The Common Core State Standards for Illinois schools and the new PARCC tests may have some wrinkles to be ironed out. But the state’s new secretary of education told an audience in Elgin Monday that if too many parents react by pulling their kids out of those tests, Illinois could lose a lot more local control over its schools.
About 75 people attended a forum hosted by Elgin Community College to discuss Common Core and PARCC. Besides Illinois Secretary of Education Beth Purvis, the panelists included State Sen. Karen McConnaughay, State Rep. Steve Andersson, former Illinois State Board Of Education Director of Assessment Mary O’Brian, and four educators from St. Charles Unit School District 303.
A majority of the meeting consisted of the panelists answering written questions from the audience.
O’Brian, who was involved in the process, said the present Common Core standards were adopted in 2010 after two years of work by the state board of education and various other school officials and teacher groups. “It was a collaborative effort by all stake holders,” she said,.
“We have always had standards,” O’Brian said. But the Common Core planners wanted to come up with standards that were “clearer, fewer and higher” than the Illinois Learning Standards that had been in place since 1997.
Though imposed from Springfield, O’Brian said Common Core leaves local school districts much independence. “They are standards. They are not a curriculum.” What teachers do and what textbooks they use in an effort to get students to those standards remain up to each school district, she said.
PARCC, meanwhile, is a group of tests designed by a consortium of several states (the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) to measure how well students have mastered those standards as required by the federal No Child Left Behind laws. The PARCC tests emphasize analytical thinking, requiring students to analyze evidence from a passage of writing, etc. In fact, O’Brian said, that’s why it takes longer to take the PARCC than other tests that merely required a student to parrot back facts.
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District 303 Superintendent Donald Schlomann said PARCC was “designed to serve four masters” — to see how much a student is learning, to see how well teachers are teaching, to see how well the whole school district is teaching, and to serve as a college admissions test in place of the ACT and SAT.
“That fourth one is probably not going to happen,” with colleges still preferring the old tests, he said. And he said the test is not working well to judge teachers because the test results will not be available until fall.
Purvis said she agrees with many that “over-testing is rampant right now” and her office is working with the PARCC consortium to iron out some snags in the testing process.
O’Brian said the test results should become available sooner in future years, as more schools give the tests online instead of using paper and pencil.
Asked how many families have decided to keep their children out of the testing, Purvis said the Rauner administration “has some real concerns about opting out. We could lose $1.3 billion” in federal aid to Illinois schools if fewer than 95 percent of the state’s students take the test.
“Would we lose $1.3 billion? I don’t believe that,” Purvis said. “But at this time in this state, even losing $1 million would be irresponsible.”
More immediately, she said, failure to cooperate with the federal requirements could end with Illinois losing its waiver from the No Child Left Behind process, which actually would backfire on the anti-testing people by taking away much control from local school districts.
“We can agree that (the federal testing requirements) are an overreach. But that doesn’t take away the requirement,” Purvis said.
Asked what the procedure is for a family to opt out, Purvis said, “I’ll be candid. I don’t have a good answer to that yet.” But she said the state school board and the Rauner administration are working on setting up such a process.
Of the 13,000 students in District 303, Schlomann said, only 20 to 25 opted out of PARCC this year. And some of those, he said, did so because they didn’t want to miss sessions of another class that was meeting at the same time they would have been taking the tests.
“We have no formal opt-out procedure,” Schlomann said. “But I didn’t want to be in a position where I told a parent, ‘Your child has to take this test.'”
Schlomann said the No Child Left Behind Act is being revised in Congress now, so he urged anyone who’s passionate about changing federal control over education to contact Sen. Dick Durbin.
“I’m a constitutional guy, and education is in the state constitution, not the federal constitution,” Schlomann said.
McConnaughay said further questions and comments on the subject can be filed by going to her website, senatormcconnaughay.com, and clicking on “Common Core and PARCC Testing Survey.”
To take a sample PARCC test, go to parcc.pearson.com/practice-tests/