Who Really Failed the Honesty Test about PARCC?
Barry Irwin of the big business lobbying group, Council for a Better Louisiana (CABL), has written an opinion editorial in the Lafayette Advertiser where he assumes that some BESE members and some school groups want to hide the truth about Louisiana student performance from the public. The title of the article isWill We Pass the Honesty Test When Scores are Revealed. Actually, as this blog has demonstrated, it was John White who really wanted to hide the truth from Louisiana parents by withholding the raw scores of the PARCC test.
It was a public records request by a group of parents, 4 BESE members, 5 legislators and other citizens that forced the true test scores to be released. Those are reported on the blog post below. It was never necessary to use the PARCC consortium's confusing point system to know how our students did on the test. The ugly truth is in the raw scores given below. That particular post according to my stat-counter has been read by over 20,000 Louisiana citizens and educators to date. We can handle the truth! even though White and his friends at CABL wanted to keep us in the dark.
The action before BESE next Tuesday is not just the approval of White's phony scale cut scores. The action being recommended to BESE would usurp all the power of BESE to set testing standards and hand over all decision making relative to scores and even test construction to John White and his testing companies. The action recommended removes all the old safeguards to require tests to meet certain criteria for grading. Once that is approved, White controls all the test construction and the grading and the Louisiana Educator: Who Really Failed the Honesty Test about PARCC?: