Fordham Institute Favors PARCC, Neglects Item Readability
It seems that the Fordham Institute views itself as the grader of the corporate reform initiatives that it is paid to support. In July 2010, it graded the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and state standards– and found in favor of CCSS in this highly questionable, slanted report.
In February 2016, Fordham Institute released another report, this time on supposedly grading CCSS assessments based on CCSSO (Council of Chief State School Officers) criteria. Why the CCSSO criteria matters is anybody’s guess. Still, Fordham Institute has time and money to publish whatever ti will, and what Fordham Institute, uh. “found,” was that the two federally-funded, consortium-developed CCSS assessments are tops:
As our benchmark, we used the Council of Chief State School Officers’Criteria for Procuring and Evaluating High-Quality Assessments. We evaluated the summative (end-of-year) assessments in the capstone grades for elementary and middle school (grades 5 and 8). (The Human Resources Research Organization evaluated high-school assessments.)Here’s just a sampling of what we found:
- Overall, PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments had the strongest matches to the CCSSO Criteria.
- ACT Aspire and MCAS both did well regarding the quality of their items
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