This summer my school’s principal and teacher leadership team prioritized projects for the year. At the end of the discussion, we put preparing staff for the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessment, a test aligned to the new Common Core State Standards, at the top of the list. PARCC is of immediate concern to students and teachers in districts that have voluntarily adopted it in lieu of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS, the state’s 17-year old assessment that tested our old standards. Boston Public Schools, where I teach, has chosen to use PARCC.

The assessment has ignited plenty of debate. Many teachers worry about its computerized format, its difficulty, and its high-stakes nature; performance on PARCC may soon replace MCAS as a gatekeeper for high school graduation. Concerns like these led the Massachusetts Association of School Committees to pass a resolution this month calling for re-examination of not only the state’s commitment to the test, but also to the Common Core, the standards on which the test is based and which are new learning expectations that are more rigorous than the old Massachusetts standards. The Massachusetts Board of Education chose to pilot PARCC first; next fall, it will choose whether to formally adopt it or go back to MCAS.

Flip-flopping on PARCC would be a step backward. The exam is designed to be more challenging than MCAS for good reason. It incorporates questions based on technology, includes higher expectations in writing, and requires more open-ended test items, because competence with tasks like these is crucial for success in college and career. Replacing the test or the standards would also negate the work my school has been doing. My experience teaching Common Core leads me to believe that the standards will prepare students for success in life and on a test like PARCC.

Last year I led the second grade team at my school in improving reading instruction using the Common Core. We crafted 10 units of study, including a four-week course on something we knew would provoke a passionate reaction – bugs. One standard I chose to focus on in my class was determining unfamiliar word meaning using clues from books’ pictures, something not required for second graders in the old Massachusetts standards.

A student of mine who struggled with reading but loved insects squealed with joy and disgust one day when she analyzed a picture of a praying mantis eating another and inferred the definition of the word cannibal. “Yuck! Cannibals are gross!” she wrote on a sticky note. She then made it her personal reading quest to discover every example of insect cannibalism available in the classroom library.

It is no secret in education that what gets tested is what gets taught. This is the kind of skill that makes young readers feel confident with text and gets them hooked on nonfiction, but without PARCC testing it, teachers may not think to teach it.

The new assessment will also press students to respond to texts in writing. To do so, students will read two texts on the same topic, and then compose an essay in which they lay out their thinking on the subject matter using information from the texts. This task is much more challenging than previous MCAS test prompts required, because MCAS did not require students to compare texts. With preparation, even our youngest learners are ready for this.

Halfway through a reading unit dedicated to animal research, a righteous seven-year-old in my class approached me asking who the senators of Massachusetts are. I answered and asked why she wanted to know. She explained she had read a book about otters and a book about oil spills and wanted to encourage Elizabeth Warren to do more to protect oceans by writing a persuasive letter.

She wrote the letter unassisted.

Not only is this the kind of writing that PARCC values, it is the kind of writing that has real-world value.

Another reason to embrace the new assessment is that PARCC promises to report data before the academic year finishes. I applaud this because, as an elementary school teacher, I need to know quickly where my students stand in their development as readers, writers, and mathematicians in order to help them. MCAS finalizes data the summer after testing, making reports feel more like an autopsy of a school’s performance than a timely diagnosis of teaching and learning designed to help schools improve. My classroom experience illustrates the importance of timely test scores.

The same student who discovered her love for entomology consistently showed below-proficient reading skills on bi-weekly exams. Through data analysis, I noticed she had a specific challenge with literature. I tapped into her love for insects and related narrative structure to a life cycle. Characters, I explained, are like caterpillars. They move through a pattern the same way insects change from one stage to another.

“Got it,” she said. “Larva, chrysalis, butterfly. Character, problem, solution.”

With timely test data, teachers can see and address student needs, and schools can diagnose bigger trends and problems.

Adjustment is never easy in teaching. Students, especially young ones, depend on routines, and changing routines can be challenging. If I am apprehensive at all for PARCC, it is only because I fear we will reject it before we give it a chance to take root. What does not worry me is whether students will be ready for the test. With good instruction, I know they can be.

Jeffrey Cipriani is a second grade teacher at Orchard Gardens K-8 Pilot School in Boston Public Schools and a Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellow.

3 replies on “PARCC assessment a step forward”

  1. I’m not hearing anything from you that is new with student thinking as a result of Common Core. When I was in the 5th grade, the Challenger exploded. I was learning about scientific theory and felt compelled to help the investigation by writing a letter to NASA explaining what I thought went wrong. The only assistance I received from my science teacher was the necessary address for NASA (Al Gore had not yet invented the internet, so I had trouble finding it on my own). To say that common core, and the unprecedented hours of testing it mandates, is THE source of critical thinking for students is absurd and inaccurate. And my theory on the Challenger disaster? It turns out I was actually on the right track (though I was too young to understand all the nuances of a space shuttle, obviously, to be exactly right). The hours I spent outside of class reading everything I could on historical figures such as Annie Oakley and Laura Inhales Wilder due to having studied them in class are far too many to count (as are the stories I wrote, both fiction and non-fiction). I have to speculate that you are either fairly new to teaching or are in some serious denial.

  2. Where to begin? How about here: your second grade students don’t take the PARCC test, so it’s easy for
    you to shill on behalf of Pearson, Chester, etal. I have been doing this education thing for a long, long time. My students always earn high scores on whatever tests we are inundated with and no matter what school I’m teaching in. Even more importantly, they end up at exam schools and then college. PARCC is going to change things for many reasons.

    First, my students, who have little access to computers (even at school, bandwidth is so sparse, the internet connection goes out so often, and computers are hard to come by) will be required to take the test online. Elementary school students, even with constant access to computers, have no business taking high-stakes tests online. Second, I challenge any adult to take ANET and PARCC tests and see how they would do. Occasionally, they are well-designed. More often, the test authors and the corporations they work for appear to take joy in creating products that don’t really test knowledge. Finally, your simplistic example of a connection one of your students made is, with all due respect, ludicrous. Your student – if she were really going to be taking PARCC (and she isn’t) – would have to be prepared to perform on a level way beyond anything she is developmentally prepared for, and certainly way beyond what you are describing.

    The purpose of student assessments is to determine what students know and are able to do and respond so students continually gain knowledge and skills as they grow, culminating in deep preparation for successful lives. In this test-manic era, this is no longer the case. Tests are now created to prove how unworthy teachers are in general (without ever actually getting rid of a single incompetent teacher), to close schools, and to leave a generation of test-weary children behind. I would challenge this author to teach a tested grade for several years before promoting a product that costs schools upwards of $25.00 per student (only for each test and not for all the other costs), and I would challenge TeachPlus to return to its originally stated mission of supporting teachers, rather supporting corporations and the wonks who prop them up.

  3. When did the purpose of schooling be to prepare students for standardized tests? The fact that you’re openly worried about whether students are ready for the test – as opposed to stating concern for other aspects of their growth, development, and happiness – is disconcerting.

    I find it troubling that you need PARCC results to know where your students “stand in their development as readers, writers, and mathematicians.” Shouldn’t your own class assessments be giving you that information?

    Inferring unfamiliar word meanings using a book’s illustrations seems like a basic skill any reading teacher would focus on, regardless of if it were on a standardized test. Our standards, curriculum, and knowledge of what our students need should drive our instruction – not a corporate standardized assessment.

    By the time the typical K-12 student graduates from high school, he will have taken 113 standardized tests over the course of his academic career. Your article implies that you are OK with this. Is that the case?

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