Who Will Run PARCC and How?

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PARCC is doing some deep soul-searching, with its future at stake. It鈥檚 figuring out how it should reorganize to survive the coming years, and who should run it.

The most recent phase of that process has produced input from the testing field. To be precise: 128 pages of input. We鈥檝e obtained it for you through a Freedom of Information Act request. You can scroll through the pages yourself, at the bottom of this post.

The documents were a response to a in February, with responses due in March. The request for information, known in the procurement world as an RFI, seeks feedback from the field about the questions at hand鈥攊n this case, how PARCC should reorganize itself to serve states. We鈥檙e talking about stuff like coordinating the development of new test questions, making test items available to states, and coordinating contracts with vendors to administer and score the test.

The RFI is designed to get ideas from the industry, but it also can be a preview of who鈥檚 going to throw their hat in the ring to win the contract for the reorganization itself. Those hats will be thrown during the second stage of this process: the 鈥渞equest for proposals,鈥� or RFP, that PARCC will issue later this year.

A caveat, as you leaf through the RFI responses: Just because someone chimed in during the RFI doesn鈥檛 mean they鈥檙e necessarily going to submit a proposal in response to the RFP. And the reverse is true, too: Just because someone stays silent during the RFI part of the process doesn鈥檛 mean they won鈥檛 jump in when the RFP comes out. So while you can have a little fun reading the tea leaves here, don鈥檛 assume too much.

You鈥檒l see that there were nine responses to PARCC鈥檚 RFI. Most are from the usual players in the assessment industry, including ACT Inc., the Educational Testing Service, Measured Progress, Pearson, and Questar. Parcc Inc.鈥攖he nonprofit that manages PARCC, the consortium鈥攁lso submitted a response, signaling an interest in continuing that management role. And there was an entry that some could find surprising, too: from Smarter Balanced, the other state consortium (along with PARCC) that designed common-core tests with federal funding. (Data Recognition Corp. also submitted some thoughts, without making a formal RFI response.)

The companies responding to the RFI pointed out the challenges ahead, such as adequately protecting the security of PARCC鈥檚 bank of test questions, how to price test items, and how to produce enough income to sustain the organization. (Only six states and the District of Columbia currently administer the PARCC test. Two others blend some of PARCC鈥檚 questions with their own.) They also try to grapple with the question of who will own PARCC content when some of it could be created by states, and other parts by the organization that runs the consortium.

One interesting tidbit that emerges from the responses is that states are apparently chatting about the prospect of having one entity that could offer them both PARCC and Smarter Balanced test content. Here鈥檚 what ETS says about that in its response, referring to test content as intellectual property, or IP:

Smarter Balanced remained silent on that question in its submission, choosing only to discuss the elements of its operation that it believes have made it successful.

Another interesting tidbit in the responses was a reflection on how the exact players responding鈥攖esting companies鈥攎ight not be good candidates to do the job. And that response came from a big testing company, ACT Inc., which notes that assessment companies are really good at some of the things PARCC wants, but not so good at others: