I Don't Like PARCC by Matt Bouma-Hannam

I'm not here to tell you all about why I personally dislike PARCC (well we'll see what happens), but display an academic take on standardized tests and why they have got to go. So you know you can trust me, I wrote an entire paper earlier this year on standardized testing and teaching to the test called, "The Impact High-Stakes Standardized Testing Has On Students Through a Social Lens."

To start, these tests are not effective in measuring student academic capability. In 2015, 89.67% of students graduated from high school in New Jersey, according to NJ.gov. But, the New Jersey Department of Education PARCC scores in 2015 showed that only 41% of students met expectations on the ELA test, and only 21% of students met expectations on the Algebra II test (these tests are both taken by eleventh graders). So, clearly PARCC is not accurately measuring student capability since students are graduating despite not meeting expectations in math and English. 

Additionally, students lack motivation to do well on standardized tests. From my experience, I have never felt a pressing need to score high on tests like PARCC because they do not effect me in any real way except take up a lot of my time. I have heard a lot of agreeing ideas from many of my other peers in school as well. This is also corroborated by Timothy page, a superintendent from Illinois. He said, that standardized tests have little value to students, explaining their lack of motivation. If students are not putting forth their full effort to answering the questions, then standardized tests like PARCC are not accurately assessing the full academic ability of the students taking them. I believe that this is a big flaw in the design of these tests: students do not care and will not put forth full effort. 

In my opinion, the most important reason that PARCC is ...well... stupid is because it greatly takes away from precious in-class instructional time. A report done by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) found that 13% of teachers spend about one month preparing for standardized tests and 29% of teachers spend over one month. This practice of teaching to the test takes away from the curriculum students are supposed to be learning, lowering their quality of education. 

Why do we keep them? Well, there are polls of parents that want them to stay. Why? According to Jonah Edelman, the CEO of an education non-profit, parents can use test scores to help them improve their children's academic problem areas. I do not believe that this reason is sufficient to keep these tests because it is the teachers job to figure out what their students need to improve and then help them in the classroom. Parents, for the most part, should stay out of the educational equation. 

Now in terms of tests like the ACT and SAT that are important for college admissions, I have opinions but no real research. As a student, I find these tests to be crude and an inaccurate measurement of knowledge. Students like myself can often not be very good under tight time constraints. Also, I have found that students feel like what they are being tested on in the ACT and SAT are not what they learned in class. We rather have to go to extremes to learn (memorize) additional information in order to score high. Every student is different, but the ACT and SAT are treating us as one. Personally, when I grow up and have kids, I wish this system of testing students like identical robots and grading them like meat will fade to a new subjective system of assessment.