White's Team Trying to Muddy up the Narrative Again

Beaking News!

I just got an email from one of the state newspapers questioning why our citizen group was asking for information that was pre-mature. The reporter questioned why we were asking for PARCC data when BESE had not yet approved the PARCC cut scores? Wouldn't it be better to wait until BESE sets the cut scores on October 13?

Here is my response that I sent by email:

"The group is making three basic requests. None of them are impacted in any way by the setting of cut scores.

The first request is for an item analysis of each test question to tell the public and the Standards Review Committee exactly what percentage of our students got each Common Core standard correct. This helps the Review Committee determine which of the Common Core Standards need to be looked at more closely and either be removed or modified.

The second item asks for a conversion table to convert raw scores to scale scores. For example, we want to know that if a student got 70% of the questions right on the PARCC test, what scale score does that equate to? (Remember that the scale scores run from 650 to 850 on all PARCC tests) We also want to know the reverse of the example given above. Suppose a student gets a scale score of 725, we want to know using the conversion table exactly what percentage of the questions the student got right.

Finally we want parents to have access to both the raw scores and the scale scores and to be told exactly which of the common core standards their child missed.

The only reason the reporter was confused about all this in my opinion is that John White's "crack" PR staff is busily trying to distract the news media away from the real issue which is John White is desperately trying to keep the public from finding out just how bad these tests really are. 

Remember, its not the teachers fault and its not the kids fault if the highly unqualified Superintendent and his neophyte staff ran this reckless experiment on our students and teachers with poorly designed standards measured by a horrible inappropriate test!