This Illinois blogger wondered why the failure rate was so high on the Common Core PARCC test. He probably didn’t know that the passing marks were set so high that mass failure was certain.

He asked a math teacher and this was her answer.

Categories Common Core, Illinois

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drakestraw says:

September 26, 2015 at 10:38 am

Read this last week and can really sympathize with the teacher. However, truth is, Chicago schools have a lot more resources than my urban school, also in the Chicago area, has. On top of that, CPS teachers make $10,000-$12,000 more than teachers in my district in almost every case. We’re all in the same sinking ship, and the pressure on teachers to “fix it” all is overwhelming! Especially in resource-limited, high poverty/low SES schools like Chicago and mine.

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- 2old2teach says:
  
  September 27, 2015 at 2:07 am
  
  You’re right about the lack of resources in your district although the same can be said for Chicago schools that are not in affluent sections of the city. I do remember sorting through the reject desks from other classrooms at the beginning of the year to try to find enough without holes drilled through the tops and that was a minor inconvenience. don’t get me started on salaries. 🙂 I am so glad I didn’t have to deal with CCSS.
  
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Peggie says:

September 26, 2015 at 10:51 am

I teach 7th grade math in a first ring suburb just outside of Philadelphia and though we don’t have PARCC and PA has slightly different Common Core standards, much of what this teacher has said applies to me and my students as well. But she doesn’t go far enough. The truth is, the standards and the tests are simply too hard for the average 12 and 13 year old 7th graders. I could not see the test itself (PA teachers have to sign an oath that they won’t look at any of the questions) but the released items from the state made my jaw drop.

I CHALLENGE ALL PA LEGISLATORS TO TAKE THE 7th GRADE MATH TEST AND LET’S SEE HOW MANY PASS.

Take a look at the released items from the state and let me know what you think. The open-ended questions are particularly shocking.

https://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/document/1434801/2014-15_mathematics_preliminary_item_and_scoring_sampler_grade_7_pdf

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- Duane Swacker says:
  
  September 26, 2015 at 6:17 pm
  
  “PA teachers have to sign an oath that they won’t look at any of the questions”
  
  Then refuse to give the test. It is unethical for a teacher to give a test to a student without having vetted it.
  
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Mary says:

September 26, 2015 at 11:00 am

Here is a cynical reason why initial scores on the PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessments are low. It is all part if “needs-based” selling to benefit sellers of curricula, software, and technology–create a need whether one exists or not. Low scores make local and state school leaders think they have to buy more stuff. So they will. Unfortunately the costs of all this stuff will take away money from schools paying teachers, and kids will ultimately suffer. Everyone should be asking whether all this is truly a need. The answer is NO!

Good reply by the teacher!

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KrazyTA says:

September 26, 2015 at 11:09 am

I sometimes use “test-to-punish” to describe how high-stakes standardized testing is used against public school staffs and students and parents and their associated communities.

I didn’t think it through carefully enough. Vomit bags. Inappropriate items. Lack of familiarity with the required technology and associated skills. Deliberately setting the bar so high that most fail. And so on…

I need to add a new term: the test IS punishment.

And that, folks, is how you develop “rigor” and “grit.” Put the little tykes through a hazing ritual and watch all the positive qualities you desire (like compassion, honor and self-respect) blossom under the beat down. Or so the rheephorm pedagogical approach asserts.

“The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

But when the rheephormsters feel themselves even a teensy bit “swarmed” they react with a fury that can’t be contained and unleash the dogs of war.

So they can dish it out but they can’t take it…

“it is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” [Ionesco]

Hmmmm…

😎

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- NY Teacher says:
  
  September 26, 2015 at 11:31 am
  
  The test is the icing on the punishment cake. Eight months of veiled (and often blatant)classroom and homework test prep to get there is like a stint in abu ghraib for so many kids. And when the results come in, 70% are defined as failures. Year after year afetre year. It is time to stop the madness.
  
  The Common Core Agenda (NCLB waiver/extortion program) is on track to produce an unprecedented level of institutionalized, chronic failure among millions of children. With no end in sight.
  
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Lisa B says:

September 26, 2015 at 11:51 am

As an elementary teacher, I concur with all that this Illinois blogger included. I would also add, and in my opinion is worth repeating, as you travel lower in to the elementary grade levels, it becomes more and more evident that the “reverse engineering” that is CCSS is developmentally inappropriate–it was a quantitative analysis and not a qualitative analysis. For example, children in 3rd grade are not developmentally ready to learn division. Children in Kindergarten are expected read at a level that was previously expected of most first grade students as they were moving on to second grade. Much of the play and practice that was a part of Kindergarten has been removed to work on the skills that CCSS compliance demands. Children are moving on to the next grade level without LIFE skills such as shoe tying and letter recognition. I worry a great deal about this entire generation not being prepared for life because the standards did not pay attention to human development.

