Mercedes Schneider noticed that Education Week published an article about a study that was released in October 2015. The study claimed that the PARCC test predicted success in college. Our new not-best friend Laura Slover, the CEO of PARCC, tweeted that the study demonstrated the sucess of the PARCC test at showing who was prepared for college.
Except, Mercedes says, it doesn’t and it didn’t. She points out that the participants in the study were already enrolled in college, so the tests predicted nothing about their college readiness.
She writes:
Moreover, even though there exists no study concerning the predictive validity of PARCC, some states have bypassed this astounding fact to make passing PARCC a graduation requirement. (There is a lawsuit over PARCC as a graduation requirement in New Jersey, where SAT and ACT are currently acceptable options. Maryland also uses PARCC as a graduation requirement “for students enrolled in PARCC-aligned courses.” Rhode Island is facing using PARCC as a 2017 graduation requirement, though the commissioner of education does not seem to want to do so.)
A PARCC spokeswoman said that the consortium plans to conduct a longitudinal study in the next two years.
Mercedes responds:
High-stakes sale first, then validation research in the years to follow.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Mercedes responds:
High-stakes sale first, then validation research in the years to follow.”
And there can never be any validation for a process so rife with errors, falsehoods and psychometric (sibling to psychometry) fudging (prevaricating) that occurs in the standards and standardized testing regime.
For those who haven’t encountered Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted work that proves the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of that regime here is a link and my summary:
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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While it would seem obvious to most thinking people, you can’t “predict” something after the fact.
But here’s an actual prediction (obtained from my crystal ball): PARCC is going to cease to exist within 3 years (if not sooner). And Laura Slover is going to go back to doing whatever it was before she did before she became a PARCC bench warmer.
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I’m not usually the gambling type, but I will this time. I’d bet that within three years what we now know as PARCC will be rebranded and it will be the newest, latest, bestest standardized test that’s going to do everything from place kids into honors classes, college, etc. to rate teachers and schools, all with unquestionable accuracy, just ask the spokesperson for this rebranded bit of genius, Laura Slover (although her spokespersonship might be honorary, as she will probably have moved on to being an “education expert” talking head by then, a la Campbell Brown).
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PARCC is gone in our state replaced by another just as bad. We’ve wasted weeks of what could have been good instruction time, breaking momentum in classrooms and disrupting schedules. All for a test that is ineffective and irrelevant. Coupled with hours of useless VAM work, and I think Reformers are watching their plan to destroy teachers and education come together nicely.
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Dienne, you may very well be right about the rebranding, but technically that would no longer be PARCC. My crystal ball is name-sensitive.
As far as Slover, I think she is effectively done — along with dumb. The kind of stuff she has engaged in recently (threatening a copyright lawsuit if a blogger does not give up the name of their source for a story) is the sort of thing that most organizations will avoid like the plague because most people see it for the spiteful behavior that it is.
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The CEO of Pearson, John Fallon, had the audacity to make this related statement:
“In hindsight, one of the mistakes that were made around the implementation of the common core was to think you could switch from No Child Left Behind, that you could click your fingers and it would happen in one fell swoop. It will take the better part of a generation for the benefits to flow through, because it’s such a fundamental step change.”
It will take the better part of a GENERATION of students to reap the benefits of the Common Core tests. Twenty+ years to see IF it works? Seriously?
Every public school parent in America should be outraged that this CRRAP has been force fed to their children without any real idea that it would work as promised.
How can anyone take these people seriously?
Link to article from Peter Greene:
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/05/pearson-ceo-spreads-it-on-thick.html
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Bill Gates said it would take 10 years and now Pearson says 20.
10 now..20 now…do I hear 30? 30 now…do I hear 40? 30 going once…40 now…do I hear 50?…100 now..do i hear 500?
500
Sold, Testing for 500 years to the US public.
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NYS parent: good catch.
SomeDAM Poet: quite so.
Over and over again the rheephormsters use the “urgency” argument to justify doubling down on whatever proven pedagogical and management failures they are mandating & selling in order to garner $tudent $ucce$$, but when it comes to them putting up or shutting up on their promised miraculous results—
Ten years is not enough. Twenty years is not enough.
Enough already of enough!
Opt out. It’s the only thing sane people can and should do.
😎
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Krafy, aren’t you willing to wait 10-20 years to see how this thing turns out? Patience, not urgency is required.
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“Urgent patience”
Urgent patience
Is required
Cures the patient,
As desired
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oops. Forgot the ‘s”
“Cures the patients”
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“The Urgency Emergency”
An Urgency
Emergency
Is why you need to test
But wait ten years
And have some beers
Until you see success
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The frauds began big time with the marketing of the American Diploma Project by Achieve, Inc, morphing those college prep course requirementsinto the Common Core State Standards–so-called–with the phoney “promise” that these standards, if followed verbatim by teachers and met by students through tests offering “proofs” of mastery, would garantee college and career readiness and save the economy. Time to dump all of this nonsense. Laura Slover played a lead role in that nonsense before PARCC.
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“Under Michael Cohen’s leadership…Achieve formed PARCC.” Cohen is the former chair of Aspen’s “Senior Congressional Education Staff Network”, an organization funded by Gates, like the organizations of Kim Smith, Pahara Aspen Institute, New Schools Venture Fund and Bellwether. Bellwether refers to schools of the 99%, as “human capital pipelines”. And, the goal of NSVF is , “to develop charter management organizations that produce a diverse supply of different brands on a large scale.”
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Laura Slover, the CEO of PARCC, tweeted that the study demonstrated the success of the PARCC test at showing who was prepared for college.
It’s interesting that Twitter allows false statements about PARCC but not true ones.
They must have a filter that flags true statements for take-down.
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PARCC funded studies will be junk science that always supports PARCC without mentioning the huge profits being made.
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