CURMUDGUCATION: aPARCColypse Now

CURMUDGUCATION: aPARCColypse Now:

aPARCColypse Now

The last ten days have been a test of how diligent PARCC might be about protecting their sad test (and, yes, a test of the internet's ability to coin a PARCC-based pun to refer to this dustup). For those of you playing along at home, here's a rundown of what has happened and what issues are involved and some of the questions on the table at this point.



Events kicked off when Celia Oyler, an education professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, posted an anonymous critique of the PARCC fourth grade reading exam. That post was picked up by some other bloggers, including me, but within a few days PARCC was on the case.

Initially they went after tweets that linked to Oyler's article. That in itself was an.... interesting move because none of the tweets actually included allegedly copyrighted material, but they did link to posts that did include the test prompts. This suggests its own little DMCA research project-- just how many degrees of separation from copyrighted materials can companies legitimately pursue? Apparently a link to a post containing allegedly copyrighted materials is not okay. What about a link to a source that contains a link? A link to a link to a link to a link?

The clean-up of twitter seemed to be job one, taken on so quickly that the DMCA request filed included a misspelled job title for the guy at PARCC filling the request (Kevin Michael Days, Assoicate Director, Operations). Meanwhile, Oyler got a letter, not from the PARCC legal department, but from PARCC chieftain Laura Slover herself, requiring Oyler to take down the allegedly copyright materials AND requesting that she hand over the name of the anonymous teacher.

Next up-- going after the posts themselves. Diane Ravitch's post just kind of went away overnight; Ravitch's blog is on the wordpress platform, which turns out to be an important detail. Many other CURMUDGUCATION: aPARCColypse Now: