Carole Marshall and Sheila Ressger, both retired teachers in Rhode Island, report that the PARCC test was poorly designed and does not measure what students know and can do.
They write:
“While RIDE [Rhode Island Department of Education] insists that the PARCC is a high-quality test, what has been created is instead a test that values a caricature of critical thinking — overly complex, ambiguous questions that are intended to “catch” students. Those who doubt it can google “PARCC sample tests” and see for themselves. Countless adults with advanced degrees have testified that many of the Common Core worksheets and PARCC sample test questions are confusing to the point that even they cannot determine the “correct” answers. English language learners, students with disabilities, and students living in high poverty neighborhoods are particularly hard hit, but all children are hurt by the testing.
“The basic problem is that the PARCC tests are aligned to the Common Core standards, which ignore developmental learning. The stated purpose of the Common Core State Standards and the PARCC tests is to “raise the bar,” under the theory that our children need to be reading far more complex texts starting in the earliest grades.
“They have certainly raised the bar; noted literacy expert Russ Walsh reports that the passages are about two grade levels above the readability of the grade and age of the children. He also reports that while Common Core proponents are claiming that the standards and testing call for a higher level of critical thinking, most questions following the PARCC Language Arts passages have a very narrow focus, and can actually be answered without a firm understanding of the text. Thus, scores on the PARCC don’t in any way reflect what children are truly capable of….
“Here in Rhode Island, representatives of RIDE have acknowledged that the grade level expectations of the Common Core do not align with the expectations of previous standards. In other words, material that used to be taught in fourth grade here may now be taught in third grade. Imagine last year’s second grader who was doing well in all respects. Now in third grade, this student is expected to perform at the fourth grade level on the PARCC without having ever been exposed to the foundation of third grade work.
“Another major problem is that Pearson and RIDE have decided that all children will take the PARCC online if at all possible. Young children are being rushed to learn keyboarding skills for testing. During the tests last spring, while working on an exceptionally long and confusing series of tasks, children were also required to perform functions such as scroll down, switch back and forth, and drag and drop items, as well as type into boxes. There is no way to measure how much impact all of this had on their ability to understand the passages and the questions.”
Common Core testing is reenforcing a false narrative of failure by “raising the bar” so high that most children will fail. These decisions were made knowingly. Those who decided on this cruel policy should be arrested for child abuse.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Infuriating. When did education become about tricking, frustrating, and failing kids?
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That is easy: the 2014 NCLB 100% proficiency requirement and accompanying NCLB waiver from the USDOE. the $64 million dollar question at the root of test-and-punish reform. The $64 million dollar question is not even “why” – the real question is, how much longer will we let this continue?
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It became a myriad of tricks and deceptions for a variety of reasons:
1) the billionaires and their political henchmen see $800,000,000,000 in taxes spent on public education and lust over grabbing their “piece of the pie”.
2) in order to do this, they create a “false emergency”…that public education is a failure and the United States lags behind Estonia, Bulgaria, and Moldova.
3) the biggest “expense” in public education are the teachers…so they are demonized for the failures of society, held to outrageous and “blind” hurdles, as the union leadership abandons them while they are crushed while 10% will be deemed ineffective, before they ever step into a classroom as they are “ranked and sorted”.
4) politicians want in on this gold rush, and those such as Cuomo offer no-bid contracts and support privatization, while their political contribution coffers are double-greased…before the contracts are signed, and then afterwards as a “thank you”.
5) the Common Core and entire privatization was implemented in back room deals…without implementation from professional educators and parents. If these two groups were involved, the Core would have faced, and rightly so, immediate pushback, and states that signed on before these harmful standards were foisted on them by their governors would have opted for their own standards.
6) the Common Core was designed by entrepreneurs to the delight of Gates and Broad et al…with additional, financial support from wealthy individuals in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Libya. They seek to destroy American nationalism, while pushing for internationalization.
7) the Common Core and assignments are meant to cause students to “spin their wheels” educationally….to confuse them, destroy their confidence, their ability to think freely…rendering them as dependent on the state, with the eventual goal of destroying our Constitutional rights…one amendment at a time.
8) as public teaching is destroyed, it will crush the pedagical unions first, then steamroll into others…the last being police and firefighters, as the billionaires realize they may need them down the road.
9) to create a 21st century of serfdom, as individualism, American pride, and religious doctrines of Judaism and Christianity are put aside, Islam is indoctrinated into children in classrooms from coast to coast, while people obey the “new order” of the state.
This plan is 30 years in the making…as the Frankensteinian monster had life breathed in to it by Hurricane Katrina and the Stock Market Crash of 2008…utilizing both natural and man-made disasters to tell the American people we must accept this to save ourselves….or else…
Those that have pushed these policies are in-American, anti-American, anti-Judeo Christian teachings, to destroy that which make us human beings.
They are criminals, and must be punished severely for their crimes against the United States, its citizens, and our tenets of democracy.
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Many questions are logical and word gibberish. Part and parcel of a beef-headed thought process.
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My husband isn’t a fan of standardized testing, partly because he went to private schools where they didn’t do any.
I showed him the sample CC test in English last year and he said “they’re creating a generation of lawyers!” He thinks the parsing of the text to try to choose what to him seem like really close calls in the answers is borderline ridiculous- he described it as “legalistic”.
He refused to make a selection- insisted that several answers were arguably correct and it’s game-playing 🙂
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“RARCC and RIDE”
PARCC reform and RIDE
With folks on opt-out side
To save our kids and school
We really need to pool
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TC and Chiara
The root of the problem with CC aligned ELA tests lies in this simple fact:
the CC standards are not compatible with the MC testing format. Test items certainly seem like gibberish and game playing – and to some extent, test writers are trying to write with confusing syntax in the name of “rigor”. The larger issue is the CC standards are mostly vague and subjective (empty) intellectual skill sets. Producing well written, objective MC test items for these standards is nearly impossible. Its like trying to measure or rate the beauty of a perfect spring day with a thermometer.
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Are you comparing the Common Core to a spring day?
“Shall I compare thee to a vernal day?”
Sonnet 18 William Shakespeare (with a few modifications)
Shall I compare thee to a vernal day?
Thou art more lovely and more coreporate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And springtime’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal springtime shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that share thou ow’st;
Nor shall Ravitch brag thou wand’rest in her shade,
When in data mines to time thou grow’st,
So long as Colemen can breathe or Rhees can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
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The CC take:
Which line best exemplifies the theme of Shakespeare’s 18th sonnet?
a) Shall I compare thee to a vernal day?
b) Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
c) But thy eternal springtime shall not fade
d) So long lives this, and this gives life to thee
Not even Shakespeare could answer this but they would want a 12 year old to read his mind anyway.
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Hmmm. . . and then what piece of evidence best supports the main idea. . .
(a) thou are more lovely and more corporate
(b) when in data mines to time thou grow’st
etc.
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My son and his friends think they cracked the code. They believe that referring back to the text constantly is the key to a good grade on a Common Core essay.
Unfortunately, they interpret that is repeating what the text says and changing some words around, basically 🙂
I was the same way. I thought testing was a kind of game when I was in school. I didn’t dread it, but I always perceived as figuring out what they were after and supplying that. I just don’t know how much value that has. I was pretty good at it, but I don’t know what that means, or it means anything other than I knew what they wanted.
I don’t have any objections to the Common Core-influenced work he’s doing. It looks to me like they supplemented fiction with non-fiction. So a novel and then a speech and then a newspaper article rather than just the novel. That’s fine with me, so I’m okay with “The Common Core” if it’s standards. But the tests? They don’t seem at all special to me. I think they could have changed the cut scores on the old tests and achieved 90% of what they wanted to do, which is raise the proficiency score.
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Chiara, your son is lucky if the only effect of CC-influenced ELA teaching is supplementing fiction with non-fiction selections. A Spanish tutee of mine saw a 3-wk examination MLK’s Ltr fr the Birminham jail (2wks of phrase-by-phrase analysis followed by a week of working on a text-based essay) right out of the box in Sep of 4th-grade, during his NJ school’s 1st yr of CC implementation.
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And yet… what set of ELA stds would ever synch w/the MC testing format?
I can no longer view online the NJ Core Curriculum Stds, circa 1991, that governed my kids’ ELA primary ed. But I remember that they occupied about 1.5 pp per grade, divided roughly into listening, speaking, reading, writing. Very open-ended. Clearly not measurable by MC-tests. ELA achievement was measured in those days by state-stdzd grade-span vocab/ reading-comp tests, which were used as a rough guideline for course-selection, & to flag issues. Meanwhile, actual progress in literacy was measured by teacher-designed assessments including reading-comp, classroom discussions & writing assignments.
NJ Core Curriculum Stds since then have multiplied their ELA stds to 40 stds per grade (2004, responding to NCLB, translated to annual NJASK tests implemented in 2007), & now prox 70 stds per grade (2009, reflecting the adoption of CCSS in 2010 implemented 2013).
The numerical increase in ELA stds relates directly to the attempt to measure literacy via state-imposed stdzd tests– which are of economic necessity composed of MC questions, augmented to a small degree by limited writing samples which can be graded by computer algorithm or (as necessary) low-paid craigslist human scorers using pre-hatched scoring rubrics.
There is no set of ELA stds, i.e., stds which measure literacy– nor has there ever been– which can be measured by multiple-choice assessments– even when augmented by writing samples scored by computer or by human scorers working from stdzd rubrics.
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IMO, these poorly written questions that attempt to trick the student are the worst. They end up testing some kind of parsing skill instead of the underlying concept. As a result, a set of questions that purport to evaluate different skills really measure the same skill (parsing) disproportionately.
I think this is a result of trying to make the tests harder without putting in extra effort to write better questions. That they result in appropriately distributed bell curves does not mean that they are measuring what they are supposed to measure.
Of course, this type of question is the hardest for English language learners, kids from low SES families, and those with learning difficulties.
I disagree regarding the ability to create good multiple choice assessments on standards in CC. NY Teacher, do you have some examples?
We see the same in Math, where too many times the question is testing the student’s ability to understand the wording of the math problem rather than the problem itself.
I’m not a fan of opt-out, but I do think we need much better tests. This is another one of those things that could use better focus. If the message were just about better tests, I think it would be more useful. But, if it’s about better tests, shorter tests, no tests, no tests used for teacher evaluation, no money to Pearson, get rid of Common Core, etc., I think the message about the quality of the tests gets diluted.
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Better, fairer, transparent tests ought to be the goal. I think that a test can be sound and still have “plausible distractors” and questions that a majority of children will struggle with. Tests in New York State used to be so easy that students could quickly deduce correct answers to reading passages without even reading the passage itself.
Almost all of the lovely, resource-rich, Dewey-approved private schools administer multi-part, multi-day computerized standardized bubble tests as a reality check against their own assessments, including the school that Dewey founded:
http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/data/files/gallery/ContentGallery/ERBAssessments2014.ppt
Align state exams to something like the ERBs, and the problem is solved, right?
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Why don’t the kids in public school just take the exact same ERBs that private school kids take?
And, when a child at the ucls gets a slightly lower score on one section than the previous year, there isn’t a huge outcry to fire his teacher.
By the way, the new SAT scores will be common core — I suspect the questions will be better, but will be interesting to see how many private school students “opt out” this year since most of the private colleges that cater to the lower 80% of the students at private schools are making them optional. Interesting how many kids from the top NYC private schools are talking about taking the ACTs this year because they are fearful of the new “common core” SAT exam. But I am thrilled that private school students will get to embrace the joy! Although at least the college board seems to have more intelligent questions — I guess they have to since they know private school students are taking them too and they won’t be rewarded if the kids fail. Unlike Pearson!
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MC test items must have “plausible distractors” All this means is that the three incorrect choices must seem reasonable to the test taker. Plausible ditsractors are not intended to “trick” students. Think about the alternative: implausible distractors!
Which is classified as a coniferous tree?
a) beech
b) maple
c) pine
d) oak
All distractors are plausible because they are all trees.
Now the alternative; implausible distractors:
Which species is classified as a coniferous tree?
a) zebra
b) quartz
c) pine
d) helium
When I worked as an item writer, we had to provide an defense for every plausible distractor, explaining why it was an incorrect but not implausible choice.
The problem wit CC ELA distractors is that the questions are too often subjective and really not suited for the objective MC format. This is what has given the idea of the plausible distractor such a bad name. In objective tests they are quite necessary. Think about the SAT math items. All distractors are the result of misapplying the math.
What is the product of 8 and 4?
a) 32
b) 12
c) 4
d) 2
This item tests the understanding of the term product and the skill of multiplication.
