Tennessee has signed a $108 million contract with Measurement Inc. to design replacements for its state test, the TCAP.
Measurement Inc. replaces Pearson, which designed the TCAP. According to Chalkbeat, the American Institutes for Research will be a subcontractor on the project. Pearson had bid unsuccessfully for the new contract, along with CTB/McGraw Hill, Vantage, and Questar Assessment. The state department of education had announced in late October that Measurement Inc. was the successful bidder, but the contract hadn’t been signed yet.
The new test is scheduled to be given in May 2016. In the meantime, Tennessee will be administering the TCAP.
You might recall that Tennessee was once a leading state in PARCC, but withdrew amid political pushback to participation in the common core. The legislature forced the pullback from PARCC, and might yet weigh in on Tennessee’s testing plans when it reconvenes in the spring, according to The Tennesseean.
Measurement Inc., based in Durham, N.C., is a smaller player in the assessment world than companies like Pearson, but is still one of the six companies that hold nearly 90 percent of the testing contracts in the nation, according to a 2012 report by the Brookings Institution.
Arizona recently chose a vendor for its new test as well: the American Institutes for Research. It’s all part of the common-core-testing shakeout, in which states that adopted the standards are having to figure out ways to revise their tests, or buy new ones, to reflect the changed academic goals. We’ve chronicled this for you here at EdWeek; Sean Cavanagh’s story shows who’s getting all the big testing contracts, and Andrew Ujifusa and I reported on which tests states are using this spring. Our map of all the states’ assessment plans is kept current on edweek.org.