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

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

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

And it also makes it difficult to norm against peer performance when no other states take it! But Bill Gates and Pearson Education are living pretty high on the hog from it. Follow the money.[/quote]

If kids need a test to tell us how they're doing in general and compared to peers then why do the highest-performing school systems in the world avoid standardized tests for elementary and middle school-age kids, including Singapore, Finland, the city of Shang'hai and the Netherlands?  What we're doing here in the US is BETTER than what these countries are doing?

The reality is that there are no shortcuts to improving educational outcomes for poor kids.  If a society won't provide optimal inputs, not much point in obsessively, and expensively, measuring sub-optimal outputs every year.[/quote]

1) You are comparing some of the best school systems in the world to DCPS, one of the worst performing school systems in the US.  You realize that most DCPS kids are performing below grade level and some are illiterate?

2) Your information is wrong.  Take Singapore, for example.  Schools are ranked based on how kids do on standardized tests.  In fact, all kids in Singapore take the PSLE at the end of grade 6, which is held over 4 days and determines where they will go to middle school.  Want another example?  China invented standardized tests over 2000 years ago, so I don’t think that your Shanghai example makes sense.  In fact, middle school students in China take the Zhongkao standardized test to determine whether they go on to high school and where they go.

3) One reason we know that US middle school education is worse than Singapore, Finland, China, and the Netherlands is because OECD has kids take a standardized test.  That test shows that the US is worse than all those countries in literacy, numeracy, and science.  Moreover, in the US, DC ranks among the lowest in the country (along with Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia) in dropout rate, math scores, reading scores, median SAT scores, etc.

And how are we able to compare DC to states in the US and other countries?  Yes, standardized tests.  And how can we establish a baseline to try to improve DCPS and see which schools are excelling and which are not?  Yes, standardized tests.[/quote]

All standard tests certainly aren't created equal.  I took around 10 British O-Levels as a teen, tests did not include multiple-choice problems that were graded by actual humans. Friends sent their children to a school in Singapore that gives the PSLE.  Their kids have also taken PARCC (not in DC).  I'm told that the former (also graded by humans) bears no resemblance to the miserable latter.  Students in Singapore gain from acing PSLE, their magnet MS entrance exam.  They can show their work on math problems they ultimately get wrong to receive partial credit.  The PSLE isn't all multiple choice, not by a long shot.

The crappy tests graded by computers the US insists on using, where students and their families aren't rewarded for high scores individually, are for the birds.  Opting out sounds eminently reasonable under the circumstances.
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