Illinois Raise Your Hand and Park the PARCC

Well, since my last blog post, we've had two family weddings--one of them being mine. It wasn't a big to-do or anything, so I thought I could just sort of carry on with everything else in life, but guess what? One actually gets pretty immersed in such things. Everything is settled down, now. Please pardon the absence.

Now then: I recently(ish) had the pleasure of speaking with Wendy Katten of Illinois Raise Your Hand. This organization, headed by Wendy and run by a host of amazing and dedicated parents, does an incredible job of bringing substantial, high-quality, well-researched, real information to parents and the public about issues in education.

That was a lot of gushing, there. But they deserve it. The group is amazing.

IL Raise Your Hand is currently working to delay the new state test, PARCC. There are many reasons to delay this test, including your most basic cart-before-the-horse problem: Illinois and other states have not completed the implementation of the standards the PARCC is correlated to, so, even if the test itself were ready (it's not) it could not possibly capture a valid and reliable picture of students' progress.

If you've been following my blog you know that I think the violent rejection of the Common Core State Standards is largely a misdirected result of immense frustration and grief related to longstanding unresolved inequities in education. I don't hate all things Common Core. But I do hate illogical, meaningless, unnecessary high-stakes testing that could not possibly result in useful information. All this testing can make a person very nervous--and I'm not even the one being tested. I support the movement to park the PARCC. Here is Raise Your Hand's position paper and a petition to sign.

http://ilraiseyourhand.org/content/park-parcchttp://petitions.moveon.org/sign/isbe-acquire-a-waiver-1

Pass it on.