The Brookings Institute released a report last week that purports to calculate the amount of money being spent on standardized tests.

The number researcher Matthew Chingos comes up with is $1.7 billion, which, when we consider that we spend more than $600 billion a year on education, does not sound like all that much. However, it turns out that all he is actually counting is the contract cost that states pay directly to test vendors.

He explains:

This report focuses on the costs of contracts between states and test-making vendors because they constitute the lion's share of state-level expenditures on testing. According to assessment cost data gathered by PARCC from its member states, of 21 states that provided both total assessment cost and contract cost data, 18 states reported contract costs making up more than 85% of total costs. Other state-level costs are surely important, such as the salaries paid to state assessment officials who play a vital role in selecting contractors and overseeing the vendors through test development, administration, and scoring. But such costs are difficult to track consistently across states, and usually represent a small fraction of the testing budget.

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