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

Common Core : Here We Go Again Welcome back to the Math Wars

PARCC testing is supposed to be more about the child’s facility with using a computer than his or her knowledge of the subject matter being tested. This is untested, seat-of-the-pants, thrown-together Obamacare website territory we will be in, and there will be a huge blowback. Fifth graders in particular need to be ready for anything, given that their standardized math scores for this year constitute the first 1/7th part of the rubric that determines whether they are ranked in the top 10 percent of their middle school in math at the end of sixth grade. If they are not so ranked, they will be prevented from taking Algebra in 7th grade and will be exposed to the Constructivist CMP math curriculum during all of 7th and 8th grade. This will stunt their growth at a critical time, and will eventually seriously limit their ability to compete for acceptance to a top notch school of engineering or science upon graduation from high school. CMP math in the middle schools is ‘the one that hot away’ about six years ago during the most recent battle in Ridgewood’s protracted Math War.