Sarah Blaine, a lawyer and parent in New Jersey, calls on the legislature to block the use of PARCC as a graduation requirement for students in the state.
As she notes in this article, the New Jersey Assembly voted overwhelmingly to block the State Board of Education from imposing this nutty requirement.
The bill now moves to the State Senate, and she urges senators to vote for the bill.
She writes:
On March 16, the New Jersey Assembly overwhelmingly passed ACR-215, which is a resolution declaring that the state Board of Education’s new regulations requiring students to pass the PARCC Algebra 1 and the 10th grade PARCC English Language Arts tests to graduate from high school are “inconsistent with legislative intent.”
The existing law requires a comprehensive 11th grade test (which these two PARCC tests, neither of which is generally administered in 11th grade, are not). The resolution will not stop New Jersey’s schools from having to offer PARCC each year, but if adopted by the state Senate as well, it is a step toward ensuring that students will not have to pass PARCC to graduate from high school.
With this resolution, the Assembly took the first step in one process by which our New Jersey legislators can check the authority of our governor and his appointees (in this case, the state Board of Education): invalidating regulations that our Legislature determines are “inconsistent with legislative intent.” In English, that means that if the Legislature passes a law, and the executive branch decides to ignore the law and do something different, the Legislature can tell the executive branch: “No, you’re wrong, please go back to the drawing board.” Because this is a check on the executive branch’s authority, the governor’s signature is not required.
As at least 180,000 New Jersey students demonstrated by refusing to take PARCC tests in 2015 and 2016, opposition to PARCC testing is widespread. But leaving the substantive issues surrounding the PARCC test aside, important as they are, ACR-215 and its senate companion resolution, SCR-132, are about governance. That is, in considering these resolutions, the key question our legislators must decide is whether they are willing to allow Gov. Chris Christie and the Christie-appointed Board of Education to openly ignore New Jersey law.
Blaine writes about the issue as an open conflict between the executive and the legislative branches.
But the substantive issues are worth reviewing.
The PARCC test was created by Pearson as a test of the Common Core standards in grades 3-8.
PARCC was never intended to be a graduation test. Most states that signed up to use it as a test of annual student performance in grades 3-8 have dropped it. New Jersey is one of the very few states that still require this test.
No standardized test should be used as a high school graduation test. Standardized tests are normed on a bell curve, and they are designed to differentiate from best to worst scores. They are designed to have a certain proportion of students who will fail, no matter how hard they try.
The state of New Jersey should not substitute the SAT or the ACT or any other standardized test for PARCC, because they all suffer the same fatal flaw.
There are many ways to set graduation requirements and make them rigorous for some, but reasonable for all. It is not reasonable to establish a high bar that some students will clear, but most will not, or that a substantial minority will not. There must be a reasonable path towards winning a diploma, especially for students with cognitive disabilities, and students who for other reasons will never ever pass the PARCC.
It is a basic rule of psychometrics (the study of testing) that tests should be used only for the purpose for which they were designed.
The legislature should force the governor and the state board to drop PARCC as a graduation requirement and give thought to reasonable standards that match the diverse needs of the state’s students.
If the state keeps
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This seems important.
They were putting way too many students into remedial courses because they were relying on this test:
“ACT is phasing out Compass, a popular but controversial college placement test that colleges use to determine whether students need to take remedial courses.
Community colleges and nonselective four-year institutions rely heavily on Compass and Accuplacer, a similar test from the College Board. Both assessments are low-cost, computerized and relatively quick ways of assessing students’ abilities in reading, writing and mathematics.
A 2012 study found that only one in five colleges use high school grades, class rank or any other criteria besides high-stakes standardized tests to decide whether students have remedial needs in mathematics. That number was only 13 percent for remedial English placement. And when students place into remediation, few ever make it to college-level courses, much less to graduation.
Yet the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 2012 found that up to a third of students who placed into remedial classes due to their Compass or Accuplacer scores could have passed college-level classes with a grade of B or better.”
How many times have you the remedial rates used as a justification for ed reform?
Turns out the test was a lousy measure.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/18/act-drops-popular-compass-placement-test-acknowledging-its-predictive-limits
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This whole business of predicting college success from standardized tests is a crock. This is the same logic behind the “read by grade three” legislation.
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As noted the PARCC tests students on Common Core knowledge yet NJ Governor Christie has withdrawn the State from Common Core yet still tests (PARCC) on Common Core and wants to make the test a graduation requirement even though Christie stated
“It’s now been five years since Common Core was adopted. And the truth is that it’s simply not working.”
Does this make any sense?
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It would make sense if he were getting a kickback.
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It does not have to make sense. We are talking about Christie, a man with the emotional intelligence of a ten year old. This move is a parting shot at New Jersey, a state that has resisted many of his outrageous and biased proposals. Christie is probably still stinging from Trump’s rejection by refusing to bring him in to his toxic tent. Good riddance to this blowhard bully!
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Speculated odds that Gates’ name will be on the radar, for this N.J. PARCC situation- 0%. And, that’s in spite of the fact that a Gates-funded Pahara Institute Fellow reportedly, heads PARCC and Gates, in the last year, reportedly, gave $15 mil., to one of the co-owners of Common Core.
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As always, thanks for posting, Diane. And you are correct re: the use of PARCC, a norm-referenced test, as a graduation requirement. It’s a preposterous notion. In point of fact, only 9% of the Class of 2016 who took PARCC were able to rely on their passing PARCC scores to satisfy NJ’s graduation exit test requirement:
http://www.nj.com/education/2016/12/are_njs_high_school_graduation_parcc_rules_unfair.html
Before PARCC, New Jersey for many years relied on the High School Proficiency Assessment and the Alternate High School Assessment (HSPA and AHSA, respectively), which were standards-referenced tests, not norm-referenced tests (i.e., it would be totally cool with the test makers if 95% of the kids passed those tests, which are not graded on a curve like a norm-referenced test). Before that (in my day), it was HSPT (High School Proficiency Test), which we took in 9th grade. As I’ve written extensively elsewhere, there is no question that substantively, PARCC does not satisfy the law in NJ as to what can be included in a graduation exit test:
But as I wrote in this article, in the current political environment, I see this as an issue that’s much bigger than the outsized role standardized testing plays in our public schools (critical as I still believe the testing issue to be). I see this as a question of checks and balances, and of holding all of our elected officials — be they Democrats or Republicans — accountable for doing their jobs.
Here in New Jersey, Senate President Sweeney has chosen — over and over again — to align himself with Republicans and education reformers on a whole host of issues (for example, he’s never met a charter school he didn’t like). And he’s aligned with Senator Teresa Ruiz, who chairs the Senate Education Committee. These nominal Democrats (both were Christie supporters) need to decide, once and for all, whether they are progressives or not. And they need to decide, once and for all, that capitulation to a Republican governor who should be envious of Trump’s — TRUMPS! — current approval ratings makes zero sense.
Let’s stop playing games and make sure that our officials vote on the issues that matter to We The People. We The People deserve legislative representation that listens to and represents our needs.
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Amen, Sarah! Especially, the note about Sweeney. It’s impossible to consider him or Ruiz friends of public education.
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