Parent Lisa Davis decided she didn’t want her two children – a sixth grader at Cole Middle School and a fourth grader at Hanaford Elementary – to take the new PARCC tests, so she did what some other parents in East Greenwich have done, opted their kids out of the test. In total, 19 children have been opted out of the test.
East Greenwich students are taking PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) tests for the first time starting this week. You can read more about that here.

But for Davis, who spent 10 years as a classroom teacher and now has a bread-baking business, the PARCC is the latest of a long string of educational missteps.

“I’m opting out for a lot of different reasons,” said Davis Tuesday. She questioned the standards – or what she sees at the lack of them – used in the PARCC. She said the PARCC shouldn’t be testing things that children are struggling with and she decried all the time spent on “pre-study” for the PARCC.

Davis said that the PARCC was, to some extent, the last straw.

“This is just me drawing a line in the sand,” she said. She said preparing for the PARCC and the tests themselves wasted valuable school time. And she worried that the Common Core was preparing students for the workplace alone.

Even the name of the test rankled Davis – “Readiness for college and careers?” she said, “My children are in fourth and sixth grades.”

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