Last week my third grader was taking the PARCC. The most notable thing about the test for him is that he doesn’t get homework. The test has much more significance, however, for many of the parents in school districts around New Jersey (and the other states taking the test this year). There has been a steady stream of criticism and complaint about the test in the months leading up to this week. As a parent, I can understand that parents would be concerned about this new test and what it means. But I am also an educator, and much of the heated discussions don’t reflect the kinds of conversations about tests that I have with colleagues. I want to offer my take on testing and some of the anxieties surrounding the PARCC and tests in general.
For those of you without kids taking the test, PARCC is the new standardized test being rolled out this year in New Jersey and several other states. (The acronym stands for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career.) New Jersey has had standardized tests for years called the NJ ASK, which I don’t remember hearing that much about. But the PARCC, because it’s new and because it’s tied to the Common Core, has drawn all kinds of controversy and fuss. There has been a campaign to have parents request that their kids not take the test. (The main teachers’ union in New Jersey has also come out against the test, but the politics behind that are another article entirely.) A few weeks ago, I went to a presentation for parents on the PARCC test given by the South Orange-Maplewood school district. There was a lot of tension in the room. The district administrative people there did what they could to allay people’s concerns, but they didn’t seem to make much headway. The concerns of parents fell into a few broad categories:
Big, Bad Standardized Tests
Some of the anti-PARCC sentiment is really just anti-test sentiment. Some people just don’t like the idea of large-scale standardized tests. Again, New Jersey has had standardized tests for decades, so the PARCC is nothing new in that regard, but what is the argument for opposing standardized tests? What would be the alternative? Non-standardized tests? Each school district could just make up their own test, but many of those tests would likely be worse than a test like PARCC. There’s no reason to think a test will be better or more valid because it’s taken by fewer students. It’s easy to criticize, but does take a lot of resources and expertise to create a test at that large a scale and ensure its reliability. The PARCC tests are developed by Pearson, a big education publisher. Everyone loves to beat up on education publishers, myself included at times, but the tests are not developed in a vacuum. Pearson has an approval process for the materials on the test that involves dozens of educators from each state deploying the test.
Should we do without tests entirely? Maybe the alternative is to have no high stakes tests and rely on teacher evaluations of students. Of course, we do rely on teacher evaluations, and they are valuable, but there’s no reason to idealize them. Can’t teachers have bad judgment or do a bad job? Yes, a teacher will know the child better, but that can go either way. What if the teacher gets to know your child and thinks he’s annoying or thinks she’s a little angel who can do no wrong? In either case the teacher’s evaluations could be influenced. Would you want your child’s educational assessment to depend entirely on everything going right with the teacher he happens to get for 3rd (or whatever) grade? You need and want to have more than one way of assessing learning and tests are a valuable tool.
In my own experience teaching writing at a community college, individual assessment of a student’s work by their teacher is essential, but it’s not everything. To ensure fairness and consistency and to get the best picture of what the student can do, some kind of standard test is invaluable.
There is a disconnect at work here: parents see educational assessment as a judgment of their child in some holistic way. It’s not. It’s always something much narrower than that. The question is never “is this a smart kid” or “is this a good kid.” It’s usually “can this kid do this specific thing we’ve been teaching him to do” or “does this kid know this stuff she’s supposed to know.”
The Typing Thing
The PARCC is a computer-based test, and people worry about their 3rd grader’s bad typing. Sure, your kid’s essay might look terrible compared to the typed writing of an adult, but these essays won’t be scored by that standard. They will be scored compared to the essays of other 3rd graders across the state whose typing will be the same or worse. Most kids in my town and other suburban towns really don’t have much to worry about here (save your concern for the poor kids who don’t have Chromebooks in their schools and computers in their homes). And lastly, consider for a moment the prospect of grading hundreds of handwritten essays by third graders. Typed essays will be beautiful clarity by comparison.
Who Grades These Tests?
This is one area where I think there is a good basis for criticism, and I’m surprised it hasn’t come up more often. I had assumed that the written PARCC tests would be graded in a similar way to the previous state-wide tests and to other standardized tests like the AP exams. Those tests are scored my multiple readers who have gone through a norming process to learn how to score the tests consistently. I’m sure the PARCC essays will initially be graded using a system like this, but their goal is to eventually make extensive use of automated scoring systems. In other words, computers will be grading these essays as well as humans.
The plan is to have one human reader for the essays with the computer scoring providing a reliability check. Maybe this is defensible, but it’s clearly just a cost and time saving effort. All the high-minded talk about written expression and critical thinking goes out the window when you decide that some pattern-matching algorithm can “read” kids writing as well as an actual person. It would also be good to know more about how the system works. Pearson is probably still working out their scoring protocols, but when they start returning results they should be transparent about how much those scores rely on computer scoring. So far, Pearson is not that transparent about this electronic scoring system itself. Here is an article by MIT researcher Les Perelman on the problems with computer scoring. He is responding to the roll-out of PARCC in Massachusetts.
Test Anxiety
There’s this idea that tests are bad because they put too much pressure on kids. If your kid is anxious about the PARCC test you should look for the sources of this anxiety and address them. Those sources are almost certainly some of the adults in his or her life and, sorry to say this, but one of them may be you. If you are worried about the test your kid will pick up on it. But there is literally nothing to worry about. The PARCC test this year won’t be used for placement in the following year. You know who should be anxious? The people implementing the PARCC exam; if there are problems on testing days or the scores are bad they will never hear the end of it.
That said, a certain amount of pressure and anxiety is healthy and maybe essential to learning. Education is not all about testing; mostly it’s about guiding and support, but the time has to come when you need to just do the thing you’ve been learning to do. On your own. That moment is always scary (for the teacher as well as the student by the way). It’s the moment the curtains open and you face the crowd; the moment you let go of the side of the pool and swim; the moment you are tested. There is no learning or growth without these scary moments.
We, parents and teachers, should not help our kids avoid these kinds of high stakes moments. We couldn’t even if we wanted to. What we should do is make sure that these moments are as worthwhile as possible. We should make sure they are supported and as well prepared as we can make them. And we should insist that they always be proud of their efforts.
Sean Egan is a South Orange resident who teaches full time at Hudson County Community College where he specializes in teaching writing to under-prepared students. He has fifteen years’ experience as a college English instructor and began his teaching career in the CUNY system. He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Cooper Union and a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center where his field was 19th century American literature.
