Tennessee’s state legislature voted Thursday to delay new tests based on Common Core state standards for a year and start a new competitive bidding process for assessments.
The legislature’s decision, if approved by the governor, means Tennessee schools will continue implementing the Common Core state standards, which have been adopted by 46 states, but will not use an assessment based on the standards to gauge students’ academic performance in the 2014-15 school year.
The PARCC assessment was supposed to be used in Tennessee schools next year. The state’s legislature considered delaying implementation of both the test and the state standards for as many as two years.
A house conference committee report released Wednesday and adopted Thursday says that the state should use the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP, which is the current state assessment, again in 2014-15. Meanwhile, it should hold a competitive bidding process to determine which assessment to use starting in the 2015-16 school year. The committee calls for the test to be field tested before it is implemented.
As the Tennessee Education Report notes, PARCC could again be selected through that competitive bidding process. But other states that had initially signed on to use the PARCC assessment, including Kentucky and Florida, have also changed their plans.
The report also set guidelines limiting how student data collected in the assessments can be used. It also requires any nationally-developed standards for science or social studies to be explicitly approved by the state’s legislature. (The current Common Core standards are just for English language arts and Math.)
The committee report is couched in the language of state’s rights: It begins by saying, “WHEREAS the federal government has no constitutional authority to set educational standards for Tennessee or to determine how children in Tennessee will be educated. Any partnership with the federal government is solely at the discretion of the state…”
The bills delaying the assessment, which must be signed into law by Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, had a tumultuous run through the state’s legislature: The state standards, the textbooks used to teach them, the assessments used to measure their implementation, and the way data from the tests will be used have all been the subject of intense debate.
Andrea Zelinski, a reporter for the Nashville Scene, reports that the governor is likely to go along with the delay:
Advocacy groups bemoaned the decision. “This legislation creates a disappointing pause in Tennessee’s efforts to have a high-quality assessment that truly measures student learning,” said Jamie Woodson, the CEO of SCORE, a nonpartisan education advocacy group. “We have supported moving to a new state assessment in the 2014-15 school year because students deserve a more engaging, skills-based assessment that is better aligned with classroom instruction and allows them the opportunity to show how much they have actually learned.”
Shelby County superintendent Dorsey Hopson II has said that he believes the district should move forward with implementation of the Common Core state standards, but that the district did not have enough computers to implement the PARCC tests, which are mostly online, as of earlier this spring. The district has been preparing for the PARCC tests this year regardless.
The debates in the Tennessee legislature reflect a national debate about the Common Core state standards, which were adopted with great enthusiasm by many states but which have since become the subject of heated debate. Here is a “tracker” of anti-Common Core legislation. Many states have experienced challenges in implementing the new standards, which were intended to be more rigorous and more uniform across states.
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State education commissioner Kevin Huffman released a statement about the delays:
“Our teachers have worked hard to prepare for new assessments, and I genuinely believe our students are ready and that they can compete with students in other states. While I am disappointed that Tennessee students will not move forward with the assessments planned for next year, I understand the General Assembly’s goal of ensuring that we select the right assessments for the long run. We will continue to focus on implementing higher academic standards and ensuring that Tennessee students improve faster than students anywhere in the country.”