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.

Rauner, Smith & Meeks: Killing Special Ed in IL

Rauner's  hand-picked State Supt. Tony Smith called the board's move, "basically the most equitable way of distribution we've got."

The center-piece of Gov. Rauner's divisive, winners-and-losers plan for funding Chicago Public Schools operations is to divert millions from the state's (mostly suburban district's) special education fund.

The State Board, headed by Pres. James Meeks, consists of nine Rauner appointees.

Rauner and Meeks

The Tribune reports:

The Illinois State Board of Education is proposing to take $305 million from an account designated for special education services and give that money to districts next school year for general expenses that may have nothing or little to do with kids with disabilities.

 Even without this source of funding for special education, districts would be expected to continue covering those costs as required by law.

 "The state is in a budget crisis — I understand that. But it is crazy to put that on the backs of children with disabilities," says Beverly Holden Johns, who is active in several special education organizations in Illinois. She questions the legality of the state board's proposal.

So do I.

It's also a way to pit the state's poorer urban school districts against wealthier suburban ones rather than adequately and equitably fund both.

Behind Rauner's call to 'end unfunded mandates'

Rauner and Smith

Unfunded mandates. I hate 'em. Schools and school districts hate 'em.

It didn't take our demagogic, education-know-nothing governor, with help from his much-smarter State Supt. Tony Smith, very long to figure that out and issue a call to end all unfunded mandates -- which these days virtually means ALL mandates.

Former Oakland supt. Smith is a veteran of the old Coalition of Essential Schools and founder Ted Sizer's less-is-more philosophy. In Oakland, he talked the Sizer Essential Schools talk in order to close public schools, fire teachers, and replace them with privately-run charters in their place.

Sizer's progressive vision, expressed beautifully in his book, Horace's Compromise (a seminal text and must-read, especially for high school educators) was about smaller schools (including charters) and classrooms which were more like learning communities than shopping malls, where skilled teachers were empowered to make the most important educational decisions (and yes, compromise between what's nice and possible), to teach and not just test, and where students could engage in meaningful learning based on their interests and experience.

For Sizer, who served as dean of Harvard's Ed School, less-is-more was never about union-busting or forcing schools to choose between basic necessities because of draconian state budget cuts to public education. It was never about austerity and do-more-with-less.

For Rauner/Smith that's exactly what the call to abolish mandates means. Rauner wants nothing less than to privatize all public space and eliminate civil rights protections and public employee unions altogether.

Yes, let's get rid of unfunded mandates like, Rahm Emanuel's longer school day, like Common Core and PARCC testing madness. But we need to keep mandates that ensure student safety, special education, ELL, class size ceilings, caps on charters, and school desegregation as well as all other fundamental civil and human rights -- including teachers' right to bargain collectively with elected school boards.

The response to necessary, but unfunded, mandates, should be to adequately fund them, not abolish them.