Along with students across the country, students at Coventry High School received concerning test scores on the PARCC exams after scores were released this past December. Most students turned out to be almost meeting or below the standard, and many students complained that the test was extremely difficult.
BY ALLIE SHINSKEY
Along with students across the country, students at Coventry High School received concerning test scores on the PARCC exams after scores were released this past December. Most students turned out to be almost meeting or below the standard, and many students complained that the test was extremely difficult.
PARCC stands for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. This test, taken electronically by most schools, is aligned with the Common Core in hopes to make America’s educational system more unified. The questions on the test have been described as ones to make students think more critically, like in real world situations. The test makes students think about how and why they got the answer.
Pierson, the company that creates and distributes the test, plans to go further with this, as third through eighth graders will soon be taking a paper and pencil version of PARCC. At some point, it may replace high school finals, and it is expected to become an official graduation requirement starting in 2020, a fact that many students are quite worried about.
Mariah Rietzel, a sophomore at Coventry High who takes all advanced courses, was able to meet the standards on PARCC, but barely. “Since this does push higher-level thinking, the grading system will definitely be harder, and it will then be harder to graduate. It’s something new, but it needs to be adjusted,” she said.
Some teachers at Coventry High beg to differ, however. “I strongly believe that it is only one indicator,” said long-time Coventry High School teacher Kathleen Laroque. “There are many other opportunities for student success.”
Laroque mentioned that she recently saw a datagram that showed all of the factors that lead to graduation. These factors included general student grades, AP classes and other college enrollment opportunities, and grades on the PSAT and SAT. The datagram also included other statistics that she stressed must be considered, such as graduates versus dropouts, the percentage that leave high school from a post-secondary program, and the number of students in AP classes. “PARCC is in one piece on that datagram,” said Laroque. “That’s how you need to look at it.”
Rietzel admitted that she may not have put in her best effort, but in terms of content, she claims that the passages on the English test, the only one she took, were lengthy, and many questions seemed opinionated. “They always asked, ‘What is the best answer’, and the answer to the second part often depended on the first, and if you got the first one wrong, that made the second one wrong,” she said.
Students also seem to oppose Common Core in general. “I see the benefits of unification, but I think people learn at different paces. It’s more difficult for others,” Rietzel stated.
While teachers agree that Common Core has become more pronounced in education, it is also something that they have always been familiar with. “We’ve been doing it forever,” Laroque claims. “Curriculums have always been geared towards state unification. It promotes uniformity, but may not be looked highly upon.”
In some districts, it may become an option for students to opt out of the PARCC exams. Laroque claims that Coventry did not provide this option because this is the first year students are taking it, so the district used it as a baseline, the starting point for later exams.
In recent years, control over the distribution of these types of tests have been given more to the states. The No Child Left Behind Act, which was passed during George W. Bush’s presidency in 2001, called for all students grades three and up to participate in some means of state testing. According to Larocque, when Barack Obama went into office, he took this law and adjusted the official wording of it to give more control back to the states over certain aspects of the testing, such as who can opt out, if anyone. This is why some other districts across the country have decided to allow it, and some have not. Coventry is simply one district that has decided not to allow the option of not taking the test.
Larocque assures that nobody is trying to punish students. PARCC is simply something that students have to do by law. “Thinking that every kid is going to go in the same direction is the wrong way to think,” she said. “Every child should have their own potential.”
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