The Common Core testing group PARCC Inc. has been waging an aggressive campaign to take down several dozen social media references to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, test being administered to students this spring — items that include questions from the exam and some that do not.
Dozens of education bloggers have been writing about the PARCC exam since May 7, when an anonymous teacher posted a piece on the blog of Celia Oyler, an education professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, that harshly critiqued the fourth-grade PARCC exam and offered three questions from the test that many students are taking this spring. Other education writers and activists began to weigh in, critiquing those questions as being either inappropriate for the grade level or nonsensical and publishing some test items.
PARCC Inc. officials said those postings and tweets violate their copyright and can lead to problems with test validity.
“Students are given an unfair test environment when anyone posts active test questions on the Internet — whether the test is PARCC, the SAT or any other exam,” Heather Reams, director of communications and public relations at PARCC Inc., said in a statement.
Take-down requests are sent to the hosts of blogs or websites such as Twitter, and the hosting service then removes or blocks the post. Asked why PARCC Inc. would seek to remove items that critique the test but do not actually disclose test questions, Reams said in an interview that “the intention is to ensure that we have the validity of the test protected.”
Asked whether the disclosures threatened the validity of the entire test, Reams said the problem would be “specific for that question” and that most students had already taken PARCC before the publication on Oyler’s blogs.
PARCC Inc. is a nonprofit organization that supports the partnership, which itself is one of two multistate consortia that were given millions of dollars in funding from the Obama administration to create new standardized tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards.
Leonie Haimson, an education activist who founded the nonprofit organization Class Size Matters and is a co-founder of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, said flawed test questions should be publicized. She and others argue it is “fair use” for writers to reveal a few items from a test if the intent is to critique the test questions. A tweet she sent, which did not reveal test questions, was removed.
“There needs to be at least as much accountability for those who make and give the tests as they’re urging on our students, teachers and schools,” Haimson said. “Yet there can’t be any, without complete transparency showing the flawed quality of these assessments.”
Oyler received a letter dated May 12, 2016, from Laura Slover, CEO of PARCC Inc., threatening possible legal action if the questions were not removed from the blog. Oyler has said she received the post anonymously and does not know who the teacher is. She did, however, remove the questions from the post.
Other writers began to receive similar letters and take-down notices about their own writings related to the PARCC test. A list on the Lumen website shows that PARCC asked for at least 10 blog posts and 33 tweets to be taken down.
Asked why PARCC Inc. has aggressively moved to take down such posts, Reams referred to a statement on the group’s website that says students are given an unfair test environment when questions are posted publicly.
“Because of this, states rely on PARCC Inc., a nonprofit organization, to help ensure that every student who takes a test does so on an even playing field without any unfair advantages or disadvantages, and this requires that copyrighted materials be closely guarded,” the statement says. “Testing fairness has to be balanced with a commitment to transparency.”