After all the threats and bullying of parents, IL dumps the PARCC

"I think the promise of PARCC is greater than the promise of most of the other assessments we’ve ever had. Kids can test to the edge of their knowledge." -- IL State Supt. Tony Smith in 2015.

Stunning reversal...After all the threats to students and parents who opted-out of the PARCC exam last year, ISBE now says, it's ditching the test for IL high schoolers altogether.

However, the move won't mean less time spent on high-stakes testing and test-prep for teachers as resisters have been demanding. Nor will it mean a shift towards authentic assessment and teacher evaluation. Just more pressure on students and more confusion for parents who still have no way to measure student growth from year to year as the SAT replaces PARCC as the test de jour. SAT unfortunately, gives no more information to teachers than PARCC did.

Miserable results from last year's PARCC tests.

The move comes after two years of PARCC testing in Illinois were highlighted by low scores and thousands of students skipping the tests and amid calls for more equitable access to college entrance exams. Students in third through eighth grade in Illinois will continue to take the PARCC tests.

The IL pull-out also badly weakens the consortium of states using the common math and English tests, called the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. The exams are built around the so-called Common Core Standards which in fact are little more than a test-driven curriculum with companies like Pearson marketing the text books and designing faulty exams.

In 2015-16, only seven states out of the 20 original consortium members and the District of Columbia administered the exams. The Bureau of Indian Education and Department of Defense schools also still participates.

Remember BBB was critical of PARCC implementation and tried to delay last year's testing until she and the district were threatened by Gov. Rauner and Arne Duncan, with sanctions, including loss of $1.4 billion in federal funding. Rahm's hand-picked schools chief had asked CPS be allowed to give the PARCC  only to 11th-graders and a sampling of grade school students.

Now she's are her way to prison and PARCC won't be given to 11th-graders.

Ah, the sweet irony.

When Illinois started PARCC testing in 2014, the state spent abut $34 million. #brokeonpurpose https://t.co/llRtaL0YXQ

— ChicagoTeachersUnion (@CTULocal1) July 12, 2016

More evidence that PARCC test is bogus. Parents were smart to opt-out.

PARCC officials are still working to determine the full scope and causes of last year’s score discrepancies, which may partly result from demographic and academic differences between the students who took the tests on computers and those who took it on paper, rather than the testing format itself. -- EdWeek

Touted by Arne Duncan, bankrolled by the Gates Fundation and designed by Pearson Education Inc., the world's largest textbook/testing company, PARCC was supposed to provide us with the new and better model of "game changing", 21st-Century, high-stakes standardized testing. Aligned with Common Core standards and curriculum, it was billed as a high-validity measure, not only of student progress in learning, but teacher competency.

But now there's compelling evidence to show that what PARCC really measured had less to do with anything going on in the classroom than it did with demographics (race and class) and familiarity with computers.  Questions have arisen around the validity of the 2014-15 PARCC test results after officials from the testing consortium revealed that students who took the tests on computers scored, overall, lower than those who did not. Four out of every five students took the test via computer.

It was a year ago that Chicago's prison-bound schools chief, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, tried to delay giving PARCC for a year because the district didn't "have enough computers" to properly administer the tests. But threatened by State Board Chair Rev. James Meeks with a loss of federal funds, she and her boss, Rahm Emanuel, complied and gave them anyway, with some kids taking PARCC on computers and others taking the pencil-and-paper version.

“Therefore, we are directing you to administer the PARCC assessment to all students. If any district does not test, ISBE will withhold its Title I funds. We will also seek to recoup the state funds spent on any test booklets unused by the district, as well as any restocking fees charged to ISBE by our testing vendor.” -- ISBE Chairman Rev. James Meeks 

It turns out, BBB was on to something. Now we learn that students who took the computer version of PARCC, scored lower on average than students who used paper and pencil.

Test results for the state's two million students plummeted to their lowest point in a decade with nearly 70% failing the PARCC.

Gov. Rauner's schools chief Tony Smith, whistled past the graveyard.

"I think the promise of PARCC is greater than the promise of most of the other assessments we’ve ever had. Kids can test to the edge of their knowledge."

Arne Duncan agreed...

"It actually doesn't concern me at all. What Illinois and many other states are doing is finally telling the truth." (EdWeek)

Yes, the truth.

