Sonja Brookins Santelises, the former chief academic officer for Baltimore City Schools and an expert on urban education who has lectured at Harvard, stood at the head of a long, rectangular table inside of a conference room in the Loop.
She was defending both the Common Core and its primary assessment tool, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), to representatives and organizational partners of Advance Illinois, an independent nonprofit organization “promoting a public education system in Illinois that prepares all students to be ready for work, college, and democratic citizenship [italics theirs]” according to the organization’s literature.
Santelises may have been facilitating a PowerPoint presentation in a downtown boardroom, but her defense of the controversial assessment went way beyond the typical bureaucratic talking points. In essence, she argued, people should see PARCC more for what it reveals than for what it is.
“Anybody who tells you that standards alone are going to single-handedly change education for all the young people we care about and are still under-serving, they’re selling you a bag of tricks,” said Santelises.
“But I will tell you that without the alignment, without setting the correct target, we will have a continual series of misfires,” she said. “If we do not do the work of actually adjusting where we’re aiming for and revamping our assessments — not so they perfectly tell us in one score where our kids are, but that they at least give us deeper information than we’ve had before from an annual assessment, then we’re missing an opportunity.”
Santelises said that PARCC’s greatest strength is that it’s a test that’s been adjusted for the Common Core’s higher expectations of students in public schools, which for too long were woefully beneath the expectations that educators and government officials who set education policy had for their own children.
To illustrate her point, she compared a sample math question from the PARCC to that from the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT), the standardized test that PARCC is replacing at the grade school level.
Calling the ISAT problem a “plug-and-play” question, Santelises said “kids don’t really have to understand what’s going on. Even if you don’t really understand any algebraic concepts, you can wobble your way through this one.”
“Now my sister is a freshman English professor and when I showed her some PARCC samples, you know what her first response was? ‘Well, thank God you guys finally got it right, because I’m tired of getting freshmen who are valedictorians from poor schools and neighborhood schools and I’ve got to take them in the back in my office and teach them what it looks like to actually write in a persuasive way for, or against, someone’s argument. So, if you guys are getting them to even remotely do this, you will have moved light-years ahead,'” Santelises said.
“So part of it is getting real about what’s actually occurring in schools and what we’re signaling to kids. PARCC is not a panacea. You can give kids this and not give them all the supports along the way and you’re still not going to get there. So, I’m not saying, give kids these samples and suddenly they’re able to actually write to this prompt. But what I am saying is if you never ask them, you will never know what it takes to actually get them to this level of proficiency, which many of us will argue is much closer to what we’d expect from our own kids.”