Higher ed leaders make push for PARCC testing

BOSTON — Massachusetts is not adequately measuring whether its high school graduates are prepared for college courses, a former state higher education official said on Thursday.

“Students are coming to us not ready for college work,” former commissioner Richard Freeland said during a forum hosted by The Boston Foundation on a new standardized test being piloted in some Massachusetts schools. “We have set the bar too low. We have set the bar at a minimum standard of tenth grade work.”

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is slated to decide next month whether to replace the state’s MCAS exam program with new PARCC assessments, which have been designed to align with the national curriculum standards known as Common Core.

The rollout of PARCC testing has been controversial nationwide, and 19 of the 26 states that originally belonged to the PARCC consortium have since dropped the test. Many opponents of the exam in Massachusetts say they prefer the existing state standards, often described as the nation’s strongest.

Freeland, who stepped down as commissioner in June, said Thursday that the older standards and corresponding testing are “out of alignment,” as the rate of students requiring remedial college courses has remained the same while MCAS scores have improved.

“I think it’s time for us to talk less about how great we are and more about how many students are failing,” Freeland said. “And that’s what PARCC is about.”

Former Education Commissioner Robert Antonucci, who held the post during development of the MCAS test, said the exam has worked but it was never intended to measure college readiness.

“Let’s look at what MCAS was,” said Antonucci, who retired as Fitchburg State University president earlier this year. “It was a competency test to look at what students should be able to do when they graduate at the high school level. It had no connection to higher education, none whatsoever.”

Antonucci said the MCAS tests “probably” should have taken higher education into account as well, but that the concept of standardized assessment was still new when the tests were developed. He said it was time for the state to adapt and evolve, pointing out that forum attendees were no longer using the once cutting-edge flip phones and had instead embraced more advanced cellular technology.

“PARCC really is an advanced MCAS test that we should be doing,” he said.

Test scores released last month by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education showed students taking the PARCC tests on a computer appeared less likely to meet or exceed grade-level standards than their peers taking the MCAS in the spring of 2015.

The computerized versions of the test have raised concerns that students in poorer districts, whose resource-strapped schools can’t provide the same technology as wealthier ones, will face additional challenges in the test-taking process.

Teach Plus Massachusetts executive director Lindsay Sobel said she agreed Massachusetts is “not there yet” when it comes to deploying technology in the classroom, which she said was a point in favor of adopting a high-tech test.

“What I have heard from teachers over and over again in the highest need schools is they’ve been begging for years for educational technology for their kids,” said Sobel, whose group supports implementing the PARCC tests. “They know that their kids are going to need to understand technology in order to get any job, apply for any job, get a driver’s license, and they haven’t gotten it because there was no forcing mechanism.

If a high-tech test is what’s required in order to get the kids the technology that they need, then we should go for that.”

Antonucci said it isn’t enough to implement a testing system that raises expectations without providing schools with resources to help their students reach the higher bar, resources he said should be sought from the PARCC consortium or by federal grants if they can’t be provided by the state.

“Somehow, along with PARCC, in 10 years, there has to be a parallel track to provide additional resources, tied to measurements, tied to achievement, so that you’re not just giving money out,” he said.