PARCC... is this test still relevant at all???

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We can all have our views, but for those parents who want to opt out, why?

I just don't get your holier than thou approach as if you know better. You are all pretending to be experts on standardized tests. You are all experts on testing procedures. Go ahead and opt out, I hope your teachers also opt out of anything above and beyond for your kids. When you opt out, you are hurting many people, your school, your teachers, your kid's friends, your neighborhood, DCPS, and so on. And the final nail could be your own child. You think you are doing good but it could even be detrimental.

Live and let live, right?

I dont plan to opt but if I did Im not sure how it hurts the school or my kids friends. My kid is almost two grades ahead in her current classroom and I know the eacher and school really really want to make sure kid takes the test the school scores. But its not like school has ever gone above and beyond for my kid, its always "smart kids will be fine anywhere"

Same here. No parent who opts out should have to deal with arm twisting or guilt trips, particularly after Bowser and the WTU leadership blocked kids from classrooms for over a year.

We have DC friends with children in parochial schools where class sizes are comparable to those in DCPS. These schools never closed during the pandemic. Their admins had parent volunteers build plexi glass desk shields. Data on families opting out of PARCC this year will not be made public, but the numbers won't be tiny as in the past, not with so many parents still furious about the closures.

[Anonymous]

goodwill reserves are running low...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I can understand the opt-out parents were anxious kids. You have a valid reason.

The opt-out parents who think in their infinite wisdom that PARCC is useless are pathetic. Your hypocrisy sticks. When you moved and were looking for a good school for your kids you used test scores to decide where to live. I'm sure you wouldn't have moved in-boundary, or even stayed, for a JKLM school if the scores were low.

Your privilege also comes through when you say you'll take time off and spend it indulging your child in this or that activity. Just sickening.

The test scores help. PARCC is not the best, but having no data is even worse.

I agree, no data is worst especially with all the grade inflation and lowering of standards due to equity. Your kid’s A is not all that it’s made out to be, and you may have a false sense of security. That is why standardized testing is a useful data point.

But they already do get standardized testing through benchmarks. You don’t need the PARCC on top of that. You have Dibels, I ready, nwea, etc depending on your kids grade level. And those short benchmarks are often done three times a year, so you can track real progress. I’m not sure if the specific language of the fed law that requires an end of year state exam…but that’s where I would focus my efforts…getting the feds to accept end of year benchmarks as the assessment.

[Anonymous]

Great post.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You may want to check out the 6 page thread on this very topic: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1032577.page

And, it's relevant because DC doesn't have another test ready to go at the moment and federal law mandates accountability testing of some kind.

This. Kids need some type of standardized test to see how they are doing in general and compared to peers. DC happens to pick PARCC which is not the best

No one is using PARCC. No one.

Ok but you can still use PARCC to compare the kids in DC and how your kid is doing compared to his peers at his school and other schools. That is helpful information.

This can be done with the MAP /nwea assessments.

Is there any way to find out MAP scores at other schools in DC? Our school uses this, I also dislike the test but still would be keen to know how our school stacks up. They sent home comparisons only with national averages.

And yes most parents entering lottery do pore over PARCC test results when picking their lottery lists. That’s the vast majority of us who are not in UNW or the Hill, that is. This thread fight is clearly for you all. I hate all these tests BUT have nothing else by way of metrics. MAP is much shorter though and not worse.

[Anonymous]

Pouring over PARCC results doesn't do much for you in the District. All you need to know is that in schools where UMC students are enrolled in force, most kids score high or very high. Where UMC are scarce, most kids score low or very low, other than in half a dozen KIPP or KIPP type programs featuring military-like structure and Sat school, universally shunned by UMC parents past Early Childhood Programs. Montessori programs are the exception, but their curricula are far outside the mainstream. Things were different when I was growing up in NYC. My siblings, good friends and I tested into GT ES programs where poor kids amalgamated.

[Anonymous]

poring, it's raining here

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pouring over PARCC results doesn't do much for you in the District. All you need to know is that in schools where UMC students are enrolled in force, most kids score high or very high. Where UMC are scarce, most kids score low or very low, other than in half a dozen KIPP or KIPP type programs featuring military-like structure and Sat school, universally shunned by UMC parents past Early Childhood Programs. Montessori programs are the exception, but their curricula are far outside the mainstream. Things were different when I was growing up in NYC. My siblings, good friends and I tested into GT ES programs where poor kids amalgamated.

Granted, I only have one data set but my UMC kid scored high in a Title 1 school. Poor isn’t contagious.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The loss off Federal funding if families don't submit to ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act, 2012) mandated testing is an idle threat.

