The newly elected Governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham, signed an executive order withdrawing from PARCC, the Common Core test funded by Arne Duncan in 2010 (PARCC and SBAC together got $360 Million in federal funding.)
“Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Wednesday ordered the state’s Public Education Department to immediately take the steps necessary to terminate New Mexico’s use of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers standardized test, commonly known as PARCC.
“Lujan Grisham, in an executive order, called on the department to immediately begin working with key stakeholders to identify and implement a more effective, more appropriate and less intrusive method for assessing school performance that is compliant with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
The development of this alternative approach, intended to deliver a sounder methodology for the rating and assessments of New Mexico schools, will include teachers, administrators, parents, students and recognized professionals and experts in the field of student assessments.”
Some 25 states signed up for PARCC. Very few remain. A judge in New Jersey just ruled it could not be used as a graduation requirement.
PARCC took pride in having the highest standards and failing the most students.
Slowly but surely, Common Core and the testing that went with it, which once claimed alliances with nearly all 50 states and DC, are disappearing.
Sad. Not really.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What teacher glories in a high failure rate on their assessments? There are many things such a situation might tell us, but my first guess would not be that the students were held to very high standards.
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Still mired in this dreck in MD.
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Been poking Larry Hogan & @MdPublicSchools on Twitter…the silence is deafening.
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You can poke all you want, but Hogan won’t budge. He thinks we all believe that he is scrapping PARCC when in fact, we are getting PARCC renamed (Meridian). As long as Finn and Smarick sit on the board and as long as Salmon (the queen of testing) is sitting at the top at MSDE, we will be stuck with Common Core and its evil twin zombie PARCC. I’m done with public school in MD….child #2 attends private school now (and he is very happy….and no emails suggesting he may need medication!!!).
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dreck — perfect word for it
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If only the ludicrous Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] were disappearing. They have long had the effect of narrowing curricula and pedagogy to a puerile and pedestrian bullet list, and they’ve stopped curricular and pedagogical innovation cold.
But they certainly aren’t disappearing.
Here’s what happened. The Oh-So-Reverend Mike Huckabee (the one who spawned Miss Communications, Sarah) went to the annual Conservative Coven known as C-PAC and told the assembled storm troops (yikes, I’m mixing my metaphors here) that the Common Core brand had becomes so “toxic” that there was only one thing to do: Go back home and change the name of them.
In other words, the minister’s advice was for the states to lie about what standards they were using.
And that’s just what they did. Most of them went back home and renamed the ridiculous CC$$. The Florida Sunshine All the Time Not Really the Common Core State Standards. The Blind Buckeye Leading the Blind Buckeye State Standards. The Dense Pense Who’s Your Hoosier State Standards. And so on.
So, at least for now, we’re stuck with the crap that we got when Lord Gates chose Lord Coleman to do the deciding for the rest of us.
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Mike Huckster-bee
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correction: The Dense-as-Pence Who’s-Your-Hoosier State Standards
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Public Education Charter for 2020 must include complete abandonment of PARCC/SBAC and all stealth clones before any candidate is endorsed or supported. Our many feet can also draw lines in the sand.
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Yes. Several of the Democratic candidates for President are big supporters of the CCSS, standardized testing, and charters.
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Adam Schiff is a high visibility Democrat. It’s time to see where he stands – with Gates/ DFER/ Broad/ Arnold/ Waltons or with the PEOPLE.
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Address
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Well, in MD they didn’t even try to rebrand/rename. Nope, here in our dreadful schools they like to promote the use of the Common Bore Standards as rigorous and academically challenging. And the parents just go along like lemmings to the sea…….
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It’s a horror. Few understand the extent to which these “standards” have negatively affected just about every aspect of instruction in English. I have long debated whether I should expend the time and energy to do a book-length analysis of them. Here, a response to just one ELA “standard”: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/
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And here, another: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/what-happens-when-amateurs-write-standards/
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Bob, if you decide to do it I will buy it & spread around to friends. I have long hoarded your specific, on-point critiques of ELA stds.
