A new company has been chosen to develop the assessments for New York State students in third through eighth grades, a contentious group of tests that spawned a backlash in recent years.
Questar Assessments, a company based in Minneapolis, received a five-year, $44 million deal, the State Education Department said on Thursday. The previous contract, for $32 million, was held by Pearson, an international education company based in London that has become a lightning rod in education policy around the country.
“Our students deserve the best, most accurate assessments we can give them,” said Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents. “Teachers and parents should have clear, practical information to help them help their students learn.”
This news was the first significant announcement made under the leadership of the state’s new education commissioner, MaryEllen Elia, who started the job on Monday.
The resistance to increased testing — ushered in by the No Child Left Behind law — has intensified in recent years. The federal law was intended to ensure that all students, particularly the neediest ones, were being properly educated.
But many parents, educators and union officials said that too much class time was being dedicated to test preparation as a result, and that some exam questions were developmentally inappropriate or sometimes even nonsensical. In one widely derided example, students in New York were given a passage in which, instead of racing a tortoise, a hare races a talking pineapple.
Bills that would make significant revisions to the No Child Left Behind law are now working their way through Congress.
An analysis of local news reports and school district data by The New York Times found that at least one out of every six students eligible to take the third- through eighth-grade tests in New York State sat at least one of them out this past school year, part of the so-called opt out movement. Parent groups and the state teachers union fueled the movement to try to force changes to the tests and how they are used (test results are an important factor in teacher evaluations).
As a dominant force in the country’s testing marketplace, Pearson has been roundly criticized.
“We held a rally back last August where we shredded Pearson tests to say this has got to go,” said Karen E. Magee, president of the New York State United Teachers union.
A spokeswoman for the State Education Department said Pearson’s reputation was not a factor in the contract process; Questar was simply the victor of standard bidding procedures.
“While we are disappointed that we were not awarded the Gade 3-8 testing contract, our commitment to New York is unwavering,” Laura Howe, a spokeswoman for Pearson, said in a statement. “We will continue to serve the people of New York through our other assessment work along with learning materials and higher education services.”
The new contract requires Questar to develop tests that can be given on computers and also calls on the company to create more versions of the exams, a shift that should allow them to be shorter. Questions are commonly embedded in standardized tests that do not count toward the final scores, but are instead being tried out for future use. If there are more versions of a test in use, each one can have fewer of these questions.
The state’s announcement emphasized that teachers will play a significant role in developing the tests, which union officials and other education groups praised.
The contract must now be approved by the state comptroller and the state attorney general.
