Laura Chapman, retired arts educator and researcher, offers reasons why you should opt out of PARCC:
“Here is one more reason to be a very serious and unrelenting critic of PARCC.
It has “teamed up” with greatschools.org, a website that rates schools and leases data for commercial exploitation (about which I have commented before).
MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2015 ( from http://www.parcconline.org/news-and-video/382-greatschools-parcc-launch-new-parent-tool)
“PARCC states have partnered with GreatSchools to launch the GreatKids Test Guide for Parents, a new resource to assist parents in helping their children prepare academically for college and careers, and for the next grade level. “…”The Guide gives … information about what a child needs to know at each grade level and how parents can help their children succeed academically, based on how their child performed on the PARCC assessment.”
“About GreatSchools. Founded in 1998, GreatSchools is a national nonpartisan nonprofit helping millions of parents find quality schools, support great learning and guide their kids to great futures. GreatSchools offers thousands of articles, videos and worksheets to help parents support their children’s learning. Last year, more than 59 million unique visitors accessed the GreatSchools website including more than half of all US families with school-age children. Headquartered in Oakland, California, GreatSchools partners with cities and states across the country.“
Do not be deceived by sweet talk about “partnerships.” This non-profit is a sophisticated and well-funded system for gathering test scores and other information reported by schools, converting this information into ratings, and selling the data and ratings. The website literally sells ads and licenses for access to test scores and other data on schools—public, private, and charter—with expansions planned for pre-school and daycare-centers.
This national data hog is funded by billionaire foundations unfriendly to public schools. The logos of the Gates, Walton, Robertson, and Arnold Foundations are prominently displayed. A list of 19 other supporters includes the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, Bradley Foundation, Goldman Sachs Gives, New Schools Venture Fund among others. All of these supporters want to make public schools an artifact from the past.
“Here is what GreatSchools does with the test scores, now including PARCC scores.
“The overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students at a given school do on each grade and subject test. For each test, ratings are assigned based on how well students perform relative to all other students in the state, and these ratings are averaged into an overall rating of 1 to 10.”
“The distribution of the GreatSchools Rating in a given state looks like a bell curve, with higher numbers of schools getting ratings in the “average” category, and fewer schools getting ratings in the “above average” or “below average” categories.”
The ratings are based on the manipulation of data classified in one of three ways: As a proficiency measure, a growth measure (including discredited VAM), and a rating for “how well schools are preparing students for success in college and beyond” (high school graduation rate, SAT, ACT scores). The system is rigged so most schools are rated average or below.
Click to access New_Ratings_Methodology_Report.pdf
The fraudulent rating system gives the notoriously test-driven Success Academy in NY the highest possible rating here
http://www.greatschools.org/about/ratings.page
This non-profit is the front for a mega for-profit operation serving big box stores, and multiple industries— financial, real estate, charter expansions, testing and text publishers. It is designed to capture the interest of media outlets and merchandizers as “partners,” co-opt entire school districts and federal agencies into “partnerships.” The gigantic “partner” basket includes Walmart, Target, Yale Center for Social Emotional Intelligence, Survey Monkey, Forbes, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Dunn & Bradstreet, US Department of Education, Goldman Sachs, and more
JUST A SAMPLING:
CONTENT 321 Fast Draw; Algonquin Books; Ashoka Foundation; Bay Citizen; California Watch; College Board; Common Sense Media; DK Publishing; Film Sight Productions; IDEO; Learning Ally; Learning and Leadership Center; Mind/Shift; National Center for Learning Disabilities; Parenting.com; Reading Rockets; Scholastic; Treasure Bay, Inc.; UCLA Department of Psychology; US Department of Education; Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
COMMUNITY AND FAMILY ENGAGEMENT Families Empowered; Hillsborough County Public Schools, Iridescent Learning; KIPP; Magnet Schools of America; Miami Dade County Public Schools; Rocketship Education; Stand Up for Students; Step Up for Students; US Department of Housing and Urban Development
RESEARCH Gallup Education; SurveyMonkey (see also Licensees); SRI; Rockman Et Al.
MARKETING & OUTBOUND MEDIA Care2.com; Common Sense Media; Forbes; NBC News Education; The Bully Project; Univision.
LICENSEES Apartments.com, Brain Pop; Digital Map Products; Dunn & Bradstreet; Fannie Mae; Maponics; Michael & Susan Dell Foundation; Military Child Education Coalition; Move Sales, Inc.; National Association of Charter School Authorizers; National Housing Trust; Onboard Informatics; Policy Map; Realtors Property Resource; SurveyMonkey; Target, US Department of Housing and Urban Development; Walmart; WolfNet; Zillow.
What do these “partners get” for signing on? At minimum, it is the opportunity to become an advertiser or license holder who can gain access to your student’s test scores—for a fee. You can find some of the ad rates here. https://selfserve.rubiconproject.com/advertise3/products/29619
At the bottom of the rate page you can see that these “packages” are offered via the Rubicon Project. Click on Rubicon Project to see what this “project “is. The Rubicon Project is the name for a company that scoops all of greatschool’s data and ratings and comments from users and puts them in Rubicon’s “Advertising Automation Cloud.”
