By Adam Clark | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

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on April 19, 2015 at 7:30 AM, updated April 19, 2015 at 9:21 AM

The A-H fiction section at Union High School’s library offers about 3,000 titles, according to the school librarian.

There are classics, such as Agatha Christie’s crime novels, and popular teen books like the coming of age tale “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.”

But during March and early April, when the library was used for the computerized Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) testing, most of those books were off-limits to the school’s students, librarian Doris D’Elia said.

“About half of my fiction section is blocked because of the way they put my tables in and the wiring they installed for a temporary lab for PARCC,” D’Elia said. “We can’t even get to the books.”

PARCC, standardized math and English tests for New Jersey students in grades 3-11, has drawn the ire of some parents and teachers for a variety of reasons, including concern about the validity of the tests.

But there’s an underlying problem with PARCC regardless of its effectiveness, those parents and teachers say — in the weeks it took schools to administer the tests, students’ daily learning was continually interrupted in some schools.

Libraries were closed, schedules flipped upside down and teachers pulled from regular assignments, educators said. Some mixed-grade high school classes were missing different groups of students each day or week, forcing teachers to alter lesson plans.

https://www.nj.com/education/2015/04/parcc_testing_takes_toll_on_daily_learning.html