The truth is that the thousands of parents who opted their kids out of PARCC testing were the smart ones. But it's the kind of smarts that standardized tests don't measure.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Brother Fred

Mercedes Schneider

Duncan is gone, and the USDOE test worship continues. -- Deutsch 29

Valerie Strauss

[New Ed Sec. John] King was so enamored with test-based “accountability,” he pushed new Pearson-developed tests aligned to the Common Core before teachers had enough time to learn the standards and develop new curriculum and lessons. -- Washington Post

S-T sports columnist Rick Telander

Can you imagine the Chicago we know today inviting the world into our living room soon? I can’t. Nor will we. -- Thank goodness Chicago won't host the 2016 Olympics

Recall expert Joshua Spivak

 “There’s no jurisdiction I know of that have just one guy” open to recall. -- Sun-Times

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Mercedes Schneider

America needs less of Pearson. A lot less. -- Deutsch29

NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia

“I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think Arne is decent and honest,” says National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen Garcia, whose union has called for Duncan to resign. “But his reforms are so ridiculous, he’s uniting teachers, PTA’s, principals, everyone. We’re writing each other’s talking points!” -- Politico: Arne Duncan Wars

Rosenbaum

R.I.P Terry Rosenbaum

“My goal was to be a teacher of history in the New York City high schools. Which I did. I loved teaching.” -- NYT: Teacher Who Was Fired After Defying McCarthy, Dies at 97

Bob Quellos, one of the founders of No Games Chicago 

“They were there early, they were bulky guys, and they just didn’t fit the activist profile.” -- THE WATCHDOGS: Spy cops: Chicago police routinely spied on protesters

Rebecca Sibilia, CEO of Edbuild

“When you think of bankruptcy … this is a huge opportunity. Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids; bankruptcy is a problem for the people governing the system, right? So, when a school district goes bankrupt all of their legacy debt can be eliminated . . . Look, if we can eliminate that in an entire urban system, then we can throw all the cards up in the air, and redistribute everything with all new models. You’ve heard it first: bankruptcy might be the thing that leads to the next education revolution.” -- PR Watch

We need to end 'regurgitation education' now https://t.co/I6rhn790PN

— John Merrow (@John_Merrow) September 28, 2015

Student debt tripled after passage of @VP Biden-backed bill to help Wall St prevent students from reducing their debt http://t.co/cgjXVBo6WC

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) September 28, 2015

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Julian Bond (1940-2015)

As former President Jimmy Carter told former SNCC worker and author Mary King, “if you wanted to scare white people in Southwest Georgia, Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference wouldn’t do it. You only had to say one word—SNCC.” -- Monthly Review

Adolph Reed

Kristen McQueary’s attempt to walk back from her scurrilous column of last Thursday extolling the wonderful changes that the devastation of Katrina brought to New Orleans is basically an unpology—and an even more empty, uninformed word salad than the original. The issue isn’t what she was feeling when she wrote what she wrote; it’s what she wrote. -- LBO News

N.Y. State United Teachers Pres. Karen Magee 

"Student test scores based on poorly written, developmentally inappropriate Pearson tests, in a year in which record numbers of parents repudiated the state's standardized testing program by `opting out,' aren't worth the paper they are printed on." -- Huffington

Columnist Myra Blackmon

“This is how the self-selected “education reformers” operate. Their motive is profit and personal advancement. They love the idea of schools run by private organizations, staffed with uncertified teachers, cherry-picking the easy students and leaving the most vulnerable students behind. Unproven, invalid standardized tests drive every decision. -- Athens Banner Herald (h/t Diane Ravitch)

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

SEIU Local 1 President Tom Balanoff 

“Mayor Emanuel doesn’t understand that what made Chicago great was working people. We think he has totally turned his back on that.” -- Sun-Times

Heather O’Donnell, vice president of public policy for Thresholds

“It’s like cutting someone off from chemotherapy when they have cancer.” -- Rauner's mental health cuts hit firefighter's family hard 

N.J. Superintendent Elizabeth C. Jewett 

I did not authorize the release of this email nor am I aware of who did release it. I am also not aware of the motives they may have had behind the release. That said, I completely stand behind my comments as they represent not only my views and concerns; they also represent the views and concerns of our Board of Education. -- Answer Sheet, Pearson monitoring social media for security breaches during PARCC testing

Diane Ravitch

 The Network for Public Education enthusiastically endorses Jesus (Chuy) Garcia for Mayor of Chicago. The election has national significance. NPE believes it will send a message that closing public schools en masse and replacing them with private charters is unacceptable; that the public schools are a public responsibility and should be fully funded to meet the needs of students. -- Ravitch Blog

CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey 

"Cease and desist" directive was given to any principal whose conduct could be construed as not following district policy in giving the state exams. -- PARCC testing launches with some pushback, confusion

Look what they've done to the GED. Aligned with Common Core and handed over to Pearson

Back in the '80s I got my start in adult education, teaching GED classes in a little classroom in the back of the public library on North and Pulaski. My students were mostly dropouts from Clemente, looking to finish high school so they could go to a community college or apply for a decent job. Most were good students, capable, thoughtful and curious. Many had dropped out because of the gang situation at Clemente or for personal reasons -- they needed to work to support their families.

