AFTNM Responds To New Mexico PARCC Results

New Mexico education officials on Friday will release scores for high school students who took new standardized tests earlier this year. A vast majority of students fell short when it came to proficiency in math.

This also marked the first time students in New Mexico and 10 other states had taken the assessments developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC.

“We do not believe PARCC test results should be used for any high-stakes decisions regarding teacher evaluation or pay or for the students to assess progress”, said Charles Goodmacher with the National Education Association New Mexico. We said…we’re going to raise our expectations.

PED said students who did not receive a score of 3 or higher will have to retake the exams sometime next month, though PED Secretary Hanna Skandera did not specify exactly when. “But we worked with districts across the state and, this year and next year, a three will count for graduation”.

“It’s really important our parents and our students know this is not the end, it’s the beginning”, Skandera continued.

For the graduating class of 2018, a score of four or five will be required to demonstrate competency in English language arts and one of the upper-level math tests-either Algebra II, Geometry or Integrated Math 2 or 3.

Rounds said that in 2014, 49.7 percent of juniors were proficient in math under the old SBA test. With PARCC, the tests are broken up by subject, depending on the math course each student is taking.

When Mississippi releases results, state Superintendent Carey Wright says it will be in PARCC’s five-level format, instead of Mississippi’s previous four-tiered format of minimal, basic, proficient and advanced.

Because a Level 3 score is what will be necessary for current juniors and seniors to graduate, KOB has analyzed the numbers provided by PED to deem a “passing” grade as Level 3-5.

PED Secretary Skandera pointed to a more hard test as a reason for the lower scores. “Every time they’ve changed the testing protocols, scores have dropped”.

The PARCC test caused outrage last spring, leading students from all over the state to protest in response. Our students did not get worse, and our teachers are not teaching poorly. “We have to work on improving educational outcomes for all students”. Scores on the exam also declined with grade level: all eighth-graders who took the exam passed, while only 30.3 percent of the 12,000+ 11th-graders passed the Algebra II exam. In our opinion, PARCC is an unnecessary test and is simply a drain on already scarce resources for our public schools. Students and their parents will need to wait until at least November 2 to learn their individual scores.