Consorting with consortia

Common Core sets the standards, and two consortia, PARCC and SBAC, will write and grade the tests that assess whether those standards were attained.  It’s a very cosy, profitable arrangement where the heaviest burdens and risks fall on the educators and students.

UCLA’s National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) has published this month a report called On the Road to Assessing Deeper Learning: The Status of Smarter Balanced and PARCC Assessment Consortia.

The report gives a general stamp of imprimatur to ongoing progress (what did you honestly expect?) cloaked in the usual hedged language:

Study results indicate that PARCC and Smarter Balanced summative assessments are likely to represent important goals for deeper learning, particularly those related to mastering and being able to apply core academic content and cognitive strategies related to complex thinking, communication, and problem solving.

Any challenges in implementation, the report foresees, will not be substantive but rather ``technical, fiscal, and political’’.

The CRESST report sounds one note of caution: ``Absent strong representation in the new assessments, students' deeper learning likely will be compromised.’’  Therein lies the rub: will the ``assessments call for deeper learning and reflect 21st century competencies’’?  (CRESST report, p.5)

As we at ccssimath.blogspot.com are also interested in the assessments being developed by PARCC and SBAC, we thought we’d follow CRESST’s lead and release our own status report.

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