The curriculum was geared to the test and involved mainly basic math and literacy. But I did my best to get to know my students and learn as much as possible about their previous schooling and out-of-school learning experiences. We managed to turn the classes into much more than an exercise in test preparation and most of my students passed the test and got excited again about learning.

Now I'm hearing that the GED exam has been overhauled, aligned with the Common Core and handed over to Pearson, the giant British testing and textbook corporation in order to supposedly prepare students for 21st-Century jobs. The new test is now much harder. The test prep classes are given on-line. No more personalization. It's also become much more expensive in order to build in a big profit margin for Pearson, making it less accessible to the kinds of students I was teaching back in the day. The changes have caused thousands to drop out and give up.

NPR reports there's been sizable decrease in  the number of people who took and passed the test, according to local and state educators and the organization that runs it. In addition, at least 16 states have begun offering or plan to offer new, alternative tests.

What effect did all of these changes have on test takers?

"Our number of graduates for this last calendar year has dropped about 85 percent," says Myles Newman, who helps coordinate GED preparation for one school district in Lexington County, S.C. States including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Colorado are reporting large drops as well.

"Teachers are telling us that the new test is virtually impossible for students to pass," says David Spring, who with his wife, Elizabeth Hanson, runs the website Restore GED Fairness in Washington state. Both are educators who have spent years helping people prepare for the GED.

Here's some hard numbers:

--- In 2012, a total of 401,388 people passed the GED test.

--- In 2014, only 58,524.

What a disaster!

Waukegan teachers hanging tough. Cuomo vows to break public schools 'monopolies'.

At last night's board meeting, Waukegan board member Victoria Torres blows it. Tells angry striking teachers and parent supporters, "Sit down and shut up!" Probably not the best way for elected official to open dialogue. Meeting up for grabs. Quickly adjourned. At 10 p.m. teachers union releases a statement calling Torres’ behavior “abhorrent” and calling for her immediate resignation. Statewide support is building for teachers who are in 4th week of strike for a decent contract.

While N.Y. Gov. Cuomo is busy playing political games with quarantined Ebola health workers, he still finds time to attack public education with a broad brush. According to this story in the Daily News, Cuomo has vowed to break the public schools “public monopolies” and replace them with more privately-run charter schools.

That's really hard to understand since Cuomo has always been a big fan of monopolies. Take for example his love affair with Pearson Publishing, the British conglomerate that monopolizes Common Core and the standardized testing industry.

According to Alan Singer, writing at Huffington,

 Pearson is already creating teacher certification exams for eighteen states including New York, organizing staff development workshops to promote Pearson products, and providing school district Pearson assessment tools. In New York, Pearson Education currently has a five-year, $32 million contract to administer state test and provides other "testing services" to the State Education Department. It also recently received a share of a federal Race to the Top grant to create what the company calls the "next-generation" of online assessments. 

“Gov. Cuomo has laid clear plans to expand his frontal assault on our public schools through high stakes testing, starving our public schools and privatization,” says Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education.

“It’s not that shocking when you look at the enormous pile of cash he has raked in from the Wall Street billionaires who are investing in charter schools. He is rewarding his financial backers at a devastating cost to our children.”

Please tell me again why the Working Families Party (WFP) thought it a good idea to endorse this guy? The Nation's explanation only makes me dizzy.

AFT Prez Randi Weingarten Tweets this follow-up to this week's teacher-bashing TIME cover:

85,000 have signed @AFTunion petition asking @time to apologize for it cover which was a sucker punch to teachers everywhere #TIMEfail
— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) October 29, 2014

Philly students walkout in support of their teachers

Our thoughts this morning are with our dear friend and sister in the struggle, Karen Lewis, who underwent emergency surgery last night at Northwestern Hospital in Chicago. The CTU has announced a press conference for 4 P.M. today to give us an update on Karen's condition.

******

Pearson has done it again. Another wrong "correct" answer on their high-stakes math exam. Sarah Blaine, the mom of a N.J. 4th-grader, tells us why this even matters in a post on the Answer Sheet.

I wrote about Pearson's mind-boggling and dangerous mistakes before, including this one, where they claimed in one of their text books that blood was blue. It took the work of a Chicago teacher and his students to debunk Pearson's text.

A SMALLTALK SALUTE goes out to hundreds of Philly students who are holding student strikes and protests in support of their teachers. The city's so-called School Reform Commission (SRC), set up under the state's takeover of the city's school system, has unilaterally tossed out its collective-bargaining agreement with the PFT.

Philly students walkout

Dozens of students from Science Leadership Academy in Center City and as many as 175 from the High School for Creative and Performing Arts in South Philadelphia boycotted classes. They held peaceful, upbeat demonstrations outside the two magnet schools. Twenty-five students from the Franklin Learning Center in Spring Garden demonstrated outside district headquarters at 440 N. Broad St.

