24 Jul 2013
Tuesday was a bad news day for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), one of two federally funded consortia creating new assessments aligned to the Common Core. Not only did Georgia publicly drop out of the consortium to go it alone, PARCC released cost estimates for its assessments that would require half of its member states to increase the amount they spend on testing. PARCC estimates the tests will cost states $29.50 per student. Anyone can figure out what $30 means to their own personal budget, but what does it mean for state budgets?
It turns out the answer to that question depends heavily on which state we’re talking about. I created the table below using Matthew Chingos’ November 2012 paper for the Brookings Institution, the most up-to-date figures that I’m aware of. It tabulates how much each PARCC member would save or lose under PARCC’s cost estimates. I used PARCC’s latest member list for this exercise, and I left in Georgia and Florida for illustrative purposes even though both states are either officially out of the PARCC (Georgia) or may be soon (Florida). For 10 states, PARCC appears to be a net savings (the states with the negative sign in front of their number), while 11 states would likely see testing costs rise.
Not surprisingly, states with the highest-cost assessments tend to save the most with