La. State Board Not “Bound by Law” to Either CCSS or PARCC
On June 18, 2014, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal made the executive decision to remove Louisiana from the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated assessment, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).
The way that Jindal approached the issue was to cancel both the PARCC MOU stating that Louisiana agreed to help develop a set of CCSS tests to be shared by all states participating in the consortium as well as the CCSS memorandum of understanding (MOU) that he and former state superintendent Paul Pastorek signed in May 2009.
The CCSS MOU was created by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the two organizations that hold thelicense for CCSS. It is a legal document outlining CCSS development, adoption, usage, future revision, and federal role, as well as the intention that CCSS assessments would be developed via consortia, of which PARCC is one. (The other is the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, or SBAC.)
Jindal canceled Louisiana’s use of PARCC tests for 2014-15 based upon the failure of the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) to abide by Louisiana’s procurement laws. In short, LDOE did not submit adoption of the PARCC tests to open bidding. (For a crash course in Louisiana procurement, click here.) On June 18, the Office of Contractual Renewal (OCR) asked Louisiana State Superintendent John White to produce the contract LDOE had for PARCC. Well. As it turns out, White had “spliced” the PARCC contract into an existing “sole source” contract with Data Recognition Corp (DRC). This shady action on White’s part prompted OCR Director Pamela Barfay Rice to open an investigation into all Louisiana testing contracts La. State Board Not “Bound by Law” to Either CCSS or PARCC | deutsch29:
