By Anonymous Actual Teacher (AAT), Maryland, Feb. 10, 2015
Does everyone remember having to deal with spoiled classmates or spoiled kids in the neighborhood when they were younger? Maybe other parents looked the other way when the little angel would throw a fit to get her way. Well, we hope you can use that experience to help get ready for upcoming PARCC assessments.
The PARCC assessments have evolved into the spoiled child rewriting the rules for a birthday party. She tells the children what to wear, what to buy her for presents, gives little advance notice to prepare, and tells the children, “By the way, I don’t want to have a party – we are having brunch.”
As a teacher preparing students for PARCC assessments, we are told that the PARCC assessments won’t allow certain special education accommodations. So apparently the folks at the US Department of Education who monitor special education compliance are either okay with this or in the dark with this. So our district notified staff in mid-January, via meetings and trainings attended by administrators, test coordinators, ESOL teachers, and special education staff, that we need to hurry up and put temporary changes into children’s official documents on special education just for the purpose of the PARCC assessments. Spoiled child 1, School Districts and Special Education Law, 0.
If your child was read to before, maybe not now! Spoiled child gets her way. If your child was able to use a calculator before, maybe not – new criteria! Too bad, students with disabilities! PARCC staff must know best, without norming data available for how children with disabilities will do, PARCC mandates that this happens. Go back and read your invitation again. It’s all there. The PARCC website has information on accommodations. Usually, test sites don’t contain that – the state departments of education have an accommodations manual on their site. Spoiled Child 2, State Department of Education and Children with Disabilities, 0.
Let’s follow the process – States adopt Common Core, states do away with their state tests, Common Core requires new testing, PARCC offers new testing, PARCC decides (and their CEO apparently has little or no special education experience, based on her bio on the DC Board of Education web site) that some accommodations for students with disabilities simply won’t be allowed. What this decision is based on is questionable, since obviously there is no norming data or scientific research on this in terms of PARCC assessing what it purports to assess – or why wouldn’t states already have eliminated those accommodations? So magically the criteria for qualifying these children for their accommodations has changed – but just for the PARCC. I am having Charlie and the Chocolate Factory flashbacks – the girl who said, “I want it, Daddy, and I want it now!” when seeing something she wants.
Never in all my years of teaching (since the late 90’s) have I seen a testing company dictate what accommodations students can and cannot receive, accommodations that had already been decided by the only entity currently allowed by special education law to determine them — in a legally mandated IEP (Individualized Education Program) meeting. The solution? Spoiled child says, “Write a new IEP to match the PARCC tests!” – But just for the PARCC tests, and then it reverts back to its original IEP.
Confusing? Unprecedented? Illogical? Last minute? Unscientific? Unfair? Spoiled children get what they want because their parents allow it. Who are the “parents” here and who is in charge? Maybe Congress needs to have hearings on what is going on at US Department of Education, and see if the tail is wagging the special education dog. Maybe parents should be outraged and demand answers.
Meanwhile, just as parents would never send their own children to a party with no gift and in the wrong outfit, teachers are scurrying around like little squirrels knowing there is an approaching blizzard. We don’t want our children to be laughed at during the party, so we are running around getting the right clothes, shopping for the right gift, preparing children for how brunch is different than a party, etc. We at least hope the spoiled child still attempts have something that resembles a cake.
Maybe, if I close my eyes and click my heels together, the spoiled child will host a regular old birthday party next year, or if she continues to insist on her-way-is-the-only-way, some children can choose not to go to the party at all. Until then, it’s off to the store to scramble and get the birthday guests ready. Happy Birthday, Spoiled Child! I wonder what the gift bags will hold.
(Why am I anonymous? The union rep told me months ago I can face action if something is written that reflects negatively on the school system.)
What do you think? Are PARCC tests like a spoiled child? How should they be dealt with?
Image by Debora Bogaerts, used with Creative Commons license.
Christine Langhoff
Pearson writes the PARCC. See Politico for more on the testing behemoth:
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/pearson-education-115026.html?hp=t1_r
howardat58
So PARCC and SBAC are now part of the school system – oh dear.
rbeckley58
Speaking of unscientific, by its own admission, Pearson’s SBAC also has issues with validity. Here’s why:
• Hand-scoring: An SBAC manual states: “The majority of the components were designed to be scored by humans.” (K-12 Center at ETS, March 2014). Yet hand-scoring is unreliable due time pressure and the fact that the majority of scorers are not English teachers.
* Validity studies haven’t been completed. “Smarter Balanced INTENDS to build vertical scales. … Smarter Balanced WILL SUPPORT a comprehensive validity research agenda…. Smarter Balanced HOPES to benchmark results from the summative assessments to the NAEP and PISA. … Finally, validity studies WILL BE conducted to establish the connection between indicators of college- and career-readiness from the Consortium’s assessment system and evidence of success in college or careers.” (K-12 Center at ETS, March 2014)
rbeckley58
In addition to being brats, the tests are pointless. Even the Academic Senate at California State University takes issue with the Pearson SBAC’s lack of validity. “The Smarter Balanced score is not currently intended to be a placement tool vis-à-vis determining how much and what type of developmental work is needed to achieve proficiency and/or the appropriate level of credit-bearing work consistent with readiness; the Smarter Balanced score may not be reliable enough to be used for placement of this nature.” (April 2013) My guess is Pearson’s PARCC is no different.
David Hochheiser
This just isn’t true. In fact, PARCC includes more access to Assistive Technologies to more students than any test I’ve ever seen. If you’ve been told that any accommodations aren’t possible under PARCC, ask leadership to look again. I guess I – and the number of workshops I’ve been to on it – could be wrong, so if you have a link to anything that’s denying accommodations, please share.
Jane Smith
We received a letter from our child’s Intervention Specialist that they are in deed :revising: the IEP for this test and this test alone to remove any access to a calculator as well as read aloud capabilities. So yes this is factual.
sue alex
I have been told Parcc cannot accommodate my child’s needs, even though they are minor, and are used every day in his classrooms. We refused the test because of this.
Mike Barrett
Laura McKenna in the Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/suburbia-and-its-common-core-conspiracy-theories/385424/#disqus_thread
seems to have decided that best way to defend the Common Core and the associated tests is to mock critics. She calls them irrational hysterical Conspiracy theorists (fueled by social media and on par with anti-vaccine parents), Tea Party ideologues, and Teacher Unions afraid of evaluation systems tied to the tests. She claims that “The PARCC test for its part doesn’t require much more time than previous assessments.” Even casual readers of this Blog know that is simply not true.
She goes on to create the straw-man that many of these Common-Core apologists use claiming that “White suburban Moms” are in opposition because they fear that their children will do poorly. She acknowledges that teachers are better informed than the general public is about the standards and accompanying tests and seems to think that the associated drop in teacher support is somehow a reason that Common-Core must be supported by parents and the general public!!??
She goes on to claim that: “Parents need to understand why a new universal set of standards is important, particularly parents in good school districts where schools are working well.” —Without actually presenting any convincing reasons why that is the case.
Maria Vera
Perhaps it depends on the state. Here in NJ, my students with disabilities will actually have access to many more accommodations than in the past. For example, the students can have text to speech (or a human reader) for the entire test (yes, including all passages) instead of just having the directions and questions read to them.
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding with the calculators. According to the department of education of NJ, the calculators are now not embedded into the test as we expected. This does not mean that our students cannot use calculators. The state directive is that now calculators have to be handheld ones instead. The needs of our students are still met and no IEP changes had to be made. This was also the case for speech to text technology. This is no longer available through the test but the accommodation is still available to our students through scribes.
I do find that there is a lot of confusion and in my state, people often make comments that are not true. For example, the daughter of a friend was tested for special education and was found to have dyslexia. Mom opted not to classify the child at this point but does benefit from classroom common sense accommodations. My friend asked for her daughter to have text to speech for the math section of PARCC as this is an accommodation now available to ALL students (not just special education). The school told her that general education students are not allowed any PARCC accommodations. When my friend insisted and referred them to the state, the school administrators were shocked to find out that she was right. There are actually a number of accommodations for general education students available and more for special education. It is scary to think that this demonstration of ignorance came from school administrators who are the ones administering and planning for this test and my friend was only able to correct them because she is a child study team member. I believe there is a lot of that misunderstanding and misinformation going around, especially because it seems that not all states have the same rules.