Name one case where the Dept. of Ed pulled a school's Federal funding because parents opted out. You can't. There is none although more than one-quarter of the families in various school districts have opted out since the legislation came on line (in NY, NY, WA, OR, IN, OH etc.). Why do you believe that this is happening?

The new head of Standardized Assessments at OSSE has made it easier to opt out of PARCC this year than in 2019. You can make an arrangement with your school to remove your kid during testing blocks freely this year. Some of the DCPS elementary schools in NW will be providing supervision for families opting out in April & May. Ours plans to.

Sure, but Sections 1111 and 1116 of NCLB are clear, even if they may not be enforced. A lot of people cheat on their taxes too.

If your kid would do well on PARCC and you opt out of testing you are only hurting your kid’s school and making it harder for DCPS/PCSB, parents, and others to evaluate schools based on a common standard. PARCC scores factor in a school’s rating and reputation, and schools with high scores attract better students and teachers. Plus, PARCC will be especially useful this year to see which schools suffered the most Covid-19 learning loss. And what else is your kid going to do while his or her friends are testing? Watch TV? Play Minecraft?

Cheating on taxes is a weak analogy for opting out. Are you familiar with the the writings of Diane Ravitch, one of the architects of No Child Left Behind? She turned against NCLB mandates back around 2010, emerging as one of their staunchest critics with her book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System." In the years since, Ravitch has become a tireless advocate for ditching the testing system she helped create.

The point of seeing which schools suffered most during Covid-19 learning loss is what, exactly? If Bowser and WTU leaders cared about Covid learning loss, they wouldn't have ensured that DC was among the last several big cities in the country to re-open schools (along with San Fran and LA). Our ed leaders wouldn't have given up on virtual learning a month before the school year ended in 2020 (no other city did this; Philadelphia never even closed its public elementary schools). They wouldn't have failed to provide strong supports to help poor kids who fell far behind during school closures to catch up in the last year.

I don't believe for a minute that most middle-class parents in the District care half as much about PARCC scores in selecting schools as they care about demographics. If high test scores were needed to attract better students and teachers, heavily UMC DC public schools with lackluster PARCC scores, like YuYing, Hearst and Brent, wouldn't have become wildly popular in recent years. Parents wouldn't buy million houses on Capitol Hill to access Brent, which boasts among the highest teacher retention rates in the system.

What is my kid going to do while her friends are testing? I'm going to take her out during testing blocks, with school's permission, like I did with her older sibling in 2018 and 2019. She wants to learn more about the Revolutionary War, so we're going to head to the public library near the school to do research on the Founding Fathers. To each his/her/their own.

Disagree.

1) NCLB passed Congress overwhelming and, regardless of what Diane Ravitch or you think, it is still the law. Basically, you are making it harder for schools to comply with current law and putting them at risk at sanctions. That is no different than encouraging people to not comply with the tax laws because you disagree with how the government spends money and because you think that the government won’t go after tax cheats. It is too bad if OSSE is going along with this and turning a blind eye to people opting out because they don’t like their precious snowflakes taking a standardized test.

2) Diane Ravitch has changed her mind on NCLB. So what? Her critique is that we shouldn’t shut down schools that have low test scores because these are often in poor and/or minority communities.
As you concede, no one is shutting down any schools in DC. In fact, schools such as Coolidge and Ideal have extremely low PARCC scores and no one is closing them. But at least, because of PARCC, we know how bad these schools are doing. Plus, Ravitch is now against charter schools. In fact, charter schools have been one of the few bright points in DC and have prevented at least some parents from rushing to NW DC or the burbs for better schools.

3) DCPS/PCSB is very interested in seeing what schools suffered the most Covid-19 learning loss. Don’t be obtuse. This is important data for the schools.

4) Please don’t claim that you speak for “most middle-class parents in the District.” Plenty of parents care about PARCC scores and these are important datapoints for rankings/awards (e.g., USN&WR, Blue Ribbon, etc.), which lots of parents care about. If you look at the last PARCC scores, Ross was at 91% 4+ ELA and 76.1% 4+ math, Brent was 73.6% and 70.7%, and Hearst was 60.8% and 60.0%. Those numbers generally correlate to the school’s quality/ranking. For example, USN&WR puts Ross as the #1 elementary school, Brent as #13, and Hearst as #26. These schools generally fill up with in-bounds kids, so the lottery waitlist is largely meaningless. So, your point about the “popularity” of these non-charter schools doesn’t amount to much because most people have to buy or rent in bounds.

