ANALYSIS: PARCC Results Say N.J. Kids Failed, But What Do They Mean?

The statewide PARCC results were released Tuesday in Trenton, and predictably, they were dismal.

According to the test results and David Hespe, New Jersey’s commissioner of education, more than half of our kids are not ready for college, based on the testing through the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.

For parents of high school seniors -- who took the test as juniors last year -- this could be a frightening moment. After all, many of these children are applying to colleges right now, driving all over to visit potential choices, preparing for that first tuition payment, even as they are trying to savor their last months of parenting that child before sending them out in to the world.

According to a grade-by-grade breakdown of the overall scores published by NJ.com, just 23 percent of 11th-graders were “at grade level” or better in the Algebra II testing, and just 41 percent were meeting expectations in English.

The reason those scores are concerning, Hespe said, is because students end up having to take remedial coursework in college before digging into their planned course of study, which, of course, is an expensive proposition.

But before parents freak out and think that the Class of 2016 is doomed to failure -- because that is the conclusion many will draw from these scores -- everyone needs to take a deep breath.

The ability to succeed in college isn’t a function of the ability to score well on a test.

A study published in February 2014 that looked at the graduation rates of students who submitted SAT and ACT results to colleges against the graduation rates of those who did not showed a six-tenths of a percentage difference in the numbers, according to a report by PBS.

That study, “Defining Promise,” looked at 123,000 students at 33 colleges and universities, public and private, over a three-year period, to see whether students who were accepted to schools without submitting SAT and ACT scores were, in fact, succeeding in college.

At that time, more than 850 colleges and universities across the country had become “test-optional.” Why? Because, according to William Hiss, former dean of admissions at Bates College, who led the study, “The evidence of the study clearly shows that high school GPA matters.”

“Four-year, long-term evidence of self-discipline, intellectual curiosity and hard work; that’s what matters the most,” Hiss told PBS in that 2014 interview. “After that, I would say evidence that someone has interests that they have brought to a higher level. ... We need to see evidence that the student can bring something to a high level of skill.”

According to the data, if high school grades are not high, good testing does not promise college success. Students with good grades and modest testing did better in college than students with higher testing and lower high school grades, PBS reported.

The list of colleges and universities that don’t automatically require the submission of an ACT or SAT score includes well-known schools: Arizona State, Bryn Mawr, George Mason University, Brandeis, Hofstra, Ithaca, Loyola University of Maryland, Oklahoma State, Providence, San Jose State and Wake Forest are just some of the noteworthy names that don’t require it. Some -- Texas A&M, for example -- only ask for one of the tests if a student has a poor GPA.

So what does that have to do with the PARCC?

If the point of the PARCC is to ensure that students are “ready for college,” when colleges are looking beyond tests to decide whether a student has the potential to succeed in college, is the PARCC really telling us anything?

With the cost of college skyrocketing and becoming unaffordable for more and more families, the way many students and families are approaching that future has changed. Students are applying to community colleges and getting those basic courses -- the ones our generation took as freshmen -- out of the way before applying to bigger schools, saving money in the process.

PARCC appears to be geared to ensuring more students are prepared for STEM careers -- science, technology, engineering and math. And while that is mportant, what about the students who have other goals? What about the students who choose to be plumbers or electricians -- very necessary skills and trades that aren’t going away just because of technology.

For the students who are not going to a college, but who have opted instead to pursue technical school training, or secretarial work, or training in any number of trades, being able to break down an algebraic equation is pointless.

As for the English side of PARCC, yes, communication skills are critical. Far too many adults don’t know how to write a coherent letter on any topic or how to read and understand a contract. But according to reporters who were there, officials said a minority of students passively blew off the test. Not the students who actively opted out and who were the subject of much of the attention going into the testing, but the number who wrote essays that did not answer the questions posed, instead writing gibberish or rants about how the testing was a waste of time supposedly was few.

Years ago, there were newspaper editors who would tell you that one letter of complaint could be extrapolated to a larger number of people -- 10, or 100, or more, depending on the size of the paper -- who had the same complaint. If you apply that theory to PARCC, and to the tweets in March of students who took the test, the number of students who took the test and wrote garbage -- particularly among high school students -- was significant.

We will never know for sure, because we will never see the actual tests; instead we’re told that we have to simply accept that the percentage of kids who wrote garbage was small -- ironic when you consider that one of the key goals of Common Core standards is to teach our children to think critically.

If the goal is to prepare every student in New Jersey to go to an Ivy League college or to become an astronaut, a cancer researcher or a nuclear physicist, then sure, PARCC tells us we’re not even close. But those careers are not for every student -- nor should they be. We need a diverse population pursuing many futures, not all of which include a college degree. Yet the plan is for a “passing” PARCC grade to be a graduation requirement down the line.

We need to prepare kids for life. That means setting expectations of hard work. Set expectations of being able to count change (which anyone who’s dealt with a young cashier can tell you has too often become a lost art) and balance a checkbook and read a contract before signing their lives and rights away. Let’s teach our students basic grammar and spelling and make sure they can put words together into coherent thoughts -- so they can define their future, what they have to do to get there, and know whether they’re on the right path.

PARCC doesn’t tell us whether our children can do those things.

This first round of PARCC scores tell us nothing we shouldn’t have expected -- it has been clear for months that PARCC was going to define our children as failures before they’ve even started college.

It doesn’t tell us or our children the truth: that success -- in college and in life -- is predicated in large part on how you apply yourself, not a bunch of dots on a page.