Heartland Institute Education Experts React to Illinois Dropping PARCC Testing for High School Students

Published July 12, 2016

Heartland Institute Education Experts React to Illinois Dropping PARCC Testing for
High School Students

The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) announced on July 11 Illinois high school students will no longer be taking the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test. High school students will now be taking the SAT instead. Students in the third grade through the eighth grade will continue taking the PARCC test.

The following statements from education policy experts at The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at [email protected] and 312/377-4000.


“The Illinois Board of Education’s decision to replace the PARCC test with an SAT test reminds me of those horror movies where every road out of some haunted town leads you right back to the haunted town square. “The only real outcome of this decision is Illinois students are now out of the Common Core-PARRC frying pan, only to be placed into the College Board’s Common Core-SAT fire. Apparently, you can have any test you want, as long as a certified Common Core provider gets the lucrative contract to test the narrowed curriculum.”

Bruno Behrend
Senior Fellow, Education
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000


“As with nearly everything Illinois lawmakers do, with this decision they have missed a great opportunity to take a step forward and have instead chosen to take a step sideways. Getting rid of the Common-Core-aligned and extremely long PARCC test was a good step in the right direction, but the problem is ISBE replaced it with the Common-Core-aligned SAT, now run by one of the architects of Common Core, David Coleman.”

Lennie Jarratt
Project Manager, Education
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000


“It’s a curious reality Common Core keeps financially benefitting the people who created it, in this case College Board, which is run by Common Core chief architect David Coleman. It remains to be seen whether it benefits all the students whose lives he claimed a right to affect despite never having held elected office.”

Joy Pullmann
Senior Fellow, Education
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000


“Two cheers for Illinois for dropping PARCC for high school students. What started as a 25-member consortium in 2010 is hemorrhaging states at an unsustainable rate, and Illinois now has one foot out the door. Pretty soon, PARCC will go the way of the dodo, the passenger pigeon, and Betamax, much to the benefit of the children in the remaining states.”

“Unfortunately, the State Board of Education only decided to jump from the Common Core-aligned PARCC to the Common Core-aligned SAT, but that is a battle to fight another day.”

Tim Benson
Policy Analyst
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000


The Heartland Institute is a 32-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our website or call 312/377-4000.