No one should be surprised that Colorado students’ first-time performance on PARCC tests was less than impressive. Every expert familiar with the introduction of the tests in other states warned that students on average would probably do worse than on previous state-mandated exams.
And on Thursday, with the release of the first Colorado PARCC results, the prediction of low scores came true.
What is surprising, however, and deeply concerning, is the simultaneous report of how many students didn’t take the tests. The non-participation rates were much higher than in previous years, and alarmingly high at the secondary level.
Whatever one thinks of the recent opt-out movement, it’s time to idle it down before the next tests. Lawmakers and the governor listened to the critics in the spring and responded, enacting a new law that significantly reduces the time spent on mandatory testing, and mostly in high school.
There’s no excuse now for those adults who have led the anti-testing movement in Colorado to continue providing moral support to no-shows, unless they simply oppose accountability and transparency in K-12 schools.
Are they really indifferent to whether students are on track for college and careers, or how students are doing compared to similar students in other schools?
Don’t they care whether our society is closing the achievement gap among ethnic groups?
Low participation rates severely undermine the usefulness of the overall data.
“Among high school students,” Yesenia Robles reported in The Denver Post, “participation in the tests ranged from a low of 50.4 percent for the state’s 11th-graders taking the English test, to a high of 70.5 percent of ninth-graders who took the same test.”
Participation was much higher among elementary students, at about 95 percent, with the fall-off starting in middle school and picking up steam.
Political opposition to PARCC and the time spent on standardized tests was a major story last spring, of course, as were reports of partial student boycotts of the tests at some schools. But the opt-out movement was even broader and deeper than had been generally understood — at least at the high-school level, and especially among white students.
With reforms in place, parents and educators should nip the opt-out movement in the bud.
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