It’s the start of a new school year and that means new changes to the system. This year, PARCC testing is being removed from all high schools in Illinois.

After a few years of PARCC testing, the test has finally been scrapped. This past July, the Illinois State Board of Education notified RBHS about the change in all high schools in Illinois.

“We got a notification from the Illinois State Board of Education that SAT would be taking the place of PARCC in the middle of July,” said Kylie Gregor, Assistant Principal for Curriculum and Instruction.

Gregor is happy that PARCC testing is gone, saying that it was too much work to assign the test to students and it took away instructional time from students.  

“I think it’s good that PARCC testing is no longer with us for a couple of reasons,” Gregor said. “One is there was a great deal of instructional time lost due to PARCC testing because of the time that it took to administer the test to students so they were out of class for a great portion of time, the better part of over a week, and so we’re getting a lot of instructional time back in our classes.”

Gregor also said that she thought that students did not take PARCC testing seriously and it was something that didn’t necessarily benefit the students at all, only the state.

“Also, I think it’s a good thing that it’s gone because students didn’t have any… ‘skin in the game’ with the PARCC test,” Gregor said. “So what that means is it didn’t count for anything for students. It didn’t help students get into college. It didn’t do anything for students at the high school level. It was something that the state was the only one using the results. And as you can imagine, when a test of that nature doesn’t have any sort of ramifications for students, many students, across not only Illinois, but across the country didn’t take that test very seriously. So not only were we giving up instructional time for a test, we were giving up instructional time for a test that didn’t necessarily mean much in the life of a student.”

Lastly, she stated that most of the staff members that she has talked to are overwhelmingly relieved that PARCC testing is gone, not only because they are getting instructional time back into the classrooms, but because students don’t have to do a test that doesn’t mean anything to them.