New Standards Require a New Assessment

The early deadline for districts’ to choose giving the PARCC test or the now 17-year-old MCAS exam next school year has passed. As of June 30th, 297 districts have made a binding decision of which assessment to administer next spring with 176 districts choosing PARCC, and 121 choosing MCAS. In the last week, Wayland, Weston, and South Hadley school committees also voted to go with PARCC this coming school year.  It is now clear the state will have enough districts implementing PARCC to truly inform the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s decision in the fall of 2015 about whether to adopt it in place of MCAS.

This decision is of critical importance.  The standards alone will not be effective in raising student achievement if we don’t have an assessment that is aligned with the standards and measures whether students are learning to them.

Robert Rothman, senior fellow at the Alliance for Excellent Education and author of Fewer, Clearer, Higher: How the Common Core State Standards Can Change Classroom Practice, recently stated in a blog post “If an assessment does not measure the full breadth of what the Standards expect, the information they provide to students, parents, and teachers about the extent to which students have learned what they were expected to learn will be misleading. In addition, research has shown clearly that when standards and tests diverge, teachers (quite understandably) focus on what is tested, rather than what the standards say.”

Many of the districts that chose to give PARCC next year did so because the test is more aligned with the standards and therefore better reflect what is being taught in the classroom.  This second year of the two-year PARCC pilot should provide us with more evidence of alignment with the standards and tell us whether the PARCC will be a better measure of the critical thinking and analytical skills the standards promote.

MBAE is engaging business organizations across the state in this important conversation and urging them to stay informed.  For more information about why standards and assessments matter to business, check out our fact sheet and contact us.