Walking Through the PARCC

Now that Massachusetts has adopted the Common Core Standards, what’s next? What is going to happen to the MCAS? I have had many teachers and parents ask me this question for the past few months. Now the picture is starting to become clearer…

Massachusetts is governing state in a new initiative known as the PARCC (Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness in College and Careers), a state-led assessment consortium with 11 governing states and 26 member states (see above graphic) all together. In fact, Massachusetts’ Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, Mitchell Chester, is the chair of the committee of governing states. The U.S. Department of Education awarded some $170 million in Race to the Top funds to the PARCC for the development of a K-12 assessment system aligned to the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics.

The emphasis of the PARCC will be beyond the 10th grade MCAS, which establishes minimum competency in ELA and math. PARCC’s goal is to dramatically increase the number of students graduating from high school college-and career-ready by creating a next generation assessment system to help meet that goal. PARCC states are committed to building an assessment system that is internationally benchmarked and anchored in what it takes to be college- and career-ready; scoring “proficient” on the assessments will mean students are on track for the next steps in their education, including postsecondary education and training after high school. Thus, with the PARCC parents will receive results that state how well their child is progressing toward college readiness.

Administered in every grade from 3 to 11, the PARCC will be designed to test students' ability to read complex text, solve complex problems, complete research projects, excel at classroom speaking and listening assignments, and work with digital media. PARCC will also replace the one end-of-year high stakes accountability test with a series of assessments at key points throughout the school year. (For a schematic of that schedule, click here.) The mindset behind this is two-fold: 1) to reduce the weight given to a single assessment given over a day or two, and 2) to incorporate more formative assessment, i.e., giving teachers more ability to access useful information on how well their students are learning. So the turn around time of the PARCC results is shortened, students in the middle and high schools will take these shorter but more periodic assessments online.

Some timelines that have been established for districts: 2012- all ELA and mathematics curriculum should be aligned with the Common Core Standards, and the 2014-15 school year- the administering of the PARCC in Massachusetts and all consortium states. The consortium plans to start the piloting the PARCC during the 2012-13, but it has not yet been determined in which states and with which grade levels. Seeing that Commissioner Chester is chairing the governing states, it wouldn't exactly be shocking to see a pilot in several districts or perhaps even statewide during the 2012-13 school year.

Much work lies ahead for us at MHS. It will be challenging but also exciting, as it all has implications for improving our curriculum, our assessments, and how we design and deliver them. More on this to come...

MCAS/AYP "Readjustment" In Store?

Over the past decade, the biggest driver of curriculum, instruction, and assessment in American public education has been the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. For better or worse, the act has led to the creation of very complex state assessment and accountability systems that measure how well students are meeting state standards in reading, writing, and mathematics. Most states, like Massachusetts, have gone the route of high-stakes testing, where passing a standardized test like the MCAS is necessary for grade promotion or graduation from high school.

A key element of the act was establishing AYP, or the adequate yearly progress each school must demonstrate by increasing the number of students that score proficient on tests like the MCAS. Baseline proficiency levels were established in 2002 with the target of 100% proficiency by the year 2014. Keep in mind that for a school to attain AYP, improvements in both the aggregate and various student subpopulations (e.g., low income, special education, English language learners, various racial groups, etc.) must show improvement. As we have moved closer to 2014, more and more schools across the Commonwealth (and the nation) have failed to achieve AYP, most often because there is an achievement gap among the subpopulation groups and the aggregate. In fact, based upon the 2009 MCAS results, over half of the state's schools have been identified as failing or in need of improvement due to their repeated failure to attain AYP.

Thus, it is interesting news that the state's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is considering a new proposal where the 100% proficiency goal will be readjusted to a target of 85% of students scoring proficient or advanced on all grades' MCAS tests by the year 2020. Proponents say that this new target is simply more realistic than the 100% mark and will give educators more time to design curriculum and instruction to address persistent achievement gaps, particularly for those students who are English language learners and have disabilities. It will also give more time to strengthen elementary literacy programs throughout the state. Because this proposal is contrary to the mandates of NCLB, the state cannot act on it until Congress acts on the Reauthorization of NCLB. It is believed that this may occur sometime later this year.

