Illinois has begun to move away from the PARCC standardized test, which underpins school accountability in the state.
The state board of education last week authorized the release of a proposal request seeking a new test developer to create a replacement for the PARCC test, formally known as the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. It鈥檚 given in grades 3-8 and measures students鈥� grasp of the Common Core State Standards.
The state doesn鈥檛 plan to totally cut the cord with PARCC. Instead, it will still include a core of PARCC test items on the new tests so that it can maintain some level of year-to-year comparability in student results as it transitions.
, Illinois Superintendent Tony Smith said that, among other things, the state would preserve features of the test, including 鈥渃omplex writing tasks that require strategic reasoning and extended investigation to solve problems.鈥�
Here鈥檚 a link to the with more details on PARCC鈥檚 replacement (scroll to p. 54). Among other things, the state wants the replacement exam to give teachers results quicker. It also wants to use an 鈥渁daptive鈥� test model, which means that the test would adjust to each test-taker, giving a student harder questions if he or she has mastered more of the content standards, for example. (PARCC gives all students the same set of questions.)
Generally speaking, said Scott Marion, the executive director of the Center for Assessment, adaptive testing means you need many more test questions鈥攑otentially costlier than a 鈥渇ixed form鈥� test like PARCC.
鈥�If you鈥檙e doing an item-level computer-adaptive test, you need a big item bank鈥攆ive, maybe ten times larger than it takes to build a fixed-form test. And item development drives cost,鈥� he said.
But, he added, there are also other kinds of adaptive testing that might not require as many questions. Perhaps the bids that come in will propose using those models.
Will New Jersey Be Next?
The news from Illinois also means that, after this spring鈥檚 testing cycle, there will be only three states using a 鈥減ure鈥� PARCC test: Maryland, New Jersey, and New Mexico, plus the District of Columbia.
Of those states, New Jersey also remains a big question mark, because Gov. Phil Murphy and state Superintendent Lamont Repollet have . Neither has announced any firm plans to do so, however, and the state education department declined an interview request.
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At one point, the consortia that created PARCC had as many as 22 member states, although some of those dropped out long before the first test administration, in the 2014-15 school year. Still, complaints about the cost and have taken their toll over the last few years鈥攁s has politics, in the form of legislators who wanted to move away from perceived Obama-era reforms. (PARCC got started thanks to a federal grant program.)
Where the count of PARCC states get tricky is that a few states, , decided to blend some PARCC questions with their own state-designed ones, in an attempt to keep the 鈥渢rend line鈥� going on their exams.
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