Judge hears PARCC contract arguments

Court decision could lead to halting exams next year

As more than 200,000 public school students in New Mexico continue to take the PARCC exams for the first time this month, a Santa Fe District Court judge is considering whether New Mexico violated state law by awarding the contract for those tests to the private educational organization Pearson.

PARCC, which stands for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, is a series of computerized tests that all students in grades three through 11 must take to assess their knowledge of the new Common Core Standards. Students in Santa Fe, Albuquerque and other districts have staged walkouts over the exams in the past few weeks.

On Tuesday, Judge Sarah Singleton heard arguments from both sides in the court fight over the testing contract. Her ruling could clear the way for Pearson to continue to administer the tests, or bring that process to a halt next year.

The case may have national implications, since New Mexico is part of a PARCC consortium of about a dozen states that are either paying Pearson or are considering paying Pearson to administer their tests.

The plaintiff, the Washington, D.C.based nonprofit American Institutes for Research, argues that New Mexico’s Public Education Department and the state’s purchasing agent, Lawrence Maxwell, rigged the bidding process in favor of Pearson by tailoring the prerequisites for the contract to a testing program that Pearson was already carrying out in Indiana.

Pearson was the only contractor to respond to the state’s request for proposals for the test. The state is paying Pearson about $6.2 million this year for PARCC.

Lawyers for the defendants countered that since American Institutes for Research — which also creates student assessments — did not enter the bidding process itself, it has no standing in the case.

Defense attorney Benjamin Feuchter told Singleton, “We do not know why other competitors did not bid. They may have been daunted by the scope” of the job.

The conflict began in 2013 when the American Institutes for Research first challenged the bidding process by asking the State Purchasing Division to investigate the deal.

State officials told American Institutes for Research leaders that their complaint wasn’t valid because they didn’t file it during the bidding process itself.

In July 2014, the American Institutes for Research filed a notice of appeal with the First District Court in Santa Fe. Singleton asked Maxwell’s office to review the protest before she made a ruling. He deemed the contract bidding process as satisfactory, which led to Tuesday’s court hearing.

The case is being heard in New Mexico because the plaintiffs also believe the state may be serving as a contracting vendor to set up a cooperative agreement featuring favorable terms to other states that might choose Pearson to administer the PARCC test.

Karen Walker, an attorney for Pearson, told Singleton that there is no such cooperative agreement and that Pearson would have to negotiate terms on a state-by-state basis.

Though the American Institutes for Research did not ask the court to stop the state from implementing the first year of PARCC tests, it wants to ensure a competitive bidding process in the future and limit the Pearson contract to a year.

Whether the plaintiffs would offer a competing bid is unclear.

Singleton gave both sides 30 days — until April 10 — to provide their written proposals for her final order in the case. She said it’s unlikely she will make a ruling until several weeks after that deadline.