ANALYSIS: Is PARCC Testing About To Be A Failure Of Grand Proportions?

In November, Kathleen D’Alessio of Toms River stepped to the microphone at the Toms River Regional Board of Education meeting, asking about the upcoming PARCC testing.

She wanted to know what data would be collected, how would the data be used, and expressed concerns about the amount of information on Toms River students that would be sent to Pearson, the testing company.

D’Alessio -- who refused to allow her son to take the test -- is one of thousands of parents around New Jersey who asked similar questions in the months leading up to PARCC testing.

Despite the clamor to stop the tests, the first round of PARCC testing in New Jersey -- PARCC stands for Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, and represents a dozen states plus the District of Columbia that are administering the tests to students in grades 3 through 11-- is winding down, with a second go-round set for May.

But what will the testing really reveal, particularly at the high school level?

Across the state, the parents of thousands of students actively refused to allow their children to take the tests. In Brick Township, Superintendent Walter Uszenski said 311 students had refused the tests as of Friday. Figures for Manchester and Toms River were not available, but at the February school board meeting Toms River Superintendent David M. Healy said the number of refusals was fewer than 1 percent of the 11,000 students expected to take the tests there.

Manchester Superintendent David Trethaway said in February that the tallies were being kept at each school in his district and he didn’t have a firm number, but didn’t believe it was very high. But in Cherry Hill, the number of refusals reportedly topped 2,000.

In other states where the PARCC is being administered, students have walked out of school in protest against the tests.

While those active refusals may have only a small impact on the results, what’s come out in the last few days on social media implies there could be a much greater impact.

The first has been the admission by Pearson, the testing company, that it has been monitoring students’ tweets about the standardized tests, supposedly looking for breaches in the security of the data with the goal of protecting the integrity of the test.

That admission, triggered by a report by Bob Braun, a former reporter for the Star-Ledger, has infuriated parents and educators across New Jersey who were clamoring for the state to put a stop to the new testing.

Braun’s report, on his blog Bob Braun’s Ledger, highlighted an email from the superintendent of a North Jersey school district that said Pearson had notified the New Jersey Department of Education that a student had supposedly tweeted a photo of a test question taken during a test.

The email, from Elizabeth Jewett of Watchung Hills Regional High School district, went on to say the tweet turned out to be words only -- no photo -- and noted the parent was upset her child’s tweets were being monitored so closely.

Braun’s posting set off a chain reaction, including what was reported to be a denial of service attack on the webhost of his blog. Even now, reaching his original blog post has been a challenge, as the website remained down even late Sunday. His report, however, was picked up by the Washington Post, and other outlets followed suit. Jewett has responded, saying the email is indeed authentic and that she stands behind what she said in the email. A photo of the email, which has now been retweeted hundreds of times, is attached to this article.

The idea that Pearson -- which, by all accounts, has millions of dollars riding on the success of the new standardized tests, $108 million from New Jersey alone, according to the Asbury Park Press -- is monitoring students’ posts on social media could encourage more parents to refuse the second set of tests for their children.

What’s been overlooked, however, is the tale the tweets are telling. When you sift through the generalized comments you’d expect from teenagers -- about how annoyed they are by the testing, how useless they think the test is, and how the kids who are taking the tests wish their parents had refused it too -- you find an undercurrent of passive resistance:

“I hope the PARCC graders enjoy my profound essay consisting of nothing but a bulleted list of things id rather do than take the parcc,” one girl tweeted. Others tweeted about writing their essays on the English/language arts portion of the testing in foreign languages, or filling them with song lyrics.

“I wrote, ‘I’m bored, I’m hungry, I’m tired. I want to go back to bed,” one student said. “It doesn’t count anyway, so who cares?”

If the tweets are any reflection of reality -- and anyone with a teenager in the house can attest to their unfiltered thoughts spilling daily into the realm of social media -- then the testing, at the middle and high school levels, will have significant gaps because so many students will have “failed” because they simply didn’t care, some say.

Part of that can be blamed on the controversy.

In spite of insistence from state Education Commissioner David Hespe that the PARCC is nothing more than the next generation of standardized testing -- one he says parents in particular should welcome because it expects more of the students and their education -- the state Assembly has passed a bill to delay its implementation for graduation and other requrements for three years.

The state Senate has not yet addressed the bill, a fact lost on most of the students who just took the tests.

“It doesn’t count, so who cares?”

Some ask: At what point does the number of invalid tests counterbalance the legitimate ones so much that it destroys any hope of gaining any useful information?

Some also ask these questions:

How can the tests possibly be used as a baseline if you don’t have a truly representative sample of students taking the tests and trying to actually answer the questions? How can you truly measure student ability and understanding if the questions are so poorly worded that multiple answers could apply -- something students have reported from both the practice testing and the live testing. How can you truly measure student readiness if you’re asking a student to apply a skill that is at least 5 years above their developmental age?

Also:

With so much riding on the outcome of this year’s tests, will those pushing for the test try to simply ignore the invalid ones? If the point of the testing is to pinpoint areas where teaching and curriculums need to be improved, how can that be accomplished in New Jersey when so many students failed to actively take the tests?

More information on Bob Braun’s report on Pearson’s monitoring of social media can be found on his Facebook page, here.

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