Rank, RANK amateurism from #PARCC tools and #commoncore

I’ve commented on this previously. And one more here. I had forwarded to me an email message about PARCC releasing some kind of planning tools to get ready for the big assessments.

I decided to examine the prototypes again to see if there was anything different. They’re the SAME things they released in November when I first looked at them. The exact same.

But here’s what I want to emphasize, and this is REALLY important, so read carefully. This is costing billions of dollars. These are supposedly professionals with big budgets. And they give us this as proof of how awesome this is going to be:

And here’s a link to the text you read to answer this sample item.  It’s a poorly scanned photocopy of a textbook. I mean, the freaking lizard isn’t even discernible and is in black and white. And you would think they could rotate the image 90 degrees so we can actually read it. Here’s the lizard:

I want to get this completely straight. Big companies are investing millions and millions of dollars. Money is being funneled into local school board races and state legislatures to change education laws. The USDE bribed states to implement new standards and assessments. And this lizard is what they give us. I think this speckled lizard picture pretty much says it all about this entire enterprise. They must think we’re stupid or something.

I have to show just one other item:

This demonstrates the interactive portion of the assessment. The test-taker drags and drops words into the life cycle. Is this supposed to be demonstrative of the vast technological infrastructure required by the PARCC? The font is ugly. The graphic is actually quite terrible, uninspired, boring. And, you could pretty much answer the question without even reading anything if you had half a brain.

Is this acceptable work from very high-paid consultants? This to me would be unacceptable work given how much hype this has generated. And for how much this costs, you must be crazy!

You can’t sit here and defend this as some kind of next-generation, life-changing event if these are the prototypes released to millions of people. It reeks of amateurism.

Is anyone willing to defend this work? Anyone out there?