Sunday, March 1, 2015

PARCC Gives CCSS a Bad Name (my apologies to Bon Jovi)

When the Common Core State Standards finally found their way to New Jersey in 2010, I admit I had concerns.  Their state approved predecessors, the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards, were relatively innocuous and fairly ambiguous.  In the district in which I taught, our local curriculum standards exceeded those outlined in the NJCCCS.  They also allowed us enough flexibility to be creative, exploring the language arts in ways that inspired students and teachers as well as challenged them.  With the introduction of the Common Core State Standards, I worried that our ability to design meaningful, authentic learning experiences for students would be squashed.

Candidly, I spent the first year of the Common Core implementation in "wait and see" mode.  I moved into a new district as an ELA supervisor the same year they were adopted, which gave me permission to observe the content teachers were teaching and how the instructional units did or did not align with CCSS expectations.  We weren't too far off from what the CCSS required, but there was certainly work to be done.  And over the last four years, we have done it.

We have infused more informational texts into our curriculum, piquing particularly our male students' interests in reading.  We have focused on closely reading fiction and non-fiction texts, providing our students with many tools and opportunities to question, to infer, and to explore ideas.  Our students have had the chance to publish their work online through message boards and web pages.  They have conducted more extensive inquiry, researching topics of interest while building crucial thinking and learning skills that will serve them well in the future.  Perhaps much to their parents' chagrin, we have taught students how to argue effectively as well as how to deconstruct an argument so that they make choices based on the evidence and their values rather than manipulative rhetorical tricks.

I see, then, little wrong with the Common Core State Standards.

However then the PARCC started its long, arduous journey to our state, promising to show if teachers are actually teaching the Common Core or not and rating their effectiveness as educators based on students' results.

Cue the screeching record...

The premise, of course, is ridiculous.  I will not expound on all the reasons as to why this is a terrible idea and how it boils down the entire purpose of education to students' test performance.  Many others have examined the flaws of this much better than I can here.

I will, though, say this.  If the Common Core State Standards are a worthwhile endeavor, and if the standards present students with rigorous expectations for complex thinking and sophisticated understandings, then how in the world can Pearson or bureaucrats believe that students should be able to demonstrate their proficiencies in sixty to seventy-five minute blocks of time, reading antiquated texts, and answering multiple choice questions?  The CCSS encourages students to do a deep dive of the materials and that requires time to think, to process, and to experiment.  These standards should not be able to be boiled down into bite size assessment nuggets.  They should require teachers' ongoing guidance even as students are evaluated and their proficiencies are measured.  Basically, the Common Core requires educators to teach students sophisticated concepts that aren't easily measured by multiple choice questions and timed writing.  And yet...

I know, the irony.

PARCC has definitely shot CCSS in its metaphorical heart.  So as the PARCC media blitz surges this week, I caution educators, parents, politicians, and journalists to more carefully distinguish the test from the standards.