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- Firstgrademonkey says:
  
  September 26, 2015 at 4:18 pm
  
  I concur! As a first grade team, we were looking for materials to teach syllabication. One teacher found a resource in her own memorabilia. She found a workbook she had used in the third grade. The reading and writing requirements are far beyond development in both skill and content level. This is reflected in the text book reading selections as well. Our first graders get to read about the labor movement and the formation of unions. In what world are six year olds ready to comprehend complex issue? I learned about it in 8th grade. There is also a lack of consideration for students back ground knowledge. One selection talked about the development of the New York subway system. We live in Utah. My title one students have never been on the subway. They were required to write about using the subway. One student wrote about ordering a turkey sandwich. We all hooted. It’s logical considering that the food chain is their only concept of subway. We see in the math standards as well.
  
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  - 2old2teach says:
    
    September 27, 2015 at 2:12 am
    
    “One student wrote about ordering a turkey sandwich.”
    
    A most appropriate response to all this baloney. 🙂
    
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Lisa Eggert says:

September 26, 2015 at 12:26 pm

Parents should also be on guard about privacy concerns and PARCC tests. A tremendous amount of data on our children are generated by these tests, and as I read PARCC’s privacy statements, children’s information is not entirely protected. As a parent, on privacy grounds alone, I would not let my child take a PARCC test.

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- Christine Langhoff says:
  
  September 26, 2015 at 9:28 pm
  
  See Leonie Haimson’s blog for more on privacy issues and testing: http://www.studentprivacymatters.org/about-us/
  
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Chiara says:

September 26, 2015 at 12:38 pm

“The Common Core” has been completely consumed by these tests. It’ll end up as an elaborate, over-priced testing system and nothing more. It’s already happening in Ohio.

Maybe that was always the intent, but boy, it was sure sold with lofty goals. If they just wanted a more difficult testing system they probably should have told the public and we all could have saved a lot of time and money.

It’s kind of horrifying to watch the same people who designed and promoted NCLB make the exact same error, again. The “accountability” caucus in the ed reform “movement” always dominates. Always. They’re the loudest and the most politically powerful and the “nuance” and “quality” factions always lose. Always.

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Roy Turrentine says:

September 26, 2015 at 12:39 pm

I would echo what this Chicago teacher said with a bit of a twist. When she suggested that PARRCCC, how many acronyms are there, failed to look at the second part if the student flubbed the first part, she jarred a memory of our failed move toward PARCC in Tennessee a couple of years ago.

Under the reign of Huffman, we had accepted PARCC as the testing vehicle for common core. Teachers were given training in giving and grading these Constructed Response Assessments (CRAs). We practiced on some of the students. What I discovered was that there was no subtly to the test. I knew more about minute differences between student’s comprehension of geometry than the test was demonstrating. It would have been far more accurate an indicator of where students were if I had been asked to assign a score on a range from one to ten than to read what the students wrote and go through the process of taking the test and grading it. This is because the test question we were giving were only understood by a very few very bright kids. Most kids threw in the towel before they started, receiving no credit. This served no purpose, for testing is supposed to identify gradients of intellectual progression. Many of the children having some understanding of the subject of a particular question were not identified as different from a student who had none.

I am thinking of two students. John rarely came to school and knew nothing of geometry. He was a nice boy, but his family life did not allow his understanding of geometry. He got no credit on the question. Sally Sue was a solid B. She could answer basic questions that proved she had mastered the fundamental ideas of the course. In my courses, a student who is like her gets a B and one who can creatively put the ideas together gets the A. Fair, I think. On the CRA both looked the same. That is a categorical failure of this method of testing.

RT

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John says:

September 26, 2015 at 1:16 pm

“Massachusetts teachers were deeply involved in developing (PARCC) assessment”, according to the
State Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Click to access TestDrive-2yr.pdf

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- dianeravitch says:
  
  September 26, 2015 at 3:23 pm
  
  John Breen,
  
  If you believe that teachers developed PARCC, I have a bridge to sell you. That is, unless Eli Broad or Paul Tudor Jones hasn’t already bought it and put a toll on it
  
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  - Duane Swacker says:
    
    September 26, 2015 at 6:23 pm
    
    Send him my way, it’ll net you a referral fee, so that I can sell some of that ocean front property over at Lake of the Ozarks in Central Missouri.
    
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- Christine Langhoff says:
  
  September 26, 2015 at 9:32 pm
  
  Yeah, well, about that. Mitchell Chester is not only the Commish of Education, he’s also the Chairman of PARCC. Some would see that as a conflict of interest. Maybe by “deeply involved” he means they stepped deeply in a pile of poo.
  
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Old Teacher says:

September 26, 2015 at 7:51 pm

Oh come on, I need to sell that bridge to nowhere up somewhere in Alaska, I have a retirement to fund you know.

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Janet M. Glenn (@jmaxg1942) says:

September 26, 2015 at 9:13 pm

I appreciate this teacher’s frustration. However, the real issue isn’t whether she has materials; it’s that we should not be testing like this. Period. The game is rigged. She could be provided with more examples, more details, sample lessons, etc. However, this won’t matter because students aren’t measured against an absolute performance standard. They are measured against each other. Scaled scores pit students against one another, not against an absolute standard. We must stop this. It is killing (has killed?) learning in our classrooms.

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