By Bedford School Superintendent Jon Sills
To PARCC Or Not To PARCC, that is not the question……at least not yet, according to the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents – Jon Sills
I recently served on a committee of Massachusetts superintendents tasked with drafting a position paper on standardized assessment that, we hope, will influence the impending decision of the Board of Education over whether to adopt the PARCC assessments or adapt the MCAS assessments moving forward. Click here to read the approved Executive Summary of the PARCC position paper.
While embracing the notion of a next generation of assessment that will provide feedback on students’ learning of higher order thinking skills, we have chosen to be agnostic at this time about which assessments should be selected to address that challenge. Instead, we have taken a stand on what the purpose of standardized assessment should be, what criteria a next generation of assessments should meet, and what conditions should be met before they are implemented.
Understandably, the position paper embodies some compromises, since it represents the thinking of a broad range of educators. For example, while I argued for decreased frequency, e.g., every other year, some superintendents argued for annual testing, as they have found it helpful to their efforts to improve achievement. So the compromise is to urge the Board of Education to find a solution that requires less time for testing and to examine the issue of frequency. We are all united, however, in the view that the primary purpose of standardized testing should not be “accountability” but rather to provide information that can be used to improve instruction.
Our position puts a lot of emphasis on the roll-out issues and the need for teachers to have sufficient experience teaching the Common Core-infused Massachusetts Frameworks before our kids’ mastery of that curriculum is assessed. In the end, the devil is in the detail, and how the tests assess students’ abilities to apply their knowledge and demonstrate their thinking skills will be critical when it comes to choosing which test will be adopted. But we argue that this should be an iterative process with lots of opportunities for feedback from the field on the character and design of the assessments.
Jon Sills
Superintendent
Bedford Public Schools
781-275-7588
[email protected]
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