Huppenthal’s Dept of Education and its AIMS replacement test shell game

By Brad McQueen

After an unsuccessful hour of searching on the Department of Education’s website and several emails later, I finally have the list of the six testing companies that successfully submitted bids to become the contractor to produce and deliver Arizona’s new statewide test to replace our former statewide test, the AIMS test.

The Arizona owned and created AIMS test became obsolete after Governor Brewer and Superintendent Huppenthal adopted and implemented the federal Common Core standards in our state, which are copyrighted, created, and owned by two private companies in Washington, D.C., necessitating the adoption of a new statewide test to assess the newly adopted federal Common Core learning standards.

The AZ State Board of Education, on which Superintendent Huppenthal is a voting member, will award the lucrative statewide test in October, just months before the test is supposed to be given to our state’s kids.

The finalists are:
1. Data Recognition Corporation
2. CTB McGraw Hill LLC
3. American Institutes for Research (A.I.R.)
4. ACT Inc.
5. Measure Progress
6. NCS Pearson Inc.

Noticeably absent from this list is the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC). In my previous article “The fix is in: Dept of Education in no rush to select the AIMS replacement test I describe why I combine both the PARCC and the Pearson testing groups when I refer to them as the PARCC/Pearson testing group.

The PARCC/Pearson groups are basically intertwined having worked together for the last four years developing the Common Core/PARCC test which used over $170 million of federal money from the Stimulus Act in 2009 to develop the federal Common Core/PARCC test and its test delivery platform. Pearson was also awarded a lucrative billion dollar contract to write and deliver the PARCC test this past May.

PARCC/Pearson, which is a private testing group, was given special access to Arizona’s kids and their private data by Superintendent Huppenthal when he mandated select AZ schools conduct field tests of the PARCC assessment this past spring. No other company bidding on our statewide test was granted this access and no other company was given access to a cadre of “state leads” at our Department of Education to work on their assessments, on the taxpayer’s dime as was the case with the PARCC/Pearson testing group.

In late June the Procurement Office, along with the Dept of Education, had an informational meeting that it “strongly suggested” all potential bidders on the statewide test attend. PARCC was originally a potential bidder and submitted company information in the Arizona’s request for information (RFI) process.

Pearson had a strong presence at this informational meeting along with the other bidders, as shown on the official sign-in sheet posted on the Procurement Office’s website, while PARCC sent no one unless they were hidden under Pearson’s skirt.

In concert with PARCC/Pearson Governor Brewer and Superintendent Huppenthal hastily withdrew Arizona from its four year relationship with the PARCC testing group months ago ahead of the test bidding process to eliminate the appearance of collusion between the PARCC group and the Department of Education. Perhaps they reasoned that the charade would work on the low-information citizens.

The AZ Department of Education may be trying to pull another one of its charades by just having Pearson bid on the statewide test acting as if the PARCC test group has dropped out, even though as stated above, the Pearson/PARCC group is essentially the same entity. Both Pearson and PARCC have had an unfair advantage over all of the other testing companies who have had their proposals successfully accepted.

In Pearson’s company information that it submitted it refers multiple times to the PARCC test being an assessment that it can deliver to Arizona when it states:

“As a governing state in the PARCC consortium, Arizona is well familiar with the features and benefits of the PARCC assessments. Pearson is strongly committed to PARCC’s success and is currently supporting the consortium through prime contracts for the Technology Readiness Tool, item development, and online test delivery and scoring.”

“If Arizona should choose to continue with the PARCC assessments in 2014–15, Pearson will be on board to support a smooth transition and provide continuity to Arizona districts and schools for online test delivery.”

In other words, if you choose Pearson you will also get the PARCC. It’s quite the shell game, eh? The original Pearson bid information that it submitted several months back has also been heavily redacted. What information is the AZ Department of Education trying to hide? Will they provide the public with an unredacted copy of Pearson’s originally submitted information in the interest of transparency? No other submitting testing company has redactions at the time of this article.

I still have not heard back from the Department of Education or the Procurement Office as to whether there will be an opportunity for public input and discussion about the selection of the new statewide test before the State Board of Education makes its choice in October.

One Department of Education official stated that those at the Department who were involved with the PARCC were “walled off” from the bid selection process to prevent any bias towards PARCC/Pearson. Really, how is that possible?

The AZ Department of Education has had a very close four year relationship with PARCC/Pearson where pretty much everyone in the Assessment Division has had some sort of interaction with them. There has also been, no doubt, countless other divisions, like the K-12 Academic Standards division and the division dealing with English Language Learners(ELL), that have also cross-pollinated with the Assessment division when the Dept of Education has dealt with the PARCC/Pearson group.

Will Superintendent Huppenthal recuse himself from the State Board of Education meeting that will select the next test in October? He was a Governing Board member of PARCC involved in all their major decisions including the decision to award Pearson the $1 billion contract to create and deliver the PARCC test no doubt.

Has each and every person who had dealings with the PARCC/Pearson group truly been excluded? The inbreeding within the PARCC/Pearson and the AZ Department of Education goes too deep to “wall off” everyone who has been involved with the PARCC/Pearson group. The PARCC/Pearson group should be eliminated in total from consideration.

ACT, Inc. should also be eliminated from consideration in the test selection process as it has a very close relationship with Pearson where, according to Pearson’s submitted information, they jointly created a testing system called “ACT Aspire” which they tout as a possible replacement for our AIMS test

Pearson’s submitted information reads, “ACT Aspire. A new assessment system developed jointly by ACT, Inc. and Pearson to measure growth to college and career readiness from grade 3 through 10 in reading, writing, mathematics, and science.”

Pearson basically now has another bid, under the guise of ACT, Inc., up for consideration for our AIMS replacement test in addition to its own, just as it previously had yet another bid, under the guise of the PARCC, up for consideration until that bid was retracted. ACT’s elimination would also ensure that Pearson does not put PARCC into place, should ACT get the contract, through the back door.

To review, Pearson basically had three bids originally. It submitted a bid as “Pearson”, then it also submitted a bid as “PARCC”, and now it is also submitting a bid as “ACT”. Pearson should only be allowed to submit only one bid as itself and be honest enough to say that it controls the testing systems for ACT and the PARCC test, thereby eliminating these two groups as possible contenders.

It is State Board of Education and Huppenthal’s job to makes sure this deceptive practice does not occur in the first place. But then again, we all know Huppenthal’s need to deceive, perhaps he found the perfect partner in Pearson? This just adds to the notion that the “fix is in” at the Dept of Education, and those same top bureaucrats that PARCC/Pearson have been wining and dining over the last four years have shown their allegiance is with the testing companies and their own egos, the people of Arizona be damned.

Huppenthal’s Department of Education does not help matters much when it makes it near impossible to get updates on the test adoption process and when the State Board of Education takes months before it will publish its meeting minutes. Or is this murkiness part of the plan? The State Board of Education had a meeting regarding the statewide selection several weeks ago and has still not posted the meeting minutes, so we cannot know what they discussed.

I’ll offer this possible scenario. Huppenthal and the State Board of Education may also try to hide behind the excuse of protecting “company proprietary information” in the test selection process so that they can have closed door meetings in their discussions regarding our AIMS replacement test. Nothing would surprise me, so let’s add to our list this possibility as well and demand that this not be allowed to happen.

Testing companies are always looking out for their company and shareholder’s bottom line. That’s what private companies do.

The Department of Education is charged with protecting its “shareholders”, the citizens of Arizona, from shady practices that hint at collusion or unfairness when awarding Arizona’s next statewide test. That’s what Departments of Education and elected officials should do.

The latest list of finalists for Arizona’s statewide AIMS replacement test and the lack of transparency from the Department of Education and the State Board of Education in its test selection process add more questions than answers to an already murky-at-best test selection process. Let sunshine be the greatest disinfectant and truly involve the citizenry in this test selection process. I’ll even provide the sunglasses for those fearful of being blinded by the truth.

Brad McQueen is a former Common Core insider and current public school teacher in Tucson, Arizona and is the author of the anti-Common Core book “The Cult of Common Core”. Connect with Brad at cultofcommoncore@gmail.com