Sarah Blaine, former teacher and current lawyer, blogs at Parenting the Core. She is the parent of two children in New Jersey’s public schools. She prepared testimony in opposition to the proposal to use the PARCC test as a high school graduation requirement.
In her testimony, she reviews what New Jersey law says about the responsibility of the New Jersey state board of education. She maintains that its action to raise the high school graduation requirement to “college and career ready” is in direct conflict with state law.
So what do the statutes the Board’s regulations seek to implement require? N.J.S.A. 18A:7C-1 et seq. require that the Commissioner develop a graduation exit test to be approved by this Board in order to obtain a State-endorsed high school diploma. Id. at 7C-1, 7C-2, 7C-4. The Statewide assessment test must be administered to all 11th grade students. Id. at 7C-6 and 7C-6.1. It must measure those minimum basic skills all students must possess to function politically, economically and socially in a democratic society: specifically, the test must measure the reading, writing, and computational skills students must demonstrate as minimum requirements for high school graduation. Id. at 7C-1, 7C-6.1. Further, if a student uses a comprehensive assessment option instead – i.e., the portfolio option – the student’s use of the portfolio option must be approved by the Commissioner of Education. Id. at 7C-4.
The problem is that the graduation requirements enshrined in the proposal for the Class of 2021 forward do not meet the requirements set forth in the statute.
First, the Statewide assessment test must be administered to all 11th graders. See N.J.S.A. 18A:7C-6; 7C-6.1. Under the Class of 2021 forward regulations, however, the tests that students will be required to obtain passing scores on to earn their high school diplomas, however, are the 10th grade ELA test and the Algebra I test. By definition, the 10th grade ELA test will not be administered to all 11th graders statewide.
The Algebra I test is even more problematic, as many students across the state take Algebra I (and therefore the Algebra I PARCC End-of-Course test) as early as 7th or 8th grade. It also, of course, makes no sense to tell children as young as 12 that their high school graduation depends on their performance on a test they’re taking now. Further, making obtaining a Proficient score on the End-Of-Course test for a course often taught in 7th or 8th grade a high school graduation requirement might well have the unintended consequence of discouraging districts from offering accelerated math programs to qualified students.
Second, I’ve scoured the PARCC consortium website in detail, and nowhere does it say that the PARCC ELA 10 and PARCC Algebra I tests were designed to measure whether students have achieved those minimum basic skills all students must possess to function politically, economically, and socially in a democratic society. Instead, PARCC is focused on assessing college and career readiness – a laudable goal, but a much higher standard than the minimal basic skills standard the Board is authorized to employ in approving a test to determine which public school students in the state will be denied high school diplomas.
Read her testimony in full. She links to the relevant statutes.
The bottom line is that the state board has created a disastrous situation. Students in New Jersey have taken the PARCC tests. Most have failed the tests. Most students will not qualify for a high school diploma. If they fail, as most will, they will have to get the permission of the state commissioner to submit a portfolio of work instead. This is a recipe for chaos and demoralization.
This is nonsense. The sooner New Jersey gets a new governor who cares about students and public schools, the better off the state will be.
The best development now would be a lawsuit to force the state board of education to comply with state law and common sense.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not that it seems to matter with ed reformers, but it damages their credibility to claim the Common Core tests aren’t high stakes for students and then they turn around and make them high stakes.
How are parents supposed to believe a word they say? Worse, how are are STUDENTS supposed to believe a word any of these adults say?
The very least they could do is state the objectives of these policies plainly and clearly, at the outset.
I wish my youngest was out of the public school system. I’m tired of trying to figure out what these people are up to.
Ed reform super-hero Chris Christie might have bigger problems than battling public school teachers, students and parents.
There is new evidence that he “flat out lied” about that bridge scandal.
Good riddance.
Citizens have been forced to go to the judicial branch, as a refuge from the abuse of the legislative and executive branches. The President, legislators, and governors sacrificed the best interests of students, taxpayers and communities so that Silicon Valley, hedge funds, and no value schemers, could rake in money.
Christie has always wanted to destroy public education. He wants his farewell to inflict chaos on the school system and union for whom he has nothing but disdain. Being a lawyer, he probably knows the implications. He just doesn’t care! His other move to cause havoc in the schools is equally reprehensible. His equity school funding formula will not be fair. It will pit urban and suburban schools against each other. Equity is not necessarily fair, especially when the local tax base varies in each community. Those with a low tax base, mostly urban schools, will see their state support diminish, and these are the districts with the neediest, most expensive students to educate. Christie’s parting shot is in keeping with his governance. He is a small minded bully that expects everyone to yield to his authority. He can go back to being an unprincipled lobbyist, and most of New Jersey will be happy to see him go.
The absurdities are revealed with absolute clarity. This really an elegant legal case.
There is one exception. The meaning of college and career ready is as much in limbo now as it was more than an a decade ago. There is a radical difference between course work for entering an elite university, a community college, and a trade school program. There are radical differences between becoming educated for a possible career as a classical musician, a plumber, an aerospace engineer. Then there is the Bureau of Labor Statistics factoid: A typical US worker has held 11 jobs before the age 44. Add the proliferation of “career pathways” for young people and pressure to choose one starting in Kindergarten and you have not much more than empty slogans driving meaningless graduation requirements and tests.
This legislative action is either willfully ignorant or purposefully designed to undermine the confidence of NJ citizens in public education in order to justify privatization. NAEP scores show that overall NJ is one of the highest performing states in the country. That said, poverty and race-related learning gaps are unacceptable. The solution is not punishment. The solution is to Invest and Trust: http://www.arthurcamins.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/The-Better-Way-to-Improve-Education.pdf
NAEP scores are just as invalid as any other standardized test scores. They mean nothing due to the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of the standards and standardized testing process as shown by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted dissertation “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.
Today in the ed reform echo chamber:
“Veteran journalist and author Richard Whitmire takes you behind the scenes with the founders, educators and disrupters who launched a learning revolution for America’s most disadvantaged students in his latest project, The Founders: Inside the revolution to invent (and reinvent) America’s best charter schools, a new book to be published August 30 by The 74.
The text will include a foreword by former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and will be complemented by the launch of a website featuring exclusive video interviews and an oral history archive. (To get more information about the book’s release, or where it can be purchased and downloaded, sign up for The 74 newsletter)”
The ed reform website gets together with an ed reform reporter to publish a glowing review of charter schools, and it’s all endorsed and cheerled by the ed reform Secretary of Education.
This is very lively and rigorous “debate” in DC. Yes, sir. All KINDS of “science” involved in this blatant public/private marketing effort.
Barf.
Chris Chrisitie is a member of the VAM MOB Machine
“The bottom line is that the state board has created a disastrous situation.”
And that “disastrous situation” is based on the concept of “measuring student achievement”:
“Id. at 7C-6 and 7C-6.1. It must measure those minimum basic skills all students must possess to function politically, economically and socially in a democratic society: specifically, the test must measure the reading, writing, and computational skills students must demonstrate as minimum requirements for high school graduation.”
There is no “measuring” in the teaching and learning process, never has and never will be Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement (notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”): “Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Now since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable” which is what all this standardized testing insanity, truly insanity if you think about it, is about???
So much harm to so many students is caused by the educational malpractices that are standards and testing or as Phelps contends in “measuring the nonobservable”.
How insane is this all???
Utterly beyond my comprehension!!!
I live in MD and we have the same issue. Unfortunately, I’m not an attorney or researcher, or teacher and I don’t know how to find the language in our charter or even where to find our charter. I am looking for this woman to pave the way with a big lawsuit against the state. If she starts, then I think MD can follow…although I believe we are the 1st state to adopt PARCC as a graduation requirement?
Thanks Diane, as always, for sharing. The State BOE’s decision to implement regulations imposing a requirement that students pass (with scores of 4 or 5) PARCC ELA 10 and PARCC Algebra 1 is, frankly, inexplicable, given that they’ve done nothing more than buy themselves another lawsuit (to be defended at taxpayer expense, which is infuriating to me as a taxpayer whose tax dollars have already been wasted on defending mistakes of the Christie administration).
I appreciate the comment from Ms. Moore, but unfortunately so long as I’m in private practice (if a pro-public education not-for-profit law firm wanted to hire me, I’d be happy to talk, of course), I’m not the person who can make that happen. But NJ’s Education Law Center already sued NJDOE once on this issue (on the interim plan NJDOE put in place for the 2016 graduates), so I doubt they’ll be shy about going there again.
