

PARCC testing in Colorado has disastrous first day - alexcasalboni
http://www.thecherrycreeknews.com/parcc-testing-colorado-disastrous-first-day-pearson/

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germinalphrase
Why do we pay The College Board to assess whether students can, say, make
logical inferences when teachers are already doing this every day?

Trust.

We will move beyond this current paradigm once we develop a way to accredit
(through national scale use/vetting) assessment materials on a much smaller
scale. PARCC, ACT, et al. will maintain their current level of influence
(functionally, not politically) so long as we can't assure that teachers are
assessing their students against agreed upon benchmarks.

If these benchmarked assessment materials could be integrated into everyday
instruction (which, as a teacher, they surely can be) AND we can accredit them
as accurately assessing student ability on "competency X' then we will no
longer need centralized, high-stakes assessment.

This accreditation will come from a decentralized exchange of classroom
instructional materials/artifacts which will allow for the 'cream' (i.e.
materials that accurately assess 'competency x") to be used, assessed,
modified, re-used and finally accredited. Currently, teachers are silo'ed and
rarely exchange learning materials beyond person-to-person contact or by
physically gifting photocopies. Google docs facilitates exchange with real
gains in productivity, but only within your immediate department (which could
4 people, could be 20 - but will hardly be >1000). We need the ability to
fluidly exchange learning and assessment materials from all over the
country/world that can be easily personalized for our classrooms.

The potential of such a platform could have far reaching benefits beyond
assessment, but I'll cut it off now. I can work the ledger, guys - but what I
want is Visicalc...

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swasheck
PARCC, Common Core, and the heightened focus on (even more) standardized tests
is an unmitigated educational disaster. My children have been wasting their
time taking practice tests instead of actually learning. The school has to
jump through the distict's hoops. The district has to jump through the state's
hoops. Kids don't actually get educated because everyone's afraid of failing
the tests so they're overpreparing. My kids are only learning how to game the
system and take tests and not actually learning information analysis and
synthesis.

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timw0j
Common Core doesn't really have much to do with the glut of standardized
testing. Common Core is more about setting a guideline for lesson planning,
allowing teachers across the country to share lessons and techniques to teach.
It was developed by teachers for teachers.

Standardized testing is a completely different problem. There's this strange
desire at the state and district level to boil everything down to a single
metric that says "this kid was taught something" without looking at any of the
data that can be provided by their day-to-day instructor.

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swasheck
I agree that there's no link between CC and standardized testing, I was just
attempting to note that all of these things when taken together with how
they're being implemented are a collective disaster.

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timw0j
Except that there's really nothing wrong with Common Core and if you talk to
most teachers they're for it (disclaimer: my wife, sister, and sister-in-law
are all teachers, and my parents are retired teachers).

Common Core is used as a political boogeyman against people who don't really
understand what it's trying to accomplish.

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cafard
Dead link.

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alexcasalboni
I can still see it.

