The PARCC Race to the Top Contract and Its 26 State MOUs
When the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) applied for Race to the Top (RTTT) funding on June 30, 2010, it submitted this 1,609-page application.
The Executive Summary (pages 7 and 8) is an enlightening read. Apparently, PARCC planned to be the indispensable vehicle for translating the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) into well-measured reality in classrooms nationwide.
Here is an excerpt from the PARCC-centric fairy tale:
Leverage technology for innovation, cost efficiency and speed. The Partnership will administer a streamlined computer-based assessment with innovative item types near the end of the school year, enabling annual combined results from the through-course and end-of-year components to be reported back quickly enough to include information about progress toward college and career readiness on every student’s report card. …The common assessment system will help make accountability policies better drivers of improvement. States that consider the results from common assessments for school accountability determinations and for teacher and principal evaluations will signal the kinds of good instructional practices that will meet the CCR (college and career ready) standards.
And, my personal favorite:
Teachers will have an assessment system that provides as much for them as it asks from them. Teachers will be able to focus their instruction on clear targets rather than guessing which standards the tests might cover, and those targets will represent meaningful progress toward an evidence-based standard of college and career readiness. The Partnership will also provide teachers with an array of training tools to use the assessment results to inform instructional planning and better understand what CCR student performance looks like.
The remainder of pages 7 and 8 are worth reading if only for the humor they provide in The PARCC Race to the Top Contract and Its 26 State MOUs | deutsch29: