Page 7 - Leadership Matters March 2013 issue.pub

7
Don’t forget hardware & infrastructure
when preparing for PARCC assessment
As the Partnership for the
Assessment of Readiness
for College and Careers
(PARCC) assessment looms
in front of us, I hear a great
deal of talk about raising
standards, creating a more
rigorous curriculum and in
many other ways preparing
for the Common Core State
Standards that will be tested
by PARCC and Smarter
Balanced. I believe that
many of us are working hard
to ensure our teaching staff
is provided the necessary
curriculum development to prepare our students for the
rigors of these new exams.
I am not sure that most districts realize the
potential need to improve their hardware and
infrastructure in order to accommodate the bandwidth
requirements of the testing process. Of
course, preparing students for the test is
of primary importance, but each district
will need to ensure that they have the
necessary hardware and a robust
enough infrastructure to ensure that the
students will have a hassle-free testing
experience, that their scores will be
representative of their achievements and
not reflective of a poor testing
environment.
Matthew Kinzie, the chief technology
officer for the San Francisco Unified School District,
stated “online delivery is predicated on a wonderful
idea, but it is an unfunded mandate. We don’t see any
funding for technology to implement online
assessments.”
Illinois is in a similar situation in that there is no
funding allocated for building out the necessary
technology infrastructure for the PARCC assessment,
although State Superintendent Dr. Chris Koch has
proposed a modest matching grant program in his
FY2014 draft budget. Federal e-rate money may also
be available for some of the connectivity development.
From a technology standpoint, there are some
facets related to the soon-to-be mandated testing that
will need to be considered, including:
 Software: The first and potentially the easiest is to
ensure your desktop, laptop and/or tablet operating
systems (O/S) are on the recommended list.
Generally, PARCC recommends Windows 7, Mac
O/S 10.7 and several versions of Android O/S,
Chrome or Linux. Currently, Windows XP is an
option, but not a recommended one. Beyond the
issues with PARCC, Microsoft will not support
Windows XP after April 2014.
Additionally, these systems will have to be able to
be “locked down” to remove student access from e-
mail browsing the web, taking screen captures, etc.
Your IT staff should start discussing now how to
work through those issues. Some of those features are
core to the operating system and may be difficult to
limit without significant work on the part of the IT staff
or potentially purchasing third-party software to lock
down some of those functions.
It may be easier in some cases to create “test
specific user profiles” for the assessment, but that may
require students to manage two sets of IDs and
passwords. This is easier said than done with third-
graders much less with sophomores.
The point is that someone needs to be
investigating this lock-down issue within
the specific technology milieu of each
district well before we start using the
PARCC to measure student
achievement.
The other software issue is that secure
browsers will need to be installed in
order to actually administer the PARCC
assessments. At the time of publication,
PARCC hasn’t yet identified what
browsers will be acceptable.
 Network Bandwidth: Bandwidth is potentially the
most important consideration for successfully
administering the PARCC assessment. Even the
most well-engineered technology initiative can be
brought to its knees if the necessary bandwidth
isn’t considered as part of the planning.
The bandwidth requirements for PARCC haven’t
been finalized, but the current recommendations for
external (Internet) access are 100 kbps per student or
1 Mbps per 100 students. Other recommendations
floated include requiring up to 1 Gbps per 1000
students and staff. For internal networking between
schools, the recommendation is for 10 Gbps per 1000
(Continued on page 8)
Dr. Steven Baule
Superintendent
North Boone District 200