Reply to How to opt out of PARCC at Deal?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Whoa - this thread has been interesting!

1.  I agree it is obnoxious that the PARCC test appears (according to folks on this thread - but I haven't otherwise looked into it)to be an enrichment opportunity for a for-profit company (shades of De Vos - shudder).  I don't like the incentives there (for a company to push testing to make money).
2.  I'd like to hear more about why ten hours of testing a year is so bad?  My view so far has been that there is a lot of testing in life (even as an adult, "testing" exists, just in different forms, e.g., preparing for an appellate oral argument!), and maybe it is not so bad to get early experience with it, and learn how to deal with the stress.
3.  At least at my kid's school - Brent - there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of teaching to the test.  Kids appear to be doing lots of interesting things and learning lots of important stuff.  Plenty of field trips and projects.  I don't know that ten more hours of field trips or projects instead of ten hours of testing would be better for the kids' development.[/quote]

[b]Have you taken a sample PARCC test on-line?[/b]  Easy to do.  I recommend it.

I found the ELA section, which took me around an hour to navigate, abominable--all five hours of it--but the math OK.   The several ELA sections are almost all pointless-seeming kiddie literary analysis, with so many poorly written questions and such awkward formatting that I got dizzy reading through them. But that wasn't the least appealing aspect, not for me anyway. It was this: no knowledge of facts a kid should learn is tested in any section of the PARCC (e.g. "Who was the First US President?" or "How many states are there in the USA?").  I see no point in my eight year-old answering strange, deeply dull ELA questions for 10 minutes let alone for five hours.  She reads to me from books she likes almost every night, and we talk about what she reads.  I can see that this insipid test will teach her to like school a little less, nothing more.

Can't stand the PARCC on any level, so opting out at our WotP DCPS.  Big headache, might end up in court.  Still opting out this year and plan to do so for each year we stay in DCPS as long as DCPS adheres to the crappy PARCC (dropped by 17 states since 2013, with only NJ and DC left in the club).  [/quote]

Good idea - I just (for the first time) checked out the ELA.  Whoa - that is not an easy test!  On the one hand, I appreciate that they are requiring the kids to do some serious critical thinking and analysis about the texts they are reading.  On the other, I am pretty skeptical that it is fair to have only one (scored) "right" answer to a lot of the questions - to me (as an adult) there were usually a couple of reasonable choices (and arguments that could be made supporting the correctness of one or another answer).  [/quote]

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