Ohio Renounces PARCC
Ohio has become the latest state to bail out of PARCC, one of the two major state consortia focused on developing Common Core assessments. That leaves just 10 states, plus the District of Columbia, as participants.
Ohio remains a Common Core state, meaning that it will continue to teach to the standards for English and math in the classroom; schools will simply be using an alternate testing system — one that, it's hoped, will consume less time and suffer from fewer technical problems.
According to coverage in Ohio newspaper The Plain Dealer, there was widespread dissatisfaction in the state over the tests owing both to technical glitches and to the sheer volume of time the tests took up.
A budget bill signed into law yesterday by Ohio Gov. John Kasich expressly forbids the state from spending any funds on the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. To date, the state had spent some $26.3 million on PARCC exam development, and, further, according to coverage in The Columbus Dispatch, "Ohio educators logged at least 54,000 hours during four years to build the test used this year with PARCC...."
Ohio's Department of Education has been tasked with coming up with a new test using a different vendor. (Pearson is the vendor that has designed and is responsible for administering PARCC's assessments.) According to Telegraph-Forum, the new vendor will be American Institutes for Research.