To eliminate the skill the item could read:
Which shows how the product of 8 and 4 would be calculated?
a) 8 x 4
b) 8 + 4
c) 8 – 4
d) 8/4
Same problem with implausible distractors:
What is the product of 8 and 4?
a) 32
b) 1,000,000
c) 3.1416
d) 0
TIM
You are right about well written tests and testing transparency. And if they insist on using them for teacher evaluation the tests must be written with “instructional sensitivity” That is a very tall order, nearly impossible to write properly. No such standardized tests have ever been written and validated for “instructional sensitivity.
The few well meaning reformers and testing advocates have to accept the limitations of objective testing. Open ended, constructed response items present a much more complex set of problems which is why SAT and ACT avoid the format.
As a compromise I would advocate for grade span testing using well written tests that can gauge minimum competency skills in math, science, reading, and writing. The CC tests don’t even come close.
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NY Teacher — good points. And what is very interesting is if you look at the 3rd grade NY State tests for example, you will find that the questions that are straightforward are answered correctly by nearly all the children and the questions that are ambiguously worded are the ones that most children miss. Unlike the ERBs, where a child might miss a question because he doesn’t know the exact meaning of a vocabulary word, the common core questions are terrible. The difference: ERB question: Which word is closest to meaning of “ambiguous” in line 3? and the common core question is: What word in paragraph 1 best helps the reader understand the meaning of the word “ambiguous” in line 3? A child can know exactly what ambiguous means but since he already knew what it meant and none of the options really “helped” him understand the meaning, he picks a wrong choice. And it demonstrates nothing about his education or teaching which is why the ERBs don’t word questions that way for private school students.
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I worked for Measured Progress and was trained to keep the item stems as simple and clear as possible. The crap I see (and I have looked at the tests) in Pearson tests would have been placed right in the circular file. MP supervisors always stressed that on cumulative standardized tests, the benefit of the doubt always goes to the test taker. The biggest problems I faced were with the specific state science standards; often they were poorly worded, too vague, too broad. The very confusing syntax in Pearson exams is just a bad excuse for rigor. As a previous poster commented, it becomes more about parsing bad syntax than understanding a reading passage or math word problem.
The guiding principle of test writing states:
“If an item can be misconstrued by the test taker, it will!”
Simple, crystal clear writing can be difficult with straightforward objective standards. Doing so with CC ELA standards is nearly impossible. The Pearson stuff is inexcusable; hopefully Questar Assessment can do better????
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NY Teacher: Interesting insights into the world of test question design.
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We’ve had standardized tests in school my entire lifetime (40 years since I first set foot in kindergarten). Surely in that amount of time there has been a good one, no? Which standardized test(s) do you think have been good? If there are none that you can point to so far, what makes you think think we’ll ever have a good standardized test even with another 40 years?
Incidentally, what do you think would be the hallmarks of a good standardized test?
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Dienne, I wish I could answer this with accuracy, but my NJ DOE site does not detail assessment history before 1999, and memory fails. What I do remember: i found grade-span testing very helpful in analyzing– with teachers’ help– overall patterns in my sons’ progress in reading and math in grades 1-8. I believe they were state-std (not nat’l), called ESPA (4thgr) and GEPA (8thgr).
But simple year-by-year grades were equally helpful. For example, I remember that my middle son’s favorite subjects in elementary school were social studies and science. But his grades in those 2 subjects declined steadily 7th-9th gr. When he started getting D’s in them in 10thgr, I knew something in the post-elementary curriculum/ teaching had killed his interest. This helped us convince him to try his h.s.’s alternative school-w/n-a school for 11th-12th. The change re-kindled his interest in all subjects & helped him hone in on a major for college.
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In states such as mine, (MD) I see an informal , unorganized, and unrecognized opt out. Every student I have talked with since last year’s PARCC Test say that they took none of the questions seriously at all. For the most part they randomly answered, finished early and sat and read a book or drew on scrap paper. The test has no effect on their lives and does not affect their graduation or college entrance. Isn’t this a form of opting out?
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I agree that it’s the students’ way of opting out. By 6th or 7th grade, the kids don’t care about the tests anymore and just bubble in whatever. And educators are evaluated on that.
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Why don’t they skip to the end, raise the bar now and advocate teaching children in the kindergarten quantum mechanics.
I LOVE what Dr. Ravitch said yesterday in her response to Ben Carson about the
“trivial pursuit” questions.
