Will PARCC and Smarter Balanced Become One? Details from PARCC’s Request to Help Chart Its Future
On February 17, 2016, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) issued a Request for Information (RFI) to organizations that wished to help advise PARCC on the future of PARCC. As a Common Core testing consortium, PARCC has not garnered a notable number of states that have agreed to administer PARCC tests; as such, in November 2015, PARCC began offering “options” to states, including the vending of PARCC items (rather than the usage of entire PARCC tests) to drum up interest in the PARCC consortium. (Much of this information one can find in the RFI linked above.)
In its RFI, PARCC was looking for advice about 1) stability, 2) sustainability, 3) comparability, and 4) economies of scale.
PARCC intends to use the information gleaned from the RFIs to inform a Request for Proposal (RFP) regarding “qualified vendor(s) for providing [PARCC’s future (as detailed in the RFI)] products and services.”
Note also that the PARCC nonprofit, PARCC, Inc., is currently the organization that manages the PARCC Consortium. However, its future as PARCC manager is not a given; the PARCC, Inc., contract to manage PARCC expires in June 2017. It, too, responded to the PARCC RFI.
The RFI itself includes the following statement about public access to the RFI responses that PARCC receives (as well as the included disclaimer):
On our public forum call on Tuesday, February 16, Secretary Skandera said that responses to the RFI will be held as confidential. While responses to the RFI will not be publicly posted, they will be subject to the District ofWill PARCC and Smarter Balanced Become One? Details from PARCC’s Request to Help Chart Its Future | deutsch29: