Sean Cavanaugh writes in Education Week about the soul-searching and market-sifting of PARCC, the federally funded testing consortium that is on the verge of collapse.
Arne Duncan plunked down $360 million to enable the creation of PARCC and SBAC. Both were designed to align with the Common Core State Standards.
PARCC started with 24 states and D.C. signed up as sites that wanted its tests (the vendor is Pearson).
However, PARCC is now down to 6 states and D.C.
One of the suggestions is that PARCC and SBAC merge, to minimize the cost of producing millions of tests.
What happens in the business world when no one wants what you are selling?
Who will be held accountable for this dud?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Still sends chills down my spine when I hear the word PARCC! What goes around always comes around…….That is for sure!!!
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“What goes around always comes around….[and with PARCC that would be CRAPP]….That is for sure!!!
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No one will be held accountable, because no one was held accountable for the Vietnam War that was based on lies and the Iraq war that was based on lies. Millions lost their lives to these two wars. Trillions were spent fighting them.
PARCC is only about money, and jobs and the destruction of a successful public education system that’s responsible for the U.S. being the 4th most educated country on the planet with almost three college graduates for every job that requires a college degree and the biggest publishing industry in the world thanks to all those U.S. readers that grew up loving to read thanks to their parents and/or teachers.
The United States publishing sector could not thrive without lots of readers who enjoy learning and/or reading for entertainment. Total market value of the U.S. publishing sector is $31 billion euros, almost a third of the world’s total that is $105.6 billion euros. China, with almost four times the people, is in a distant 2nd place with a publishing sector worth a little more than $10 billion euros.
http://publishingperspectives.com/2012/10/ipas-global-ranking-of-publishing-markets-us-china-on-top/#.V92IP5grKUk
I measure the long term success of the public schools in the U.S. with results that are not cherry picked. When Bill Gates, the Waltons, Eli Broad and the other billionaire oligarchs destroy that public school system and educate children to hate learning and reading because of the abusive and bully tactics being used in most if not all of the autocratic, opaque (secretive), often fraudulent and inferior corporate charter schools, what will that look like ten and twenty years ago. Most traditional public school teachers work hard to reach children so those children grow up to love learning and reading.
In New Orleans, where corporate charters rule, it’s estimated that as many as 15 percent of the children are not in school because there is no public school to go to once the autocratic, abusive, fraudulent and inferior corporate charter kicks them out.
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“What happens in the business world when no one wants what you are selling?”
This is the question that hits the nail on the head…
If it is John King, or Meryl Tisch, or Chris Christie…
1) You cry out that “special interests” (aka parents) have political agendas against accountability…
2) you find a politician to sign on the dotted line (think of the pot o’gold that comes with the signature…
3) you force it along anyway, because after all…
It’s not really about education…it’s about business and profit.
This is capitalism with a spoon shoved down the throats of the American public and our children.
These are not capitalists in the true sense of the word…
PARCC was pushed upon the people as a result of the back room, midnight deals as politicians wear “for sale” signs, as they walk the catwalk for millionaires and billionaires.
Imagine not if, but actually when…a politician tells business and industry to leave our children, and our public sectors alone, that our children and our public services belong to the people.
…Imagine a politician standing up for the people.
…Imagine a leader protecting our children and our public schools.
…Imagine a leader defending democracy instead of subverting it.
If only one leader would stand up….say no to the bribes and coercion…and actually be a leader.
It will happen, but how long must our children suffer and wait?
It’s time to hold the education drug pushers accountable.
“Just Say No”
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Standing up to big businesses with their hands out for public dollars, isn’t that what Bernie Sanders did and is still doing? I don’t think Bernie is alone. What about Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts?
By the way, Trump made a lot of money from a generous government, paid for with our taxes.
“Trump has thrived with government’s generosity”
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/11/nation/la-na-trump-20110511
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We need Elizabeth Warren to stand up against the Wall Street takeover of public schools in her home state. When will she speak out against Question 2?
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Another question is why she isn’t standing up for public schools. Has she been threatened by Bill Gates, the Waltons, the Koch brothers that if she stands in their way, they will crush her in the next election?
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Sen Warren has said that she is…”concerned.”
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Elizabeth Warren said “ALL children” need resources. There is a court order in one school in Boston that says “you don’t need an IEP to deserve resources”… you do not have to be proven “defective” to deserve resources. I am interpreting E. Warren in that direction. My supervisor (who is deceased had said to me) “Call them all charters if you want but equalize the damn resources” and he was meaning the great inequities among/between cities and towns and the less affluent cities have to tax themselves disproportionately in order to keep their schools . This has been known for decades. The political powers have decided that only SOME students deserve the resources and they should be “creamed” off the top because they are “strivers” and have test scores that will help us to look good. Ruth Rodriguez wrote today that her school gets kids back from the charter just before testing time and they will be the lowest scoring students on MCAS (plus they were in the charter for several months and haven’t had exposure to the teaching and strategies of the school accepting them). If I were a surgeon in Boston I would accept only those patients who have the lowest risk so my statistics in surgery would look good and I’m sure the insurance companies will reward me for that.
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What should PARCC do to survive? They should just go away and figuratively cut the wrists of this monster and let it die. Put the money into something useful such as medical care and good nutritious meals, not the cinnamon roll sugar crap my school gets for free breakfasts…do things the right way!
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this is Ruth’s letter that she shared on FB this morning; anyone who would like to frame a letter to Governor Baker; anyone who would like to frame a letter to Elizabeth W.????
I think Ruth includes the MA issues quite well. (I did not ask Ruth’s permission to share her letter but she is widely sharing throughout our state so I will ask her now)
Sharing my letter to governor Charlie Baker regarding his support for Question 2:
Governor Charlie Baker
Massachusetts State House
Office of the Governor
Room 280
Boston, MA 02133
Dear Governor:
The people of the Commonwealth wait for you Governor, to be the leader that will protect our most sacred institution, our public schools. We expect your assurance to families, to use your power to make every public school the quality school that every child deserves. We have followed your campaign promoting charter schools, while portraying the public schools as failing. The “failing” designation, based solely on the high-stake test, designed with a 60% failing rate. You have shown disrespect to the thousands of teachers, families and students that have been at the helm of a system that prior to the privatization reforms, enjoyed the admiration of the nation and the world.
Yes, there were challenges educators and students faced; challenges such as, large class size, lack of resources to enhance classroom instruction, increased number of children living in poverty, and an array of other social ills. There was also former Governor Mitt Romney unfortunate Unz Initiative that ended Bilingual Education. Most of those charter schools you praised, do not accept English language learners, or students with Special Needs, while the public schools that the Charters take money away from, have to teach every student with less resources. Therefore, when families and educators begged our legislators to listen to our concerns, we expected collaboration between the government and the school community to find just and equitable solutions. Instead, we got a lobbying group composed of Billionaires, Foundations moguls and investors with no pedagogically experience, no expertise in child development, nor any understanding of the increased cultural diversity the state witnessed over the last three decades; positioning themselves as the saviors. They forced their business model, test-prep factory-style school environment, a school environment that you would never subject your own children. However, Governor, our children are not commodities for moguls looking to increase the profit for their investors. Our children deserve the same respect enjoyed by the children of those who are forcing their corporate-style education on the children of the poor the working class and the politically disenfranchised, nothing less.
I sat behind you, the day you testified at the State House in Boston. I listened to your songs of praises for Charter schools, while disrespecting the neighborhood schools, addressing them as “Failing”. If I were in your place, I would feel ashamed telling families that, “I am not able to fix the neighborhood school your child attends. But, I can offer you a chance at a lottery that you may or may not win, and even after you win the lottery, if your child has certain special needs, or is limited English speaker, they may be “counseled out”, and sent back to the school that is “failing”. It is disingenuous for anyone to claim that Charter schools offer families a choice, when they have regulations that make a disclaimer to that Choice’s offering. In fact, it has been a practice for some of the for-profit charter schools to return students back to their neighborhood school; this happens if they do not have faith that the student will pass the test. Another claim is the high number of families on waiting list. But here is the reality, that waiting list you and the rest of the charter school choir claims, that can be eliminated by filling the empty seats from the high attrition rate that have become the norm after the counseling-out practice of most charter schools. Each year prior to the MCAS, many high schools in Boston receive students from area charter schools, and public schools do not have the same luxury as charters to counsel-out the students who they may fear will not pass the test. In addition, even thought these students spent most of the school year in the charter school, if the students failed the MCAS, it goes against the receiving public school, the same school whose money the charter school took away.
Governor Baker, here is the question families have, hoping for an answer; Can you find the will to make sure that every school is of the quality school that every child deserves? This way families are not forced to send their children out of the neighborhood. There are people who never understood the rationale of taking away resources from “failing” schools to give to an experiment proven ineffective in solving the challenging conditions that existed in our public schools. In fact, after three decades allowing the charter school experiment, the achievement gap between Whites/Blacks and Latinos has widen, giving our state the distinction of having the highest achievement gap in the nation. Three decades have gone since the claim by the charter schools advocates that somehow their competitive innovation will help to improve the entire public school system. This promise has failed the test of time instead creating a duel system more segregated than before the 1974 Desegregation Plan.
There are unconfirmed reports that the people behind Question 2 are some of the same who contributed to your candidacy for Governor; and they expect something in return. It is no secret that investors have found the Charter School Enterprise quite a profitable investment. Why, we even have foreign companies investing in charter schools. Perhaps you might want to encourage them of a more just and equitable way to help the children of the Commonwealth obtain the academic achievement that every child deserves rather than profiting. You might want to ask Wal-Mart, one of the largest investor in the profit-making education reform, to consider an alternative way of helping the children of the public school. This would mean for Wal-Mart to change its treatment by paying their employees livable salaries and 100% health insurance. This will ensure that their children will be able to attend school well fed and healthy.
Finally, I humbly suggest that you listen to the advice of Juvenile Court Judges that since the implementation of the MCAS as a high school graduation requirement, and the zero-tolerance policies of the Charter Schools, have witnessed a rise in their courts of majority Black and Latino youths, and over 90% failed the test. This is a classic example of what we have come to see as the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
Again, consider making every school the quality school that every child deserves, not just the lottery lucky ones,
Thank you,
Ruth Rodriguez-Fay
Worcester, MA
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Chris Christie is more than happy to triple down on PARCC and go to bed with Pearson. He hates our public schools so much, he is asking the Supreme Court to reverse Abbott districts. http://www.nj.com/education/2016/09/christie_wants_court_to_reopen_landmark_education.html
He visits Gulan charter schools: http://njascs.org/governorsvisit/
I’m thinking for Parcc and SBAC, and Pearson to survive, they should be donating more to the politicians in their pockets, because that seems the only way it will happen.
This is taxation without representation funneling our tax dollars to charter schools. When does it end?
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Christie hates the U.S. Constitution, the republic and its participatory democracy because it gets in his way as the dictator or mob boss of New Jersey
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Who cares who’s responsible as long as it goes (ok we really do care who is responsible but I really do want it gone). Can they take SLOs with it? I added up unnecessary and non-learning tests students in our school now take every year and the average for K-8th is 9 to 11 time guzzling tests a year. The MAP test, is the latest one added to our unending list of tests. Yes it helps guide instruction but to force first graders to sit through two 30 miniute + tests, three times a year seems cruel and unnecessary. They were actually afriad to go back into the computer lab, later in the day.
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Thanks I would like to hear more of that. I am waiting for an opt-out movement on the SLO system. Seems to me it was initiated as a supplement to the scores gathered by PARCC/ SBAC & the like, to provide nuance to teacher evaluation via student performance. And if someone can show me the SLO sys helps disadvantaged students I’ll consider it, but I haven’t read anything encouaging in that dept.
Meanwhile from here in hi-tax chi-chi suburban NJ (my town initiated Marzano 3 yrs ago), it is clearly a yet another state-mandated response from a top-down Fed mandate that takes up inordinate teacher-time & adds hours of testing time for students– none of which is needed in a high-ed-performing pubsch sys, & all of which (including PARCC & CCSS) serves to dumb-down, distract, & subtract from the excellent sys our outrageously-hi prop taxes were providing prior to the onslaught.
When my NYS admin-ed sister explained Danielson to me 4 yrs ago, I recognized it immediately as the now-discredited ’80’s-style MBO that was imposed by some clients on the engr-constr co I worked for. It cost the client a bundle, & was easily gamed.
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bethree5 … right with you on waiting for the axe to fall on the infamous SLO. I waste more time on this BS and sadly it takes my attention away from teaching my students. And to make matters worse, PARCC is alive and well in my state.
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I totally agree. The deformers have made everyone miserable….the teachers, the principals, and most sadly, our children.
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Accountability is for little people. Teachers in Atlanta are forced to endure a prep walk when it was the test and punish policies of state and federal officials that perverted the system. Columbus teachers are fired and lose their license when it is the failed, blundering education policy at the Ohio statehouse that sets the stage for failure. Drug companies pay the execs huge bonuses for raising the price of life-saving medicine. Even the executives at Wells Fargo get a pass while 5800 employees are fired for working in the corrosive bank environment. But wait! Free markets are working! So little people just keep voting against their own interests.
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We need more superintendents willing to say, “These tests are meaningless, useless and invalid.”
“They are a waste of valuable instructional time and a waste of taxpayer dollars.”
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No, we don’t need more supes willing to say that!
What we need is one, just one supe TO ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING to prevent the harms from educational malpractices that they institute. One supe to stand up and mandate that no, these tests are not going to happen. And then pay, out of his own pocket to ship the boxes of tests and other test prep supposedly curriculum materials back to the state with an open letter to state board of ed explaining why.
Will that ever happen? Hell no, those supes, every single one of them, GAGA Good Germans, are more enamored with their own lifestyles that need the $$ their salaries bring in than with halting the holocaust of innocent minds and souls to allow for justice for the innocent children in their care.
Perhaps they should all first read Comte-Sponville’s “A Small Treatise of the Great Virtues” and take what he has to say to heart and then follow through with positive action:
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
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To answer the question: Nothing! Let it pass on to the nethersphere towards which its karmic trajectory has been moving since its inception.
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You remind me of Gov John Kasich speaking from the White House press room
earlier this week. He spoke in favor of TPP and against traditional public schooling. For a moment I thought, ” he sounds like Captain Kirk, on the
bridge of the starship Enterprise.’
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JB2,
I don’t take lightly insults like “You remind me of Gov. John Kasich”-ha ha! Although I must admit I’ve never been told that I remind someone of somebody like Kasich, Been called many epithets but a comparison with a far right winger-never!
What the. . . to what are you referring? Reread my response with the humour it is intended.
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“What happens in the business world when no one wants what you are selling?”
You end up with a whole lot of inventory you didn’t plan on having. When we were in high school my friend’s dad thought of and made a hand held ice skate blade sharpener. Good idea, especially for a quick touch up on the bench or between periods. Well, it didn’t sell. 30 years later when the family had an estate sale, out in the barn was a pallet stacked head high with boxes and boxes, now basically disintegrated, of the sharpeners, thousands of them.
Who will be held accountable for this dud?
Come on, you know. It’s the market’s decision and since the vaunted free marketplace cannot be/do wrong, no one will be held accountable.
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It should die
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I used Ruth’s model and added a few points;
Governor Baker
Office of the Governor Room 280
State House
Boston, MA 02133
Governor Baker:
I am quoting my friend and colleague Ruth Rodriguez in her statement that you have the “power to make every public school the quality school that every child deserves.” I was canvassing today and a black parent said to me : “we can fix the system; we don’t need more charter schools”…. Instead, you and your colleagues are insisting that you destroy the public schools ; that includes the libraries in our schools… and several towns do not have public libraries open on Saturdays now. In the 1960s when I taught in Sudbury we made it a goal to have nurses at each school; this has been decimated in many areas and we have fewer counselors .
I have followed your campaign promoting charter schools with Peyser and Sagan; Chester says he is “neutral” but the facts belie his words. If as you portray the public schools are failing the commissioner and the DESE Board are largely at fault. When Stephen Lynch says parent can’t find a decent school in his district that is a gross over-generalization (it cannot be proven by fact so therefore it is a lie). The “failing” designation, based on the high-stakes test, designed purposely with a failing rate is intended to fail even more of the youngsters in our communities — and this is the intention of the policy. The tests are not valid, not reliable and have no predictive validity — so Chester is committing fraud selling them to taxpayers.
Again, to quote my colleague Ruth, “you have shown disrespect to the thousands of teachers, families and students that have been at the helm of a system that prior to the privatization reforms, enjoyed the admiration of the nation and the world.” Greg Anrig when he was commissioner, and before he went to ETS , had a lot to do with the improvement and growth in public schools and the management by school administrations in their cities and towns. Other commissioners have torn down the policy and systems and yes, I am including Dave Driscoll who now tells NAEP it is time to measure “grit”.
With your push for more and more charter schools, and your claim on NPR that your neighbor “likes charter schools” so therefore they must be great — and the ads that state “eye-catching results”… This is not a term used by professionals who evaluate educational programs…. It is an ad you use to sell clothing at “fashionable stores”.
You are depriving the public schools of the resources needed for increased numbers of children living in poverty. Father Drinan taught me that in Worcester County when I was a beginning teacher — they will take the resources away and then accuse you of failing in the mission and goals. Hasn’t that come to true proportions today with your administration? When Romney was running for president I told many of my colleagues “he will kill the goose that lays golden eggs”.
This week you add another “charter” proponent to the personnel administering and guiding educational programs . Ms. Charter School Specialist Sheila Balboni…. Loading up the supreme court is what you would like Trump to do (I am the one who wrote you emails about your support for the Brady/Boch/Trump coalition and I will never forgive you for that). A hugfest around the Christmas tree, you cry to win your election but I don’t see that you have any empathy for our students or the many children we have that are struggling against enormous odds — and you continue to load the dice with the personnel you select and the funds that are directed towards the destruction of public education in Massachusetts. ?
Many people now know of the failure of charters in OH, FL, and the need for regulations of charters in CA and other states. Yet, you go in the opposite direction encouraging voters that the cap on charters will be lifted. Well Suzanne Bump needs to audit the Department of Ed and that should include all the funds held by the host state where Chester draws upon for his trips to England to work on Michael Barber’s priorities and his trips around the country to tell people to sign up with Jeb Bush and Pearson Corp. Now he is asking for , what, another $3 million to test and fail our students so he can do more “turn around” with SIG (School Improvement Grants) that are ineffective. Gives him lot of power — power taken away from our locally elected school boards.
Another parent I spoke with today said every year the costs for her son in charter school are going up and I told her “yes, and then they will tell you that you have been on welfare at the charter and will bill you $15,000 each year.” As is said about Trump “I know a conman when I see one” even if you dismiss those of us in the “hinterlands” and the “Boondocks” with arrogant statements like “the cities have lost their functional purpose “ of educating immigrants and their manufacturing base. Deplorable, Mr. Baker — I refuse to give you the honorific title of governor.
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