Where does this leave us in the world of MHS? We have already achieved this new target, at least in the aggregate (2009 MCAS results: 94% proficient/advanced in ELA, 89% proficient/advanced in math). Below are some slides from a presentation that I gave to the MHS School Council last fall, showing exactly how MHS was doing relative to the AYP targets. The system contains somewhat of a complicated metric, known as the Composite Performance Index or CPI. This CPI score is what determines a school's AYP is:

NCLB Targets for MHS

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If you look through the above slides, the aggregate CPI for the 10th grade ELA and mathematics tests has been progressively increasing for the past seven years. So have the results for the two significant subpopulation groups, students with disabilities and limited income students. However, you will notice that the CPI scores are much closer to the state target than the aggregate results. If the results for these groups stay static or dip over the next year or two, MHS will not attain AYP and could be labeled as "in need of improvement."

To their credit, our teachers have aptly used the data from previous year's MCAS to make improvements to the ELA and math curriculums and their instructional strategies. When so many students are scoring proficient or higher-say in the 90-95% range- it is that much more challenging to move the last 5 to 10% of students to proficiency. The challenge here is to analyze and use the data at a micro-level. Who are the students who are struggling? What specific standards/content strands do they not understand? What type of interventions and instruction work best with these kids?

While I am not a fan of high-stakes testing and I passionately believe in the use of multiple measures to assess a student's learning, I do think that NCLB has forced us to think in these terms. And that's a good thing...

Something New: Student Growth Percentiles

Recently the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released a new set of data to all of the Commonwealth's districts and schools. This data, known as Student Growth Percentiles (SGP), serve to quantify how much each student has grown each year as measured by his/her performance on the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) test each spring. One could simply look at a student's performance and score from year to year, but that wouldn't necessarily be a valid judgment, as the relative difficulty of each grade's tests and accompanying cut scores have some variability. Thus, some scale that could judge a student's performance relative to his/her peers is needed. That's exactly what the DOE has created.

It works this way: Say a student scored 240 (Proficient) in the fifth grade on math MCAS test. He takes the math MCAS in the sixth grade, and that performance is compared to all of his peers in the same grade who also scored 240 in the fifth grade. He scores a 242 as a sixth grader (also Proficient), but his SGP is 70, which means he scored in the 70th percentile of his peers (he scored the same/better than 70% of his peers, and 30% of his peers did better than him). Thus, the SGP is a statistical feature that quantifies growth on a 1-100 scale, comparing each student to his/her peers based upon how they did in the previous year.

This is another nice piece of the data collection that schools now possess to ascertain how well students are learning. The DOE has also released median SGP values for individual districts and schools for the MCAS tests in ELA and math in grades 4-8 and 10. Typical growth has a SGP value of 40-60 while high growth is 70 or higher. These values could show that a school with high proficiency rates (achieiving AYP, or adequately yearly progress) is not growing, a low-performing school is showing growth, or something in between. When the DOE announced the new SGP data, they highlighted the schools that showed significant growth from 2008 to 2009. Many of these schools are in urban settings.

For more information on SGP data, click here. For the Mansfield SGP data, click here. If you will note, the median SGP for the Mansfield High School grade 10 ELA is 60 and grade 10 math is 63. These percentiles show the growth that last year's sophomores (the class of 2011) have made since they took the test as 8th graders in 2007. As a school community, we are pleased that we have demonstrated some growth while maintaining high proficiency rates (94% in ELA, 89% in math, and 86% in science).

SGP data for individual students has been released to schools but not to parents. Parent reports will include SGP data starting with the spring 2010 administration.