Washington, DC

The DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) announced today changes to the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) assessment. Based on feedback from educators about this year’s PARCC administration, the PARCC Governing Board unanimously voted yesterday to consolidate the PARCC assessment’s two testing windows into one and cut total test time by about 90 minutes overall beginning in Spring 2016. The Consortium states and PARCC have worked closely to ensure these updates maintain the same high level of validity and continue to provide students and educators with data to inform instruction while also reducing administrative burden on Local Education Agencies and schools.

“I thank our students, parents, teachers, and school and LEA leaders for their hard work and patience during the transition to our new PARCC assessments,” said acting State Superintendent of Education Hanseul Kang. “We are pleased that these changes in the second year of PARCC will streamline test administration while ensuring valid results.”

The PARCC governing board voted to:

• Reduce the testing time for students by about 90 minutes overall (60 minutes in mathematics; 30 minutes in English Language Arts/Literacy) and create more uniformity in test unit times.
• Consolidate the two testing windows in mathematics and English Language Arts/Literacy (which includes reading and writing) into one in order to simplify administration of the test for states, local education agencies and schools.
• Reduce the number of test units each student will complete by two or three.

OSSE is working with the PARCC Consortium to finalize the District’s 2016 test window dates. The PARCC consortium governing board is made up of the state education chiefs from each PARCC state: Arkansas, Colorado, District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, and Rhode Island. Louisiana and Mississippi also are administering the PARCC assessments this year, as are the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the Bureau of Indian Education. Five million students in 11 states and the District of Columbia are participating in the assessment in 2015.

For more information about this topic, visit www.osse.dc.gov.