We can only hope that our next governor (election for NJ’s next governor will happen in Nov. 2017 with new governor to take office in Jan. 2018, so given that, thank goodness, Trump is likely to lose, we’re stuck with Christie for almost another year and a half). But sadly in New Jersey, the land of machine politics, party affiliation and even explicit campaign promises to take pro-public education positions are not enough to make us feel secure that a candidate will stand up for public schools. So far I think our best hope is Democrat Phil Murphy, but the NJ machine politics are strong, and we can only hope that the NJEA will support the guy who is actually espousing education policies that are good for students (instead of selling their support to whomever they think will do their bidding with respect to pension reform, regardless of what the rest of that person’s education platform looks like).
In the meantime, I’ve been spending all of my time this summer working on opposing a charter school proposed for my NJ town. See:
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/08/08/montclair-charter-school/
Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with the decision about the PARCC graduation requirements, our New Jersey State Board of Education and our New Jersey Department of Education don’t seem to care about the degree of public opposition, whether that opposition is to the PARCC graduation requirements or to a proposed charter school in a high-performing district like Montclair (we have our issues, and we’re striving to reduce our opportunity gap, but the idea that our district is failing is, frankly, laughable — and our all-magnet, all-CHOICE school district has been a model for a workable desegregation plan for the past 30+ years — a charter school that isn’t required to follow our desegregation plan and that would bleed millions of dollars we use to support our desegregation plan through courtesy busing and magnet offerings could single-handedly undo decades of work aimed at reducing educational inequity).
Yet, as with the PARCC grad requirements, this is another decision that gets made entirely in Trenton for local schools and local districts with ZERO control by the local community. Our local community (from the NAACP to our local PRO-education reform AstroTurf group, Montclair Kids First) has been universal in its opposition to this charter school, but all we can do is to hope and/or pray for a miracle in which the NJDOE is actually responsive to and acts on local input, which is universally against this charter. This editorial in our local newspaper sums up the opposition as of about a week ago, and the list of organizations and entities that have voiced their opposition has only grown since that time.
http://www.northjersey.com/opinion/opinion-editorials/unsupported-1.1639751
And here’s an update from an online news source as of today: http://baristanet.com/2016/08/charter-school-montclair/
To me, be it PARCC as a graduation requirement or charter school decisions, it seems clear that in NJ the real issue is an issue of governance/democracy. It is time for NJ to amend its state constitution to reduce the power of our governor, whomever he or she may be, and to put some real checks and balances in place to ensure that entities like our NJDOE and NJBOE can’t go off the rails in terms of blatantly refusing to follow duly-enacted legislation (see my underlying post) as well as in term of completely ignoring non-bought-and-paid-for grassroots community input. And it is way past time for a veto-proof majority of our legislators to amend NJ’s charter school law to ensure that local communities have the ability to — through the democratic process — reject charter applications that threaten the public schools we’ve worked so hard to support and that many of us work so hard to fund through our notoriously high property tax dollars.
Thanks for the posted comment.
Sounds like Ohio, and my metro district struggling to keep peace with an aggressive corporate-led “accelerator.” They find it hard to keep an arms length away from “offers” made by the current and former CEOs of several fortune 500 companies here. Retired CEOs created the accelerator ( a non-profit conduit for money) in order to up-end school board governance with the principle that “any operator” is fine if they produce results… high test scores, increased rates of graduation and entrance into college.
The intent is to replace the school board with a self-appointed committee of about nine members with a CEO who pacifies the public, raises money to overturn everything public except for the flow of customary public money(local, state, federal) to any “operator” that produces results. The recruitment pitch for the CEO that I tripped upon from Bellwether (a promoter of all things charter) spilled more beans about the intent of the accelerator than the local press or record of school board discussions.
Since 2008, the school board has been target for policy changes by national groups and their networks. The first wave from “The New Teacher Project formulary, called a “study,” recommended pay for performance, an accelerated dismissal for underperfoming teachers and the rest. The new national strategy seems to involve targeting local community foundations as the instigators of “reforms” with partners such as the local chamber of commerce and the United Way.
Absolutely absurd, that one state imposes the use of this useless test as a graduation requirement while another (doing the right thing, for once!) does away w/PARCC for high school students (Illinois). Also, see link, whereby superintendents ask IL State Superintendent Tony Smith to also remove the PARCC from IL elementary schools, as well:
http://www.winetkacurrent.com/letters-editor/letter-editor-superintendents-thank-state-parcc-decision.
Perhaps this could help you make your case in NJ, Sarah, and those of you in other states.