State’s choice of testing contractor disputed
The State Board of Education last week endorsed the current contractor’s three-year, quarter-billion-dollar bid to continue administering the state’s standardized testing system – but only if it agrees to extensively involve teachers in scoring the parts of the new tests on the Common Core standards that can’t be done by machine.
Board members voted unanimously to approve Educational Testing Service’s contract on the condition the company duplicate the teacher-participation model that a losing bidder, Pearson School, a division of the textbook and education giant Pearson, had proposed. Pearson’s plan was closer to the original vision of educators such as Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Education, who, in pitching the Smarter Balanced test to California education officials, had said that involving teachers in scoring “performance tasks” would improve classroom instruction.
Pearson’s proposal said that training in scoring would be part of a larger professional development effort in the Common Core standards. County offices of education would provide the teacher trainings in local schools. The nonprofit research agency WestEd and the Sacramento County Office of Education would be hired to lead the initiative.
Doug Kubach, CEO and president of Pearson School, said if the state goes through with its plan to adopt Pearson’s strategy to work with teachers even though it rejected the company’s bid, Pearson would probably file a lawsuit. Evidence would show, he said, that state officials preferred ETS from the start.
“We typically don’t do litigation – it’s an uphill struggle with a high barrier of evidence – but this case is so egregious that there may be no State’s choice of testing contractor disputed | EdSource:
