Durango School District 9-R Superintendent Dan Snowberger has reason to be frustrated. The increasing number of parents allowing their children to opt out of the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for Colleges and Careers, or PARCC, tests could put at risk a valuable tool he needs to properly do his job. And there is no particular reason those parents should do so.
It is not that testing is fun or profitable. It is simply that it is necessary. Testing is feedback, the mechanism by which humans do everything from walking to running a corporation. Whether they be taxpayers, parents or neighbors, everyone has an interest in knowing how well our schools are working. What is more, given that taxes support our schools and the fact that they help mold the nation’s future, everyone has a right to know.
How can anyone outside the school system know how schools are working without testing? How do we know that Durango District 9-R’s approach is as good as that taken by schools in other communities?
As a practical matter, there are few options. We have some other means of judging Snowberger’s performance or that of the school board, by watching how money is spent and judging the general condition of buildings, buses and equipment. But while those are certainly important metrics, they tell us little about how well the schools are performing their central function – teaching.
We could just take the school district’s word that everything is great, but who would oversee anything else in that way? Or we could let parents be the judges. But parents are busy people and few have the specialized training to know what they are seeing in real time. Or we could do what has too often been the case in the past, give it a generation and see how many 9-R graduates are still making minimum wage at 40.
The alternative is testing.
There can, of course, be problems with testing, particularly in how the tests are crafted. But the PARCC tests were created by educators of all sorts, specifically including teachers with classroom experience. They were also constructed with an eye toward the stiffer high school graduation standards 9-R and other districts are adopting. And they are more rigorous than their predecessors.
Another problem can arise if the district fails to make adjustments based on the data testing yields. But District 9-R seems to have moved beyond that. It has used information gained from testing in several areas, including for gauging where to focus professional development efforts and in reviewing educational programs.
District 9-R’s overall opt-out rate this year was 4.7 percent. But a couple schools are in the 6 percent to 7 percent range, and one hit 10 percent. That is not terrible, but it is too much, perhaps enough to affect the results. And what is most worrisome is that the opt-out rate increased.
Snowberger correctly said 9-R needs to do a better job of educating parents as to why the tests matter. For starters, the district should return to requiring face-to-face meetings with parents before letting them opt out. There is no cost to taking the test, no pain and no real reason to opt out. Parents need to know that.