University of Pennsylvania history professor Thomas Sugrue made a detour on his way to work from Mount Airy to support daughter Anna, a junior at Science Leadership. "Their voices are the ones who have been less heard in the debate about school reform," he said before tweeting a photo of his daughter.

We're still waiting to see what the union's response is going to be.

There's nothing wrong with Common Core Standards, except...

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has joined other top education officials to warn the public not to be alarmed by dramatically lower test scores following new testing standards.                                                                                           

There's nothing wrong with schools having high academic standards There's plenty wrong with having those standards handed down from on high and then bringing in multi-million-dollar ramrods on no-bid contracts to "retrain" teachers and principals into passive compliance. There is even more wrong with Common Core and it "rigorous" testing regimen being used to sort and track kids, opening up doors to college and employment to the few and shutting them to the many.

Case in point: The New York Times reports that New York State, an early adopter of the new standards, released results from reading and math exams showing that less than a third of students passed.

Making matters even worse, CC testing is almost entirely in the hands of British textbook/testing mega-publisher Pearson. The Washington Post reports that Pearson just apologized for assigning wrong testing results to more than 4,000 students in Virginia.

Pearson issued a similar apology last spring for making mistakes in the scoring of admissions tests for gifted and talented programs in New York City public schools. Other scoring problems by Pearson in recent years caused delays in final test results in Florida and Minnesota.

Arne Duncan is out telling parents "not to be alarmed" by crashing test scores.

“We should absolutely not be alarmed if test scores drop as a result of these more rigorous expectations and higher standards,” said Duncan on a conference call. “That’s because these new assessments and standards are now aligned to mark and measure what it truly takes to adequately prepare students for the real world.”A source familiar with the city results said scores had dropped by about 30 points. “Very few city kids passed the test. And almost no kids of color passed the test. It’s a disaster.”

Yes, don't be "alarmed." Those crashed scores will only mean your neighborhood school may be closed, yourchild's teacher given a poor rating and possibly fired, and the value of your home bottoming out.

In Pearson we trust. Really? But our blood is never blue.

Remember back in April, when a single insipid test question sparked the pineapple rebellion and shone a light, not only on current standardized testing practices, but on the whole testing industry and its leading profiteer, Pearson Publishing? With lives, careers and the very existence of schools hanging in the balance, we have become totally reliant on Pearson and the testing companies to measure and arbitrate truth and correctness. Even more so, with the era of the Common Core curriculum at hand. But what happens when Pearson is wrong -- either in the content of their texts or in the proscribed answers on their tests?

Check out this exchange between Chicago Science/Math Teacher Oscar Newman and Pearson.

November 17, 2012 

To Whom It May Concern, 

My school recently purchased Pearson's Interactive Science for our middle school students (6-8 Grades). While preparing for a lesson, I happened upon the following quote, from the Interactive Physical Science book 1 TE, p.119 Under "Science and Society": "The influx of oxygen changes blood's color from blue to red...Have students examine their arms to see if they have any blue veins. Explain that the blood in those veins is headed back to the heart and lung to receive more oxygen." 

Really? I am appalled at the poor scientific review that this book apparently underwent. Even cursory editing would have prevented this error. Human blood is never blue.

Hemoglobin turns bright red when oxygenated. Deoxygenated (vertebrate) blood is dark red. Mollusks and some arthropods use hemocyanin, which turns blue when oxygenated due to the copper it contains, but our blood is never blue. Pigments in skin cause veins to appear blue. Those who have donated blood are well aware of this, in fact, I show my students a photo of me donating blood to dissuade them of this misconception. 

I was on the team that decided to purchase this series for my school, and I am saddened that I did not catch this in time or have a chance to question the representative who sold this product. I will now thoroughly check these science texts to make sure that I do not have to waste valuable instructional time addressing this and other foolishness.

Please address this problem in future versions. 

Yours in outrage, 

Oscar Newman,

NBCT (EA Science 2002, 2011) 7-8 Grade Science and Math Teacher 

Chicago Academy Elementary School  3400 N. Austin Ave. Chicago, IL 60634

Pearson responds to Oscar Newman 

Question Reference #121117-000138 

Thank you for contacting our Curriculum K12 Customer Service Dept. Our customer service team will research your request and respond as quickly as possible.

Our regular office hours are 8:00AM to 6:00PM Eastern standard time, Monday through Friday. If you received this message outside our normal operating hours, please expect our team to begin researching your inquiry the next business day. We appreciate your business. 

Learn about our Virtual Learning Achievement Guarantee.Click here for details: http://www.pearsonschool.com/index.cfm?locator=PS159t 

So far, Oscar tells me he has received no call-back from Pearson. So for millions of American public school students and their teachers, human blood remains blue -- at least for the purpose of getting the answer right on the test.