This data warehousing operation “brings buyers and sellers closer together on a robust advertising technology platform. One of the largest cloud and Big Data computing systems in the world, the Automation Cloud leverages over 50,000 algorithms and analyzes billions of data points in real-time to deliver the best results for sellers and buyers,” with 300 real-time data-driven decisions per transaction.”
Follow the money. The billionaire foundations gather the test scores and other information about schools. They are notoriously in favor of market-based education. The scores are translated into a their dubious but “custom” rating scheme with direct links to the great red-lining guru, Zillow (who has paid for a high end license). The data and ratings migrate out from the greatschools website to Rubicon. For a fee, Rubicon facilitates rapid and custom access to the data and ratings from their “cloud,” (a data warehouse), promising their clients they can “Efficiently find your target audience;” “build brand awareness,” “acquire new customers, and re-engage existing customers.”
https://selfserve.rubiconproject.com/advertise3/products/29619
I hope that this information gives parents another reason to opt out of the tests and especially PARCC. Greatschools has test data from every state, has a map of district boundaries searchable by zipcodes, and it is seeking data well beyond that required by state or federal regulation such as such as schools safety, cleanliness, and parent involvement. Next up: Scores for school climate and social-emotional learning, and “customer satisfaction surveys.”
Remember, taxpayers made PARCC possible. Time to say bye, bye and good riddance.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The only element these tests measure is poverty and literacy. If children grew up in a literate rich home environment and are avid readers, they will test well compared to children who grew up in a Death Valley without books, newspapers or magazines and parents that don’t read. In every country, tests also reveal large pockets of children living in poverty.
“Poor ranking on international test misleading about U.S. Student necromancer, Stanford researcher finds.”
And the same report discovered: “There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country, suprinsily, the gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than 8in the very highest scoring countries.”
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
Every time I read that, I think why hasn’t Bill Gates, the Walmart Waltons, the hedge fund managers, Eli Broad and all the other corporate hacks, fakes and frauds asked what are the traditional public schools in the Untied States doing right to have a smaller achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students compared to every country tested.
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The harmful social impact of such artificial rating systems cannot be ignored. Such rating systems work against diverse school districts and, of course, districts with significant levels of poverty. The big assumption of such stack rankings is that education along with real estate is a marketplace. Once again a hidden algorithm is at work to promote social engineering. Standardized test score results promote segregation, and many excellent schools with diverse socio-economic levels of students will receive lower rankings. In my opinion, this is another misapplication of technology that promotes a narrow definition of excellence or success.
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Stack ranking schools by test scores assures that there will always be a bottom 5%. That’s a ready supply of schools to be handed over to charter operators every year. We already know from the Tennessee Achievement School Districtand Chris Barbic said when he quit–that it is much easier to open new schools than to take over existing schools. New schools can choose their students.
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Ugh. Information and advice for parents from a testing company and a media company?
“The Parent Toolkit was designed by NBC News Education Nation and Pearson to help parents and caregivers navigate their child’s holistic development and journey from pre-kindergarten through high school. It is designed to help track and support a child’s progress at each stage in academics, social & emotional development, and health & wellness.”
No thanks. I’ll pass. I really don’t need advice from Pearson on “social and emotional development”
I’m not clear why we outsourced our entire public education approach to for-profit companies.
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This is what happens when you monetize your schools and children. You get corporations trying to “help” you make decisions about your life based on a computer model.
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Imagine if even JUST half of all American families opted out of all standardized tests in protest against the reform movement, poor treatment of school funds, children, and teacher evaluations.
Imagine JUST HALF . . . And what it would do politically!
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NF,
It would be a political earthquake.
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Yes!!!!!!!!! And done in peace!
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20% of parents in New York opted out of the state tests and caused a political earthquake. The governor convened a commission that told him to back off, and he went silent. The head of the state Board of Regents decided not to run again. And the new chair is an ally of parents who opt out.
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There is some woman named Lisa Rudley who I understand has been very instrumental to this movement . . . her and some other woman named Jeanette Deuterman, as my friends in NY inform me.
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“The scores are translated into a their dubious but “custom” rating scheme with direct links to the great red-lining guru, Zillow (who has paid for a high end license).”
Yes, and we should never underestimate the power of real estate companies to promote segregation. They have a long history of this. From the use of restrictive covenants, racial steering, and block busting tactics, they have discouraged integration and encouraged white flight for years.
Zillow is doing that now, too, by putting their dubious school ratings on every webpage with a house for sale. They provided instructions to home buyers on how to effectively use those ratings, too, in commercials where (mostly white) actors portray parents who are shown using the school ratings to avoid moving to certain neighborhoods. They might as well be building gated communities!
This kind of thing has been going on for a long time and it’s difficult to believe it’s all legal. I guess that’s another example of how the rich and powerful have the freedom to manipulate markets to their advantage.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.” John Maynard Keynes
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@ Laura Chapman
What about SBAC? Have you found that same trail because I am sure it’s there!
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I am not certain that all of them are filed, but here is one link
http://www.greatschools.org/gk/test-guide/sbac-3rd-grade/?state=california
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