5) Your Yu Ying example isn’t compelling. Anyone choosing that school is doing so in spite of the school’s test scores because they want their kid to learn Chinese. In fact, the test scores at Yu Ying are poor: 55.9% 4+ ELA and 57.4% 4+ math. Understandably, kids taking some of their classes in Chinese aren’t going to excel on ELA but what is the excuse on math? It is very difficult to get into Yu Ying after PK3 and parents at that stage aren’t really focused on PARCC scores. In contrast, the fact that schools like SWW and BASIS have some of the best PARCC scores in DC is a reason why parents consider those schools for 9th and 5th grade, respectively.

6) Parents buy in the Brent district because it is a great place to live, Brent is a good school (with good PARCC scores, see above), and they can try to move to BASIS or Latin for 5th grade. However now with BASIS ranked the #1 middle school in DC by USN&WR (Latin is #14) and winning the Blue Ribbon award last year, it will get harder and harder to get a slot there. We’ll see what happens with Latin 2.

7) My kid studied the Revolutionary War for 2 weeks in school, visited the Revolutionary War exhibition at the American History Museum a couple of times, read a couple books about the Revolutionary War, and has visited multiple sites involved the war over the years. He/she knows it well and will still find the time to take the PARCC test. Your kid can just read up on the war at the library over the weekend. Apparently, the war wasn’t covered in your kid’s school.

8) No one thinks that the PARCC test is perfect but a standardized test is required by law and, for better or worse, DC contracted to use PARCC. In my view, parents like you who send their kids to publicly funded schools, participate in LSAT and PTA, and then undermine the DCPS/PCSB’s educational mission by opting out of the PARCC and encouraging others to do so are wrong and selfish. You are just hurting DC schools and, in particular, hurting your own kids’ school(s).

Diane Ravitch lost me last year with her "Don't Believe the 'Learning Loss' Hoax" post which highlighted this observation: "Our children are learning lots of things. They have learned how to make the best of a bad situation. They have learned how we all need to pitch in to help each other. They have learned to wear masks in public. They have learned a lot about communicable diseases. They may have different learning this year, but is that the same as losing learning?"

PARCC might not be the best test, but infinitely waiving testing requirements because the scores are going to look bad and this definition of "learning" is not going to fly with a lot of parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The loss off Federal funding if families don't submit to ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act, 2012) mandated testing is an idle threat.

Name one case where the Dept. of Ed pulled a school's Federal funding because parents opted out. You can't. There is none although more than one-quarter of the families in various school districts have opted out since the legislation came on line (in NY, NY, WA, OR, IN, OH etc.). Why do you believe that this is happening?

The new head of Standardized Assessments at OSSE has made it easier to opt out of PARCC this year than in 2019. You can make an arrangement with your school to remove your kid during testing blocks freely this year. Some of the DCPS elementary schools in NW will be providing supervision for families opting out in April & May. Ours plans to.

Sure, but Sections 1111 and 1116 of NCLB are clear, even if they may not be enforced. A lot of people cheat on their taxes too.

If your kid would do well on PARCC and you opt out of testing you are only hurting your kid’s school and making it harder for DCPS/PCSB, parents, and others to evaluate schools based on a common standard. PARCC scores factor in a school’s rating and reputation, and schools with high scores attract better students and teachers. Plus, PARCC will be especially useful this year to see which schools suffered the most Covid-19 learning loss. And what else is your kid going to do while his or her friends are testing? Watch TV? Play Minecraft?

Cheating on taxes is a weak analogy for opting out. Are you familiar with the the writings of Diane Ravitch, one of the architects of No Child Left Behind? She turned against NCLB mandates back around 2010, emerging as one of their staunchest critics with her book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System." In the years since, Ravitch has become a tireless advocate for ditching the testing system she helped create.

The point of seeing which schools suffered most during Covid-19 learning loss is what, exactly? If Bowser and WTU leaders cared about Covid learning loss, they wouldn't have ensured that DC was among the last several big cities in the country to re-open schools (along with San Fran and LA). Our ed leaders wouldn't have given up on virtual learning a month before the school year ended in 2020 (no other city did this; Philadelphia never even closed its public elementary schools). They wouldn't have failed to provide strong supports to help poor kids who fell far behind during school closures to catch up in the last year.

I don't believe for a minute that most middle-class parents in the District care half as much about PARCC scores in selecting schools as they care about demographics. If high test scores were needed to attract better students and teachers, heavily UMC DC public schools with lackluster PARCC scores, like YuYing, Hearst and Brent, wouldn't have become wildly popular in recent years. Parents wouldn't buy million houses on Capitol Hill to access Brent, which boasts among the highest teacher retention rates in the system.