AMEN!!!!
How trivial some people regard the education issue now.
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Baby Plus Pre-Natal Education company is currently developing an audio library on advanced science topics, including quantum mechanics. Their motto is, “Screw cognitive theory, Brain development is for losers”
https://www.babyplus.com/
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Raising the bar too high in inappropriate ways and at inappropriate times.
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Politico announced that Common Core is already a big success
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/common-core-education-schools-214632
They “won the war”- I’m not sure why a national experiment involving tens of millions of children is a “war”, but they won and that’s really all that matters, right?
Some of them were even able to dupe their constituents into believing they repealed the Common Core, but that was actually a lie – the clever lawmakers simply changed the name and “outsmarted” the public. Another win!
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Do look at the PARCC samples if you’re at all curious. The questions are so badly worded that it’s difficult to figure out what they’re getting at on the ELA questions. And their concept of the main idea oversimplifies the meaning of the passage so that the true main idea often isn’t there at all, and all the choices have some merit.
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Just switch the word PARCC for STAAR and you have the same thing going on in Texas.
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Many of the comments here suggest CCSS is okay, we just need better tests. This may be true for math. Untrue for the travesty of CC-ELA.
Some give examples of better vocabulary test Q’s. Word meaning is on a par with understanding the difference between the amounts represented by numbers 4 and 7, but does not rise to the cognitive level of 4×7, nor even 4+7. And our numbers are logical extensions of 0-9– how to choose testable bits among the 10k+ words used by the average 7yo?
Few sub-components of literacy lend themselves to MC tests. Comprehensive means are required, unlikely to be captured in tests scored by computers or by minimally-qualified human scorers using pre-hatched rubrics.
ELA testing issues are not tangential. They are baked into the asinine CC approach of breaking the ability to read, write, & analyze a written passage into hundreds of grade-by-grade testable mini-skill-sets (“standards” is a misnomer). Ability to define certain words at certain ages does help gauge literacy level (if supported by other measures). Other testable skills such as naming parts of speech arguably do not. Deciding which phrases illustrate ‘author’s intent’ or make his work ‘memorable’ are not even skills (let alone stds of literacy), merely fodder for the occasional classroom discussion.
It is tough to concisely critique the ELA stds as the rot runs throughout. A few are age-inappropriate on their face, e.g., K-reading RFK.4, “Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.” Many are curriculum outlines rather than standards (e.g., all of the writing stds). But the main problem lies in the highly-subjective attempt to break Listening/ Speaking/ Reading/ Writing into a sequence of as many as 70 separately-testable ‘skills’ (plus anchor stds) per grade level– an exhaustive picking-apart of thought processes into their supposed component parts– as though each were teachable/ testable on a stand-alone basis. This leads to implementation problems which are not separate from the standards, but inherent in them, long before we get to testing.
–Sp&Fr Freelancer
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Bethree
I don’t think most readers here think CCSS is fine.
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I’m sure right you’re right Diane but I do get nervous in a thread with so much detail on what makes a good standardized test question, as though ignoring that the test house is built on CC sand.
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You are right on target about Common Core ELA “standards”. Your description is quite accurate: a laundry list of vague, subjective skill sets and endless sub-sets, often developmentally inappropriate, mediocre discussion fodder, and reading more like curriculum outlines (because they prescribe the “how”). Completely incompatible with the MC format – hence the really, really bad PARCC, SBAC, and Pearson nightmare.
Common Core math “standards” have their problems as well. Mainly because they too are written as curriculum outlines, specifying the “how” in addition to the “what”. What parents are noticing, via CC math homework, is just how bad the “how” is. Overly complex methods have replaced simple, common sense approaches, supposedly to develop a deeper understanding of mathematic concepts. A clueless approach on the part of the originators of this crap. Most of the math concepts have been pushed down a year or two, in a lame attempt to create “rigor”. Instead the CC math approach is about to create a generation of incredibly inept math students. Just wait until they hit the colleges and universities’ the “college and career readiness” claim will seem like a cruel joke played on our children.
As a general rule parents and teachers seem most upset with the ELA tests and the math methods (as prescribed by the so-called standards). Yet the entire package violates all we know about best practices. Just think, it only took a small handful of arrogant amateurs to completely dismantle the public school system. Shameful.
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Reblogged this on stopcommoncorenys.
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