Letter: For many reasons, refuse your child’s PARRC test

To the editor:

As an educator, and former School Committee member of Little Compton, it is of no surprise that I write now about Common Core and PARCC testing.

This April your children will be taking the PARCC test. You do not have to allow this test to be administered to your child. The Little Compton School Committee passed a resolution that prohibits the school department from any punitive actions.

Since 2010 for the state and 2012 for Little Compton, Common Core has been introduced and tested through the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers PARCC. Now go to the Rhode Island Department of Education website and look up the test scores for the state and Little Compton. One statement you will see is “…PARRC testing at the (RI) state level, “approximately 38% of students across grades 3 through 10 met or exceeded expectations; in mathematics, statewide achievement improved by 5 percentage points since 2015, with 30% of all students meeting or exceeding the learning.

Is this what you want for your child? Please ask yourselves the following questions? Does your child get stressed taking the test? How are the results helpful to teachers when results don’t come back until the following year? Does your child’s next grade teacher review the results for each of their students? What it the helpfulness to your child and yourself? Does your school reach out to each child after the results are in and offer suggestions on weaknesses or strengths?

As you well know, the PARCC test does a lot of data mining — your child’s name, nickname, religious affiliation, birthdate, ability grouping, GPA, physical characteristics, IEP, attendance, telephone number, bus stop times, allergies, diseases, languages and dialects spoken, number of attempts at a given assignment, delinquent status, referral date, non-school activity involvement, meal type, screen name, maternal last name, voting status, marital status, – and even cause of death.

You see, this year the State Department of Education was hacked by a well-known hacker called Rasputin, google it! Do we really need to have our schools country-wide able to read and receive each school’s information on our child? Who else reads it?

Refuse the PARCC Test!

Peg Bugara

Little Compton