PARCC Place | EduShyster

PARCC Place | EduShyster:

PARCC Place

 A cozy, clubby place where everyone is, well, connected and conflicts of interest don’t apply…

Welcome to PARCC Place, reader! It’s acozy, clubby place where everyone is, well, connected, united in a shared urgency over the fiercely urgent cause of our time: college and career readiness. In fact, so urgent is the cause of our time that the old rules about, say conflicts of interest, no longer apply. So relax, pour yourself a scotch (three fingers since no one’s watching) and prepare to stick around. For it turns out that PARCC Place is a whole lot easier to get into than it is to exit.

The man with many hats
I’m referring, of course, to the kerfuffle that has arisen recently in Massachusetts regarding our chief career and college readiness officer Mitchell D. Chester and his rather, ahem, unusual dual roles when it comes to the new PARCC assessments—the 21st century testing instruments intended to measure college and career readiness.

You see, Commissioner Chester wears more than one hat, as they say. Sporting his fedora of excellence, he has just presided over the start of an ambitious two-year effort to test drive the PARCC tests in more than 1,000 Massachusetts schools so that the state Board of Education, which Chester also advises, can vote in 2015 on whether to replace the old, outdated and outmoded MCAS tests with the cool new computerized PARCC edition. Still with me? But in his second hat—let’s call it his readiness beret—Chester serves as PARCC Place | EduShyster: