Mitchell Chester, PARCC Consortium Chair, Turns His Back on PARCC
Massachusetts Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester has been pushing for PARCC assessments in Massachusetts. Chester is the chair of the PARCC consortium. As a member of PARCC’s governing board, he was supposed to have his state signed on for PARCC assessments for 2015, but it didn’t quite work out that way. Massachusetts districts had a choice in 2015 between PARCC and the state’s longtime assessment, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).
So, even though the PARCC MOU noted that PARCC governing board members needed to have their states signed on for the PARCC assessment in 2015, Chester was allowed to slide for a year.
Meanwhile, the PARCC consortium has steadily been losing states. For 2016, PARCC was down to DC and seven states (Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island). (This 2016 PARCC state commitment is reflected in its dwindling governing board.)
But it looks like that is about to become six states and DC, with the chair of the PARCC governing board making the next exit.
As Michael Jonas of Commonwealth Magazine notes:
Chester said today (October 20) that he still views PARCC as a superior assessment to MCAS. He said MCAS has “outlived its usefulness” and that “there’s no question that PARCC has set a higher standard for student performance” in requiring more reasoning and critical thinking from students.Chester said the issue is not the test content, but governance, since signing on to PARCC would lock the state into a testing system in which decisionsMitchell Chester, PARCC Consortium Chair, Turns His Back on PARCC | deutsch29:
