The original publish date of this piece was 14 May 2016. It was removed on 16 May 2016 because it contained three partial questions from the then current PARCC test. A Columbia University professor had been sent PARCC questions by a horrified k-12 teacher and decided to share them in a blog post, which I republished below.
At the time, Blogger simply returned the published post to "Draft" and I decided to not repost. My Tweets were also removed from Twitter. Twitter did inform me of the decision to remove the Tweets, but I never heard a word from Google or Blogger - just the removal of the post. Later, a friend sent me this link and this link to Lumen, which does have some explanation. I still take issue with the decision because I believe the fair use doctrine of copyright law applies to the publishing of the partial test questions.
Today (23 January 2017), I received this via email (with no specific information about what needs to be removed from the post) and decided to republish, per Blogger, removing the "offending content" (the PARCC questions). The email also provides no explanation for the reason why I received this email today.
Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others. As a result, we have reset the post(s) to "draft" status. (If we did not do so, we would be subject to a claim of copyright infringement, regardless of its merits. The URL(s) of the allegedly infringing post(s) may be found at the end of this message.) This means your post - and any images, links or other content - is not gone. You may edit the post to remove the offending content and republish, at which point the post in question will be visible to your readers again.
A bit of background: the DMCA is a United States copyright law that provides guidelines for online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. If you believe you have the rights to post the content at issue here, you can file a counter-claim. In order to file a counter-claim, please see https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_counternotice?product=blogger.
The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Lumen at https://www.lumendatabase.org. We do this in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). You can search for the DMCA notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Lumen page, and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed.
If it is brought to our attention that you have republished the post without removing the content/link in question, then we will delete your post and count it as a violation on your account. Repeated violations to our Terms of Service may result in further remedial action taken against your Blogger account including deleting your blog and/or terminating your account. DMCA notices concerning content on your blog may also result in action taken against any associated AdSense accounts. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should retain your own legal counsel.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Affected URLs: http://elfasd.blogspot.com/2016/05/top-secret-parcc-test-exposed.html
The original post about what is so wrong with the PARCC questions, and why the Columbia professor was so astonished at the absurdity of the test questions, is still noteworthy and, I think, valuable. I have noted where text has been removed.
Leonie Haimson is asking bloggers to post the original blog post, The PARCC Test: Exposed. The redacted version can be found here. PARCC has been removing posts on Twitter and auto-flagging posts of the blog on Facebook.
As you read this, consider the absurdity of Pearson, PARCC, or any organization trying to keep secret the items on a test which is given to
millions of students nationwide. Consider the awful quality of the test questions - what are we paying for? Then, think about all those written responses scored by a computer. Does this sound like something we should be paying millions of dollars for?
The PARCC Test: Exposed
The author of this blog posting is a
public school teacher who will remain anonymous.
I will not reveal my district or my
role due to the intense legal ramifications for exercising my Constitutional
First Amendment rights in a public forum. I was compelled to sign a security
form that stated I would not be “Revealing or discussing passages or test items
with anyone, including students and school staff, through verbal exchange,
email, social media, or any other form of communication” as this would be
considered a “Security Breach.” In response to this demand, I can only ask—whom
are we protecting?
There are layers of not-so-subtle
issues that need to be aired as a result of national and state testing policies
that are dominating children’s lives in America. As any well prepared educator
knows, curriculum planning and teaching requires knowing how you will assess
your students and planning backwards from that knowledge. If teachers are
unable to examine and discuss the summative assessment for their students, how
can they plan their instruction? Yet, that very question assumes that this test
is something worth planning for. The fact is that schools that try to plan
their curriculum exclusively to prepare students for this test are ignoring the
body of educational research that tells us how children learn, and how to
create developmentally appropriate activities to engage students in the act of
learning. This article will attempt to provide evidence for these claims as a
snapshot of what is happening as a result of current policies.
The
PARCC test is developmentally inappropriate
In order to discuss the claim that
the PARCC test is “developmentally inappropriate,” examine three of the most
recent PARCC 4th grade items.
A book leveling system, designed by
Fountas and Pinnell, was made “more rigorous” in order to match the Common Core
State Standards. These newly updated benchmarks state that 4th Graders should
be reading at a Level S by the end of the year in order to be considered reading
“on grade level.” [Celia’s note: I do not endorse leveling books or readers,
nor do I think it appropriate that all 9 year olds should be reading a Level S
book to be thought of as making good progress.]
The PARCC, which is supposedly a
test of the Common Core State Standards, appears to have taken liberties with
regard to grade level texts. For example, on the Spring 2016 PARCC for 4th
Graders, students were expected to read an excerpt from Shark Life: True
Stories about Sharks and the Sea by Peter Benchley and Karen Wojtyla. According
to Scholastic, this text is at an interest level for Grades 9-12, and at a 7th
Grade reading level. The Lexile measure is 1020L, which is most often found in
texts that are written for middle school, and according to Scholastic’s own conversion chart would be equivalent to a 6th grade benchmark around W, X,
or Y (using the same Fountas and Pinnell scale).
Even by the reform movement’s own
standards, according to MetaMetrics’ reference material on TextComplexity Grade Bands and Lexile Bands,
the newly CCSS aligned “Stretch” lexile level of 1020 falls in the 6-8 grade
range. This begs the question, what is the purpose of standardizing text
complexity bands if testing companies do not have to adhere to them? Also, what
is the purpose of a standardized test that surpasses agreed-upon lexile levels?
So, right out of the gate, 4th
graders are being asked to read and respond to texts that are two grade levels
above the recommended benchmark. After they struggle through difficult texts
with advanced vocabulary and nuanced sentence structures, they then have to
answer multiple choice questions that are, by design, intended to distract
students with answers that appear to be correct except for some technicality.
Finally, students must synthesize
two or three of these advanced texts and compose an original essay. The ELA
portion of the PARCC takes three days, and each day includes a new essay prompt
based on multiple texts. These are the prompts from the 2016 Spring PARCC exam
for 4th Graders along with my analysis of why these prompts do not reflect the
true intention of the Common Core State Standards.
ELA
4th Grade Prompt [Deleted per DMCA]
The above prompt probably attempts
to assess the Common Core standard RL.4.5: “Explain major differences
between poems, drama, and prose, and refer to the structural elements of poems
(e.g., verse, rhythm, meter) and drama (e.g., casts of characters, settings,
descriptions, dialogue, stage directions) when writing or speaking about a
text.”
However, the Common Core State
Standards for writing do not require students to write essays comparing the
text structures of different genres. The Grade 4 CCSS for writing about reading
demand that students write about characters, settings, and events in
literature, or that they write about how authors support their points in
informational texts. Nowhere in the standards are students asked to write
comparative essays on the structures of writing. The reading standards ask
students to “explain” structural elements, but not in writing. There is a huge
developmental leap between explaining something and writing an analytical essay
about it. [Celia’s note: The entire enterprise of analyzing text structures in
elementary school – a 1940’s and 50’s college English approach called “New
Criticism” — is ridiculous for 9 year olds anyway.]
The
PARCC does not assess what it attempts to assess
ELA
4th Grade Prompt [Deleted per DMCA]
It would be a stretch to say that
this question assesses CCSS W.4.9.B: “Explain how an author uses
reasons and evidence to support particular points in a text.”
In fact, this prompt assesses a
student’s ability to research a topic across sources and write a research-based
essay that synthesizes facts from both articles. Even CCSS W.4.7, “Conduct
research projects that build knowledge through investigation of different
aspects of a topic,” does not demand that students compile information from
different sources to create an essay. The closest the standards come to
demanding this sort of work is in the reading standards; CCSS RI.4.9 says: “Integrate
information from two texts on the same topic in order to write or speak about
the subject knowledgeably.” Fine. One could argue that this PARCC prompt
assesses CCSS RI.4.9.
However, the fact that the texts
presented for students to “use” for the essay are at a middle school reading
level automatically disqualifies this essay prompt from being able to assess
what it attempts to assess. (It is like trying to assess children’s math
computational skills by embedding them in a word problem with words that the
child cannot read.)
ELA
4th Grade Prompt [Deleted per DMCA]
Nowhere, and I mean nowhere in the
Common Core State Standards is there a demand for students to read a narrative
and then use the details from that text to write a new story based on a prompt.
That is a new pseudo-genre called “Prose Constructed Response” by the PARCC
creators, and it is 100% not aligned to the CCSS. Not to mention, why are 4th
Graders being asked to write about trying out for the junior high track team?
This demand defies their experiences and asks them to imagine a scenario that
is well beyond their scope.
Clearly, these questions are poorly
designed assessments of 4th graders CCSS learning. (We are setting aside the
disagreements we have with those standards in the first place, and simply
assessing the PARCC on its utility for measuring what it was intended to
measure.)
Rather than debate the CCSS we
instead want to expose the tragic reality of the countless public schools
organizing their entire instruction around trying to raise students’ PARCC
scores.
Without naming any names, I can tell
you that schools are disregarding research-proven methods of literacy learning.
The “wisdom” coming “down the pipeline” is that children need to be exposed to more
complex texts because that is what PARCC demands of them. So children are being
denied independent and guided reading time with texts of high interest and
potential access and instead are handed texts that are much too hard
(frustration level) all year long without ever being given the chance to grow
as readers in their Zone of Proximal Development (pardon my reference to those
pesky educational researchers like Vygotsky.)
So not only are students who are
reading “on grade level” going to be frustrated by these so-called “complex
texts,” but newcomers to the U.S. and English Language Learners and any student
reading below the proficiency line will never learn the foundational skills
they need, will never know the enjoyment of reading and writing from intrinsic
motivation, and will, sadly, be denied the opportunity to become a critical
reader and writer of media. Critical literacies are foundational for active
participation in a democracy.
We can look carefully at one sample
to examine the health of the entire system– such as testing a drop of water to
assess the ocean. So too, we can use these three PARCC prompts to glimpse how
the high stakes accountability system has deformed teaching and warped learning
in many public schools across the United States.
In this sample, the system is
pathetically failing a generation of children who deserve better, and when they
are adults, they may not have the skills needed to engage as citizens and
problem-solvers. So it is up to us, those of us who remember a better way and
can imagine a way out, to make the case for stopping standardized tests like
PARCC from corrupting the educational opportunities of so many of our children.
