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The Arizona Implementation Plan states that all grade levels must fully implement CCSS next year (2013-14), but the PARCC Assessment does not take effect until 2014-15. I was just informed by an ADE item selection director that AIMS will still use the blueprint for the AZ 2008 standards on the 2013-14 AIMS test and that teachers/students will be held accountable to BOTH sets of standards. In other words, students may see items from either set of standards. It does not seem feasible to address both sets of standards adequately. CCSS has placed some of the existing 2008 AZ standards in different grade levels. Teaching to both would interfere with the progressions contained in CCSS. It seems that ADE would take advantage of these next two years to gradually shift to CCSS by starting to eliminate removed and moved standards while they are adding field-test items from CC. Any advice on how to manage this situation?
I hope this doesn’t turn out to be the case and I agree it’s not a good situation. I’ve heard similar things from other states. It seems to me that at the very least one could remove items from the test bank that are no longer in the Core. However, even if that doesn’t happen it’s conceivable that sticking to the focus in the Common Core will be beneficial because it could improve performance on most of the test. For example, if 20% of your current consists of material that is no longer in the core, it might still be a good strategy to focus strongly on the other 80% and let the 20% go, in the sense that it could improve performance on the test overall. The promise of focus and coherence is that greater proficiency with fewer topics will serve a student better than a weak grasp of many topics. Of course, I understand how difficult it must be to make that leap in practice.
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