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The ELA Standards are horrific. Perhaps you could write a series of articles. All I have is anecdotal evidence, but the aspects I found most disconcerting were close readings, excepted texts and discouragement of providing background information. How can I teach The Gettysburg address in isolation? The Standards take all the enjoyment out of reading.
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excerpted
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Dear Ms. Shure: You hit the nail on the head with regard to the excerpting of texts. We have an epidemic in this country of snippets of out-of-context text being presented to kids, followed by questions keyed to these puerile standards. Very often, today, that’s what passes for the teaching of English. Here are three more really important issues (though I could mention many more):
The “standards” draw a tiny boundary within the vast design space for possible ELA curricula and pedagogy and say, “What is within this space you can teach, and what is outside this space, you cannot.” And so they effectively kill all curricular and pedagogical innovation going forward.
The “standards” are a sloppily framed list of abstract skills. Mastery in ELA consists both of world knowledge and of procedural knowledge. The “standards” completely ignore the former and reduce the latter to a bullet list. Two big mistakes with extremely negative consequences for kids.
Almost every “standard” seems to have been written by someone with no expertise in the relevant areas. Really important stuff is left out. Trivialities are magnified in importance. Essential concepts are mischaracterized. What is known from research and scholarship in the areas treated by the standards is largely ignored. The “standards” are clearly the work of amateurs. It’s as though someone handed David Coleman, who lacks any training in medicine, a copy of the 1857 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and told him to base new standards for the medical profession on that.
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Sorry, but I’m bitter about it, now!
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NJ is a real disappointment in this regard as well. I liked the pre-CCSS NJ Core Curriculum Stds. They were spare, stating goals, leaving plenty of room for districts to fill in means & manner of getting there. Dumped in a wholesale switch to CCSS. Today if you look them up, you find “NJ Learning Standards” modified in 2016. A pathetic tweaking of CCSS which they don’t even disguise: it’s a 2-column comparison: each CCSS word for word on left, repeated on right w/ 2016 “modifications” in red– a purely semantic editing.
I’m no longer in touch w/locals working w/them. I suspect, given our excellent district teachers, they’ve found work-arounds that allow them to continue their high-qual pedagogy. (The little scuttlebutt I’ve heard indicated SGO was more of a problem to adapt to). And there isn’t the same pressure in a chi-chi district like ours where kids generally excel on whatever assessments you throw at them, & for those who don’t there’s a spectrum of well-funded aids/ assists. But, (a)that’s a ridiculous situation, & (b), leaves all those lesser-funded lower-income districts w/confusing micromgd age-innapropriate guidance — still paired w/CCRAP tests for 3rd-8th.
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I so agree with you, bethree5. If you are teaching upper middle class students they can dig their way through the mush mash up. But it is painfully hard breaking it down for low social eonomic students. It is unfair to them. The reformsters have this idea about high expectations and critical thinking but in reality, the most effective instruction is breaking it down to the level they are at and doing the hard work of teaching step by step upwards.
Teaching is hard work, professionalism, and compassion – I define it to those three.
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Every time I find a work-around so that I can teach ELA with whole literature and without formulaic writing (and without dry, frustrating, online, scripted lessons), the principal, under enormous pressure to raise test scores, not provide quality education, pushes me to do narrow test prep with shallow Common Core materials. Day after day, week after week, year after year… It’s excruciating, the ubiquitous obsession with meaningless test scores based on poorly constructed tests and backwards standards. And for what? Stock portfolios of charters? Monetizing data? Upside down and backwards.
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AIR is terrible, too.
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AIR is just the test, right? I.e., just somebody else’s aligned assessment of CCSS?
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Yep. They’re the company that wrote Utah’s old CC test. Utah has now gone with someone else, but will still be using some of AIR’s questions.
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Standard schmanderd. PARCC schmarch.
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I notice the end of the post said – Sad. Not really. – I would like to add: Waste. Really.
This huge amount of money 360 million could have added universal preschool, reduced class size, increased pay for new teachers, science labs, enrichment, tutoring, … all the proven things that improve learning.
