities in the community, and you should collabortate in that.
But you, and you alone, are also viewed as responsible for student performance in your classroom–with not even a hint that scores may be influenced by others, including other teachers, parents, or out-of-school activities. Mixed messages on sources of influence are there in the criteria for evaluation.
Then there is the continued use of VAM and SLOs (writing out student learning objectives so these meet 25 criteria) Neither have any real credibility, reliability, or validity for judging student achievement and teacher “effectiveness” except by arbitrary definitions. The whole strategy in giving you a VAM rating is to “isolate” your influence on student test scores.. Why? especially when you are judged unprofessional and ineffective unless you are enlisting others in support of learning.
An effective teacher in Ohio is defined this way: ODE first claims there is a “direct connection between effective teaching and high student achievement.” This is a perfect example of circular reasoning because high test scores are equated with student achievement and are central in defining effectiveness.
Then ODE says, with no apologies: ” Inherent in this definition is the expectation that all students will demonstrate a minimum of one year of growth based on standard and reliable measures (p.4).”
What is the source of this “expectation.”
The source is actually at lease one statistician who marketed this definition, and the metrics for large-scale tests. This what I call “econometric speak” intended to make ratings of teachers sound “objective,” “precise,” free of any bias. (In Ohio, we have industrial strength hog-raising, with spillover hogwash for evaluating students and teachers, ordered by the legislature).
There is nothing “inherent” there. There is no there, there. What you do have is a totally arbitrary stipulation that says test scores are the most important measure of your “effectiveness.” And if the VAM produced for you, based on crunching test scores of your students and a large number of other students, happen to map into the right-hand side of a bell (normal) curve you are effective. Otherwise you are not.
Upshot: it will take a legislative change to get teachers, administrators, and students free of the absurd reification of scores on standardized tests that have been marketed as if necessary and nearly sufficient for accountability.
One of the key marketers is SAS who sells EVASS (Educational Value Added Assessment System) in many states. The system cannot be independently verified as valid for any purpose. The statistical formulas are in a black box surrounded by marketing materials.
Credible researchers and experts in statistics question the assumptions, methods, inferences, and ratings produced by EVASS and the many variations on VAM.
One of the most recent and brilliant critiques, based on a study of 470 references to VAM “value-added methods and metrics since 1971, found that only 29%, n=138 were in peer reviewed research journals. Moreover, the pitch about the importance, reliability, and objectivity of VAM has been disproportionately shaped by a handful of economists together with William Sanders and his colleagues who pushed EVASS into the eduational limelight in Tennesse, where he was best known for using value-added statistics in genetic engineering for agriculture–to improve the productivity of seeds, cows, and sows.
The study that dares to question the hogwash (my term) is “Truths” Devoid of Empirical Proof: Underlying Assumptions Surrounding Value-Added Models in Teacher Evaluation, by Jessica Holloway-Libell & Audrey Amrein-Beardsley (who has the VAMBoozled website).
The citation is Teachers College Record, Date Published: June 29, 2015 http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 18008. I think you can read it free until the end of this week.
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But, but, but … didn’t Gates say that there would be glitches and it would take time, that we should ALL be patient while his paid for RheeFormers worked out the problems to make his agenda work—or at least look like it works.
Let’s see: Gates is 59 years old so if he lives to reach 90, I think we will be hearing the same message from this oligarch for another 31 years (or more) as the RheeFormers keep filling dump trucks with tax payer cash and they keep spinning their lies through the media to get their failed agenda to look like it is succeeding.
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Illinois won’t leave until Obama does. Mustn’t embarrass the President of the United States! He might take his library away!
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I know…Illinois is always so behind the times.
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More on Ohio.
http://knowyourcharter.com/share-your-story/mark-stewart-columbus/
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MA is also having discussion on the merits of PARCC v. MCAS. My understanding is that TeachPlus recently got about $7.5 million from Gates and they are lobbying hard for PARCC. Parents have been vocal at the called-for public hearings on the matter. Governor Baker called it an embarrassment that there was limited to no public input on CCSS and PARCC. We’ll see who wins.
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