A bill that would have ended the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, exam was amended in a way Wednesday that its sponsor said will make it more difficult to kill the test.
House Bill 1241 by state Rep. Mark Lowery, R-Maumelle, sailed through the House by an 86-1 vote earlier this month, but it initially died for lack of a second Wednesday in the Senate Education Committee after hearing testimony from both sides of the polarizing issue and which attracted a standing-room only audience.
Later in the same committee meeting, Sen. Jim Hendren, R-Gravette, replaced language in the bill requiring the Arkansas Board of Education to cease participation in PARCC after June 30, 2015, with a provision limiting the department from entering into a contract for longer than a year with PARCC or another agreement "related to statewide assessments for public school students."
Hendren's amendment also requires the board to "take into consideration any recommendations that are made by the Governor's Council on Common Core Review before entering into any contract or agreement related to statewide assessments for public school students for the 2016-2017 school year."
The committee adopted the amendment and gave the amended bill a do-pass recommendation.
Hendren said he wanted the bill in some form if only to "send a message" to the company holding the $9 million contract to administer the test. He said the original bill was unworkable because the state would have to start over on development of another test.
"It troubles me greatly that we've got a private company that's got a contract with the state for $9 million and came two votes away from being repealed and such unhappiness amongst many people in the state and they don't send someone here to testify," he told fellow committee members. "That really troubles me.
"The reason I asked Representative Lowery to allow us to pass something out of here is to send a message to PARCC that if they are going to get $9 million from the state, they ought to be required to perform, and I hope the board will include additional contract performance guarantees and expectations so that if a third of the kids can't log on that it comes out of their hide as far as the dollars that we pay them.
"Because there's no question that we heard evidence here today that there are problems with PARCC that need to be fixed. There's also no question that there wasn't, I don't believe, a plan moving forward and that's why I didn't support repealing it immediately because I didn't have clarity on what we were going to do and how that was going to line up with Common Core."
State education officials, while acknowledging some problems endemic to any occasion the first time a large-scale test is administered, said the problems were isolated and that most of the reports about testing in the field had been good.
Before the amended version cleared the committee, Lowery said Hendren's amendment hurt the chances of eliminating PARCC.
"The best read I could make on that is the PARCC test would be in jeopardy at the earliest in 2016-2017 if the task force voted against it or recommended that it not be used," he told reporters outside the committee room. "In the meantime, you end up doing it in 2015-2016, which makes even a stronger argument that it is too big to fail: 'We've done it two years, we've got to stick with it.'
"The language doesn't deal with the real concern that we need to end the use of the PARCC assessment."
The vote came as more than 200,000 Arkansas public school students had taken the new state-required exams. The PARCC exams, which are to be used for the first time this year in an online format by Arkansas' school districts, were tested in paper form last year.
The exams are based on a common set of math and literacy standards that have been adopted by most states since 2010, called Common Core. A consortium of about a dozen states, including Arkansas, is developing and administering exams based on that curriculum.
The new tests replace the Arkansas Benchmark and End-of-Course exams. As with those older tests, the results from the new tests are to be used to develop academic improvement plans for individual students and to evaluate overall school performance as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.
Through early May, more than 5 million students nationwide in grades three through 11 are expected to take the PARCC performance-based and end-of-year tests. Well over half of those students -- including a majority of Arkansas test-takers -- will use desktop and laptop computers.
The committee also gave do-pass recommendations to:
• Senate Bill 847 by Sen. Alan Clark, R-Lonsdale, which would give authority to the state Department of Education to allow open-enrollment charter schools access to unused or under-utilized public school buildings.
Representatives of school administrators and school boards opposed the bill, but the committee was moved by the refusal of the Helena-West Helena School District to allow access to an abandoned school building to the KIPP Delta Public Schools charter organization, which said its students were taught in trailers.
• Senate Bill 878 by Sen. Jason Rapert, R-Bigelow, which would require all high school students pass the civics tests required of all people seeking to become U.S. citizens.
• Senate Bill 615 by Sen. Gary Stubblefield, R-Branch, which would exempt from the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act all security plans for public schools.
Metro on 03/19/2015