PARCC

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a collection of 24 states working together to develop a common assessments for grades K-12. PARCC became involved in the Race to the Top initiative in 2010 receiving $186 million grant. Race to the Top is government program set up to prompt reforms in K-12 education funded by the ED Recovery Act as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. PARCC will provide a common way for measuring the performance of students in all states. Therefore, meeting standards in one state will mean the same thing as it does in the other states.
The main goal of PARCC is to ensure that students graduating from high school are college and career ready. PARCC’s vision is to build a K-12 assessment system that accomplishes the following 5 statements:
• Builds a pathway to college and career readiness for all students,
• Creates high-quality assessment that measure the full range of the Common Core State Standards,
• Supports educators in the classroom,
• Makes better use of technology in assessments, and
• Advances accountability at all levels
The PARCC design will incorporate four features designed to improve the quality and usefulness of large-scale assessments. The concept of the design is to model the kind of activities and assignments should be doing throughout the year. A main focus of the assessment is to link it to instruction periodically throughout the school year. Therefore, students will be assessed closer to the time when instruction happens. This also allows for teachers to identify students who are struggling and areas which still need to be addressed.
PARCC states that “the overall assessment system design will include a mix of constructed response items, performance- based tasks, and computer-enhanced, computer-scored items”. The assessments will be given via the computer and scoring will be a combination of automated and human scoring. PARCC further breaks sown the types of assessment based on grades. Grades K-2 will be formative assessments, such as observations, checklists, classroom activities; all of which reflect aspects of the Common Core State Standards. Assessments for grades 3 – 8 will be given at each grade level and will include both through-course and end-of-year components. The assessments will include a variety of items including: innovative constructed response, extended performance tasks, and selected response. The high school PARCC assessments mirror the grades 3-8 assessments. Some of the minor changes include college-ready cut scores on mathematics and language arts literacy; which will determine whether or not a student is ready for college-level coursework. In addition, tests will be aligned vertically to make sure that students are on, and stay on, track to graduate ready for college and careers.
New Jersey is one of the 24 states that are working with PARCC; joining in the spring of 2010. In addition, New Jersey became a Governing State in the spring of 2011 and therefore actively helped shape the PARCC proposal for a common assessment system. Nearly 200 higher educational systems have also joined PARCC to develop the new high school tests. Fifteen of New Jersey colleges and universities have committed to participate in this process; Rowan University is not one of the fifteen. The overall thought is that college-ready assessments can then be used as part of the process for college acceptance.
There are obvious benefits to the concept of a national assessment system. The comparison of schools from state to state becomes clear-cut; therefore, easily ranking the states and their achievements. In addition, the common standards that go along with the common assessment make it easier for those students who may move from one state to another. Another benefit is that the assessments will be connected to teacher evaluation and possible merit pay. However, there are people questioning this concept and identifying many drawbacks. Will teachers focus only on “teaching to the test”? Now that students will be assessed several times throughout the year, will this decrease learning time? Is the overall cost of the process worth it? These are just some of the many questions that educators will discuss as they prepare for PARCC assessments that will be ready for states to administer during the 2014-2015 school year.