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Melinda Gates’ fortune (more than her family could spend in a lifetime) could have been used for good. But, she chose to spend it to destroy the common good and on a PR image that falsely depicts her.
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The AIR Test
Caught by AIR
And techno ware
Naught but err
A sad affair
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I would like to remind everyone of the rolling out of this test. Our state department chose classroom teachers to train for introducing the PARCC who had no experience, were not really competent in their field, and had no grasp of the implications of what they were saying or of the material they were presenting.
I was teaching geometry in those days, and my presenter was this wonderful kid who taught middle school. She was personable and endearing, neither of which qualities served to mitigate the feeling that we were being sold a bill of goods.
Those were the days when we had just won the Race to the Top, and our state department of education was intent on our understanding that this was the way testing would look forever. I know, you have been told this before, but this is where testing is going.
All the literature we used was copyrighted to the u of Pittsburgh. Someone made some money off all that, and it was never used, because the field testing that ensued laid bare the intellectual bankruptcy of the testing.
Our state department was very complicit in the implementation of this failed mess.
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“the field testing that ensued laid bare the intellectual bankruptcy of the testing”
It’s been 18 years now since the passage of NCLB. We’ve had this two-decade-long national “field test” of standardized testing–a study larger in duration and scope than any other, ever. The verdict? Standardized testing has been far worse than a failure. Not only has it failed, completely, to improve educational outcomes. It has narrowed and distorted curricula and pedagogy and produced a whole generation of kids who think that studies in English aren’t about writing essays and poems and stories or reading and discussing great poems and plays and novels but about scanning text snippets to figure out what the correct answers are to convoluted, tortured, indefensible multiple-choice questions.
“My teachers should have ridden with Jessie James
for all the time that they stole from me.”
–Richard Brautigan
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The ugly irony of all this is that the accountability advocates have refused to have any accountability for the UTTER FAILURE of their panacea–the standards and testing regime.
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STANDARDIZATION
Our 100,000 public schools
have NEVER
and
will NEVER
have students with . . .
standardized intellects
standardized psyches
standardized talents
standardized abilities
standardized anatomies
standardized health histories
standardized experiences
standardized parents
standardized families
standardized home lives
standardized neighborhoods
standardized friends
standardized influences
standardized opportunities
standardized teachers
standardized curricula
standardized pedagogies
standardized motivations
standardized support systems
standardized goals and aspirations
Yet somehow,
the HOLY GRAIL of
the 21st century
education reform movement
was
standardization.
Any doubt as to why it has
FAILED?
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so beautifully said!!!! thank you!!!
amen to this!!!
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And, the whole rationale for Education “Reform” was to prepare students to perform better in their careers, though it should always have been OBVIOUS that a highly diverse, highly pluralistic economy needs people with an extraordinary variety and range of differing skills, knowledge sets, propensities, and so on.
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Eduction that is limited to math, science and reading sets the parameters for Kinsey and Co.’s recommendations for learning based on a recent study of 72 countries. (“Drivers of student performance….”). An article in the NYT recently exposed links between McKinsey and authoritarian regimes.
Nations and communities must reject all corporate influence on education policy because democracy, the most important value for a developed nation, is of no value to for-profits.
A prior decade of experience with Success Academy and Explore Schools landed an individual, a job with McKinsey as a “Senior Implementation Coach”. What is McKinsey implementing in this country?
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McKinsey and Co. “advised a top three research university on…redesign of governance”.
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McKinsey and Co. “supported with strategies, scaled up personalized learning in classrooms (5 U.S. school systems) to reach 250,000 students by 2019.”
Lakeside, where the Gates’ kids went? I’m guessing, “H_ll no, as the answer.
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She’s human so I’m sure someone (alt-right Conservatives and Trumpists are experts at slinging lies and filth) can throw mud at her, but I REALLY like what I learned about Michelle Lujan Grisham poltiical positions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Lujan_Grisham#Earlier_political_career
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