The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers (PARCC) held a PARCC Progress Briefing on March 12 for leaders from national membership and advocacy organizations. The event provided an update on activities and sparked lively discussion about PARCC’s progress towards development of a common K-12 assessment system and broader efforts in states and districts to implement the Common Core State Standards and transition to the PARCC assessments.
There were a few comments of specific interest to CTE. For instance, Laura McGiffert Slover, Senior Vice President at Achieve, which is leading the PARCC effort, said that PARCC is working closely with the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium on issues such as a common definition of college and career readiness. She noted that the focus on PARCC in “round one” of the assessments is on college credit-bearing courses but that doing some additional work on CTE is worthwhile.
Identifying ways to effectively incorporate CTE in the PARCC assessments work is clearly of interest to PARCC. Ms. Slover mentioned that PARCC’s Technical Working Groups (TWGs; pronounced “twigs”) include CTE representatives. Those TWGs are small groups of national experts focused on addressing specific issues related to assessments development, and their work begins this week.
Sue Cain with the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, said that her state includes two-year community colleges on their planning teams, and PARCC representatives noted that Georgia’s PARCC leadership includes a representative of CTE. Most of the participants are not-for-profit institutions.
In a conversation after the meeting, PARCC representatives noted that some states are leading CTE-inclusive efforts, such as Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey and Oregon. PARCC is expected to soon release a report detailing more information about these states’ CTE efforts.
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