PARCC
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
Please give us a good reason UMC DC children should take PARCC tests they've "spent so much time prepping for?" So they can take pride in high scores that are virtually guaranteed by their parents' income? So that they're eligible for GT programs if they test advanced? To help teachers support their needs/learning gaps (although PARCC results don't come out until the summer or fall, by which time many of test takers will have moved onto a different school). I teach my children that 3rd-8th grade corporate standardized tests are irrelevant to their lives. I tell that they're much better off working hard to excel at school work and extra-curriculars that will almost certainly matter down the road than to ace an irrelevant test. We focus on building toward a variety of other achievements that matter to us all. |
Anonymous
No, we can't, not when almost all DC public school parents send their kids to take PARCC unquestioningly and don't organize politically to vote out the city pols who support its administration. Not when we don't have a rep in Congress to challenge Every Student Succeeds Act requirements. |
Anonymous
|
I don’t get it. It seems like so many folks on here
opine often on how people should avoid most schools in most parts of the city EOTP due to low PAARC scores. But then are also entitled enough to not subject their own kids to citywide standardized tests. Something doesn’t add up. |
Anonymous
|
Come on, hardly anybody opts out of PARCC in DC. When we opted out in 2019--the last year PARCC was given--admins told us that were the only family in the school to opt out in the last several years. Our DCPS is overwhelmingly UMC, yet nobody else was opting out.
We could care less about test scores. We choose our house/in-boundary school because we like the neighborhood and more than 3/4 of the students are IB. We wanted our kids to attend school with friends living nearby. |
Anonymous
| What are the options other than PARCC? If it’s not a great test and there are better out there that’s one thing. But it seems like there is some hostility to measuring competencies and that is not something you can avoid forever in many fields, whether your are a plumber or a surgeon. |
Anonymous
I'd agree with you if the PARCC were... *The product of a non-profit entity, like the IOWA Test of Basic Skills that I took as a kid, or a government entity. I might even go for a test generated by an American company (Pearson is a British company). *A well-crafted test that I was convinced tested competencies with a reassuring degree of accuracy. Unfortunately, the PARCC is jammed with poorly-worded/confusing questions and most of the math tested isn't math as much as reading. There are far too many long word problems on PARCC likely to stump ELL students who excel at math. For these reasons, among others, 19 states have dropped PARCC since 2010. *Was 2 or 3 hours long for elementary school, vs. 10 hours. For such a lengthy test, a small army of test writers and graders needs to be employed to implement it, generating huge profits for Pearson, and kids essentially miss a whole week of school to take it. By contrast, when my 9-year-old applied to a CTY (gifted) summer camp for math, Johns Hopkins needed just 1 hour to determine that he was math gifted but not ELA gifted. Ever ask yourself why Pearson, DCPS and DCPCS need 10 hours of testing to determine if your kid reads and does math at grade level? |
Anonymous
The district could have improved the homegrown DC-CAS rather than embracing PARCC 7 years ago. DC could also have gone with Smarter Balanced, PARCC's main national competitor and a much better test. The states who adopted Smarter Balanced 10 years ago tend to have stuck with it. Congress never required PARCC of the District. |
Anonymous
| +100. |
Anonymous
| I fail to understand why so many DC ed stakeholders are fine with the bad news PARCC, particularly after it’s been on hiatus for a couple years now and wasn’t missed. |
Anonymous
They could even use MAP testing if they wanted to show growth from fall to spring. They could use end of course exams for middle and high school. |
Anonymous
| They could also finally acknowledge that the parcc math test is really a reading test with math mixed in. They treat reading and math scores separately but they are intertwined, especially with how wordy the PARCC is. |
Anonymous
|
The bottom line for DC parents with children in public school is that, because the District doesn't allow families to opt out of PARRC, testing time blocks work as childcare. It's that simple. As has been explained, if you're going to opt out, you need to bring time, planning and risk aversion to the exercise. A thick skin won't hurt either, as you stand accused of selfishness etc. for pushing back against PARCC testing by voting with your feet.
I have a sibling who opts out in Oregon, one of the 3 states allowing parents to reject state standardized tests without penalty (with California and Colorado). When she opts out, her children are provided with supervision at school. As long as no childcare is provided for families who opt out in DC, PARCC quality, and how results are interpreted, is immaterial politically. There's no anti-testing lobby for OSSE to contend with, no threat that test results will be rendered meaningless by low family participation. The arrangement is convenient for the for profit-organizations producing the tests, and the DC vendors and bureaucrats who profit from their business professionally and financially. But, arguably, it's also fundamentally coercive to citizens who object to PARCC testing for whatever reasons. |
Anonymous
My mother always said people who say things are stupid are stupid themselves. |
Anonymous
| Now there’s an educated opinion backed by a great corpus of credible academic literature. |
Anonymous
Your entitlement and privilege is making me sick and I'm not even on Capitol Hill. |