My main concern with PARCC and the Common Core can be seen in the grim faces of students on PARCC days. Students walk the halls without smiles. Sometimes they stop to ask the effect of a poor score on their educational future. I have reassured middle school students that “flunking” the PARCC test will not result in being retained in the seventh grade.* I have reassured them that this test will not affect their ability to get into college. PARCC and the Common Core are adding to the long list of failures that extreme testing now regularly inflicts on students.
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 they probably did alright., many kids in the middle now 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, if not quite as intensely, as they take a test with a greater percentage of unknown answers. Kids are breaking into tears during and after these tests. Kids are going sleepless the night before the test.
Most of our test-takers can be found somewhere in the middle of the testing bell curve, where the psychological costs from PARCC testing will be highest. Educational publications wrote about widespread expectations that test scores would fall throughout the country as students adapted to the new, harder standards, and the first PARCC test led to a fall in performance that was almost a freefall in some schools. No one in education seemed surprised.
Given that we were never able to meet demanded test improvements under NCLB, despite a decade of progressively harsher threats codified into a punitive law, the brainstorm that led government leaders and other Core proponents to believe America needed tougher standards and tougher tests seems utterly batshit crazy to me. Raising the bar when kids can’t jump the current bar strikes me as a strategy absolutely destined for failure. Believing that raising the bar will solve our performance problems is nothing more than a leap of faith. Believing in vampires or zombies would not require a much bigger leap of faith.
The standards have never been the problem. Any kid who had mastered the state standards for his or her state would have been ready for college. Performance is the problem. Kids have not been mastering the standards. Changing the standards will not change that fact.
*Administrations do not always understand how little their students understand about testing. Students catch the stench of anxiety from teachers and administrators, but they do not necessarily understand the source of that anxiety. The fact that a teacher or Principal’s job may rest on score results often will not be understood. Oddly enough, students tend to assume that the annual test is about THEM, rather than the adults in their lives.