(Useful knowledge on the classroom walls must be covered for PARCC testing.)
Still writing book, so I will try to keep this short.

Has the Common Core improved American education? ACT and SAT scores remain relatively stagnant. The first few years of the Core have shown no results to shout about.

Of more concern, we are now basing our state standardized tests on the Common Core. As I walked through school hallways last week, I saw many signs that said, “Quiet! PARCC testing.” We have gone into the first round of a two-round testing process that sucks up weeks of school time.

PARCC is acknowledged to be a more demanding test than its predecessors. My concern about PARCC and the Core can be seen in the grim faces of students on PARCC days. We are adding to the long list of failures that extreme testing regularly inflicts on students. I assure readers that many students are suffering during testing season.

Those kids at the very bottom are not much worse off than before the Core and PARCC. If a student did not know most of the answers to the Illinois State Achievement Test, the impact of not knowing most PARCC answers will feel about the same. The world has not changed greatly for our lowest students.

The world has shifted under the kids in the middle and toward the top, however, the great majority of America’s students. Those kids in the middle may have gone from knowing many answers to knowing relatively few answers. Instead of walking out thinking that they probably did O.K., those kids will leave the testing arena with a sense of having been beaten up or even clobbered. The kids toward the top may end up feeling the same, as they take a test with a greater percentage of unknown answers.

The kids at the very top of our academic tiers should be fine. Except for the fact that public schools are frequently boring these kids to tears (or random disciplinary infractions), our kids at the top tend to function well on test days.

The psychological costs from PARCC testing are high. Educational publications wrote about widespread expectations that test scores would fall throughout the country as students adapted to the new, harder standards. The first PARCC administration led to a fall that was almost a freefall in some schools. Given that we were unable to meet earlier, demanded test improvements after a decade of progressively harsher threats from NCLB, the brainstorm that has led government leaders and other Core proponents to believe that America will be able to meet harder standards now can only be considered mysterious. Believing in zombies might not be a much bigger leap of faith.

If our students cannot meet these standards, what will we have gained? I know what our students are losing: They are losing confidence and hope.