PARCC Shortens Its Common-Core Test

Education Week

By Catherine Gewertz

Published Online: May 21, 2015

 

In the face of rising opposition to testing, the PARCC consortium has decided to carve 90 minutes off its 10- to 11-hour-long assessment, and shift the start of testing to later in the school year.

The redesign of the test was approved Wednesday in a unanimous phone-conference vote by the board of governors of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC. Eleven states and the District of Columbia belong to the consortium, which created tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards. The revised design will take effect with the 2015-16 PARCC tests in English/language arts and mathematics, which are given to students in grades 3-11.
In addition to shortening the test, the new design also folds PARCC’s two testing windows into one 30-day window, and requires that states wait until three-quarters of the way through the school year before starting the testing period.

Currently, PARCC states have a 12-week window to give the longer, more-complex performance tasks, between Feb. 16 and May 8. They have an eight-week window for the end-of-year component, which contains shorter-answer items: from April 13 to June 5. Within those windows, states choose 20-day periods in which to administer the tests.

Next year, states will have one 30-day period to give the tests. It can’t begin until 75 percent of instruction has been completed—day 133 in a 180-day instructional year—and it must be finished by the time 90 percent of instruction has been completed.

This year, teachers in states that began early—such as Ohio, which opened its testing season on Feb. 16—complained that they hadn’t had enough time to teach their material before testing began.

Read more HERE

 

 

 

Struggle over how to evaluate special ed teachers

Apr 24, 2011
11:40 AM EDT
By CHRISTINE ARMARIO
AP Education Writer

MIAMI (AP) -- Since the first day of class this school year, Bev Campbell has been teaching her students how to say their names.

Some of the children in her class have autism. Others have Down syndrome or other disabilities. "People don't understand where they've come from," she says. "It's slow."

Just one has learned how to say his name. Still, the South Florida teacher sees signs of growth in the nine kindergarten to second-grade students in her class.

Those little steps are what teachers like Campbell consider major leaps for students with the most significant physical and cognitive disabilities - and what are the most challenging to capture on a test. Yet that will be a significant part of the way school districts in Florida and in many other states will evaluate teachers.

Spurred by the U.S. Department of Education's $4.35 billion Race to the Top grant competition, more than a dozen states have passed laws to reform how teachers are evaluated and include student growth as a component. For most students, that growth will be measured on standardized tests. But for special education students that is considerably more complicated.

Read more HERE.

'Creative...motivating' and fired

Bill Turque

March 6, 2011

The Washington Post

By the end of her second year at MacFarland Middle School, fifth-grade teacher Sarah Wysocki was coming into her own.

“It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined,” Assistant Principal Kennard Branch wrote in her May 2011 evaluation.

He urged Wysocki to share her methods with colleagues at the D.C. public school. Other observations of her classroom that year yielded good ratings.

Two months later, she was fired.

Wysocki, 31, was let go because the reading and math scores of her students didn’t grow as predicted. Her undoing was “value-added,” a complex statistical tool used to measure a teacher’s direct contribution to test results. The District and at least 25 states, under prodding from the Obama administration, have adopted or are developing value-added systems to assess teachers.

Read more HERE.

Race to Top Winners Feel Heat on Teacher Evaluations

Federal-grant recipients must live up to promises made in winning awards

By Sean Cavanagh
Education Week

Winners of the federal Race to the Top competition are facing difficult questions about how to make good on their ambitious promises to link teacher evaluation with student performance, a task complicated in some cases by resistance from educators and practical questions about how to judge job performance fairly.


For some states, that means wrestling with how to evaluate teachers in subjects for which no statewide test now exists. Others face a tough task of setting specific evaluation requirements based on relatively broad laws that established those systems, which in some cases were designed to boost the states’ chances in the competition.

Eleven states and the District of Columbia split $4 billion in awards through the Race to the Top grant initiative, which was championed by the Obama administration and financed by the 2009 federal economic-stimulus package.

Read more HERE.