What is my kid going to do while her friends are testing? I'm going to take her out during testing blocks, with school's permission, like I did with her older sibling in 2018 and 2019. She wants to learn more about the Revolutionary War, so we're going to head to the public library near the school to do research on the Founding Fathers. To each his/her/their own.

Disagree.

1) NCLB passed Congress overwhelming and, regardless of what Diane Ravitch or you think, it is still the law. Basically, you are making it harder for schools to comply with current law and putting them at risk at sanctions. That is no different than encouraging people to not comply with the tax laws because you disagree with how the government spends money and because you think that the government won’t go after tax cheats. It is too bad if OSSE is going along with this and turning a blind eye to people opting out because they don’t like their precious snowflakes taking a standardized test.

2) Diane Ravitch has changed her mind on NCLB. So what? Her critique is that we shouldn’t shut down schools that have low test scores because these are often in poor and/or minority communities.
As you concede, no one is shutting down any schools in DC. In fact, schools such as Coolidge and Ideal have extremely low PARCC scores and no one is closing them. But at least, because of PARCC, we know how bad these schools are doing. Plus, Ravitch is now against charter schools. In fact, charter schools have been one of the few bright points in DC and have prevented at least some parents from rushing to NW DC or the burbs for better schools.

3) DCPS/PCSB is very interested in seeing what schools suffered the most Covid-19 learning loss. Don’t be obtuse. This is important data for the schools.

4) Please don’t claim that you speak for “most middle-class parents in the District.” Plenty of parents care about PARCC scores and these are important datapoints for rankings/awards (e.g., USN&WR, Blue Ribbon, etc.), which lots of parents care about. If you look at the last PARCC scores, Ross was at 91% 4+ ELA and 76.1% 4+ math, Brent was 73.6% and 70.7%, and Hearst was 60.8% and 60.0%. Those numbers generally correlate to the school’s quality/ranking. For example, USN&WR puts Ross as the #1 elementary school, Brent as #13, and Hearst as #26. These schools generally fill up with in-bounds kids, so the lottery waitlist is largely meaningless. So, your point about the “popularity” of these non-charter schools doesn’t amount to much because most people have to buy or rent in bounds.

5) Your Yu Ying example isn’t compelling. Anyone choosing that school is doing so in spite of the school’s test scores because they want their kid to learn Chinese. In fact, the test scores at Yu Ying are poor: 55.9% 4+ ELA and 57.4% 4+ math. Understandably, kids taking some of their classes in Chinese aren’t going to excel on ELA but what is the excuse on math? It is very difficult to get into Yu Ying after PK3 and parents at that stage aren’t really focused on PARCC scores. In contrast, the fact that schools like SWW and BASIS have some of the best PARCC scores in DC is a reason why parents consider those schools for 9th and 5th grade, respectively.

6) Parents buy in the Brent district because it is a great place to live, Brent is a good school (with good PARCC scores, see above), and they can try to move to BASIS or Latin for 5th grade. However now with BASIS ranked the #1 middle school in DC by USN&WR (Latin is #14) and winning the Blue Ribbon award last year, it will get harder and harder to get a slot there. We’ll see what happens with Latin 2.

7) My kid studied the Revolutionary War for 2 weeks in school, visited the Revolutionary War exhibition at the American History Museum a couple of times, read a couple books about the Revolutionary War, and has visited multiple sites involved the war over the years. He/she knows it well and will still find the time to take the PARCC test. Your kid can just read up on the war at the library over the weekend. Apparently, the war wasn’t covered in your kid’s school.

8) No one thinks that the PARCC test is perfect but a standardized test is required by law and, for better or worse, DC contracted to use PARCC. In my view, parents like you who send their kids to publicly funded schools, participate in LSAT and PTA, and then undermine the DCPS/PCSB’s educational mission by opting out of the PARCC and encouraging others to do so are wrong and selfish. You are just hurting DC schools and, in particular, hurting your own kids’ school(s).

Diane Ravitch lost me last year with her "Don't Believe the 'Learning Loss' Hoax" post which highlighted this observation: "Our children are learning lots of things. They have learned how to make the best of a bad situation. They have learned how we all need to pitch in to help each other. They have learned to wear masks in public. They have learned a lot about communicable diseases. They may have different learning this year, but is that the same as losing learning?"

PARCC might not be the best test, but infinitely waiving testing requirements because the scores are going to look bad and this definition of "learning" is not going to fly with a lot of parents.

Yep this. Waiving requirements sp the results won’t look as bad as it actually is.

[Anonymous]

"The mainstream media are filled with warnings about “learning loss” and how we must measure it and why students should go to summer school to make up for what they have “lost.” If we can’t quantify it, they say, how can we know which students are behind? This is silly. There was no “pre-test,” so there can’t be a “post-test.” A test that students take this spring can’t possibly demonstrate “learning loss,” since they can’t be compared to anything else. If you want to know where students are in their learning, ask their teacher."

-Diane Ravitch

I don't even know what this mean. She really has drunk the Kool-Aid.

Take DC, for example. DC used the PARCC pre-pandemic and now is using the PARCC post-pandemic. So, yes, they can use that to help quantify learning loss.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:"The mainstream media are filled with warnings about “learning loss” and how we must measure it and why students should go to summer school to make up for what they have “lost.” If we can’t quantify it, they say, how can we know which students are behind? This is silly. There was no “pre-test,” so there can’t be a “post-test.” A test that students take this spring can’t possibly demonstrate “learning loss,” since they can’t be compared to anything else. If you want to know where students are in their learning, ask their teacher."

-Diane Ravitch

I don't even know what this mean. She really has drunk the Kool-Aid.

Take DC, for example. DC used the PARCC pre-pandemic and now is using the PARCC post-pandemic. So, yes, they can use that to help quantify learning loss.

My old DCPS school school that has been rapidly gentrifying used to sell their “growth” by showing the improvement YoY of a certain grade level, for example the 2017 5th grade scores v the 2015 5th grade scores. These aren’t a real comparison and considering student bodies change, and school demos differ, I’m not really sure what you are hoping to glean from this

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pouring over PARCC results doesn't do much for you in the District. All you need to know is that in schools where UMC students are enrolled in force, most kids score high or very high. Where UMC are scarce, most kids score low or very low, other than in half a dozen KIPP or KIPP type programs featuring military-like structure and Sat school, universally shunned by UMC parents past Early Childhood Programs. Montessori programs are the exception, but their curricula are far outside the mainstream. Things were different when I was growing up in NYC. My siblings, good friends and I tested into GT ES programs where poor kids amalgamated.

Yes we know. But it is indeed broken down by demographic in the star system as well, and includes growth.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"The mainstream media are filled with warnings about “learning loss” and how we must measure it and why students should go to summer school to make up for what they have “lost.” If we can’t quantify it, they say, how can we know which students are behind? This is silly. There was no “pre-test,” so there can’t be a “post-test.” A test that students take this spring can’t possibly demonstrate “learning loss,” since they can’t be compared to anything else. If you want to know where students are in their learning, ask their teacher."

-Diane Ravitch

I don't even know what this mean. She really has drunk the Kool-Aid.

Take DC, for example. DC used the PARCC pre-pandemic and now is using the PARCC post-pandemic. So, yes, they can use that to help quantify learning loss.

My old DCPS school school that has been rapidly gentrifying used to sell their “growth” by showing the improvement YoY of a certain grade level, for example the 2017 5th grade scores v the 2015 5th grade scores. These aren’t a real comparison and considering student bodies change, and school demos differ, I’m not really sure what you are hoping to glean from this

Your old DCPS school has changed demographically over the last few years, so we should throw out the PARCC test. Very insightful. No data is obviously a lot more useful than some data.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"The mainstream media are filled with warnings about “learning loss” and how we must measure it and why students should go to summer school to make up for what they have “lost.” If we can’t quantify it, they say, how can we know which students are behind? This is silly. There was no “pre-test,” so there can’t be a “post-test.” A test that students take this spring can’t possibly demonstrate “learning loss,” since they can’t be compared to anything else. If you want to know where students are in their learning, ask their teacher."

-Diane Ravitch

I don't even know what this mean. She really has drunk the Kool-Aid.

Take DC, for example. DC used the PARCC pre-pandemic and now is using the PARCC post-pandemic. So, yes, they can use that to help quantify learning loss.

My old DCPS school school that has been rapidly gentrifying used to sell their “growth” by showing the improvement YoY of a certain grade level, for example the 2017 5th grade scores v the 2015 5th grade scores. These aren’t a real comparison and considering student bodies change, and school demos differ, I’m not really sure what you are hoping to glean from this

Your old DCPS school has changed demographically over the last few years, so we should throw out the PARCC test. Very insightful. No data is obviously a lot more useful than some data.

Do you work for Pearson? If you read through this thread you can see that there are many examples of actionable data that schools collect throughout the year