Marie Corfield: @GovMurphy Promised To Ditch #PARCC. Is He Going Back On His Word?

Marie Corfield: @GovMurphy Promised To Ditch #PARCC. Is He Going Back On His Word?

@GovMurphy Promised To Ditch #PARCC. Is He Going Back On His Word?

What's harder than navigating 'Spaghetti Junction' on the Garden State Parkway? Figuring out what it takes to graduate high school in New Jersey. We thought we had it fixed, but not so fast...

Parents, educators and education activists cheered last month when the New Jersey appellate court struck down the requirement that high school students must pass the PARCC Algebra 1 and English Language Arts 10 tests in order to graduate high school because it violated state law requiring students to take only one exam in 11th grade to graduate.

There was plenty to cheer about. The test is awful, and was never designed for its current use. From its inception under Gov. Christie, it was met with sustained and vociferous pushback from parents, educators and testing experts. And it has turned our public schools into test-prep and data-collection factories, gavage-feeding our students more and more grade level inappropriate info lest educators be found sleeping at their desks. This despite the fact that New Jersey consistently ranks in the top two or three states in the country for quality public education. The test is so bad that out of the 24 states originally in the PARCC consortium, only one other remains: New Mexico, which consistently finishes at or near dead last. In its first year of administration, we had the second highest opt-out rate in the nation, bested only by New York. But Gov. Christie and his buddies down at the DOE (with plenty of help from some powerful state Democratic lawmakers) couldn't have that egg on their faces, so they forced it on our kids as a graduation requirement.

State graduation requirements have changed so many times in the past five years, that it's clear the DOE has no idea what it's doing. And it's hurting kids. Here are just two of CONTINUE READING: Marie Corfield: @GovMurphy Promised To Ditch #PARCC. Is He Going Back On His Word?