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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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?
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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.
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Sounds like you should homeschool.

Good luck.[/quote]

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