Dive Brief:
- On Monday, New Mexico District Court Judge Sarah Singleton found that the American Institutes for Research (AIR) lacked the legal standing to challenge the decision by the PARCC states to award a massive testing contract to Pearson.
- As a result, the ruling also effectively put an end to AIR's other complaints, including accusations that the contract process was biased in favor of Pearson.
- AIR does not plan to appeal the ruling.
Dive Insight:
Testing contracts are big money for providers and the one awarded by PARCC was a particularly big fish. AIR estimated that the work the contract entailed could be worth as much as $1 billion. It included developing test items, delivering test materials, and scoring and reporting results. AIR alleged that the contract included work Pearson had already won in a separate bidding process, which gave them an easy in for the new work.
Only Pearson bid on the contract, a fact AIR said was due to the heavy and obvious bias of the process. However, as a result, that meant that AIR did not qualify as a legal party to process and could not pursue its complaint.
"We have been confident from the start that New Mexico conducted a fair and open RFP process," David Connerty-Marin, a spokesman for PARCC, told EdWeek. "Thousands of educators from the PARCC states have built this test on the belief that high quality assessments go hand in hand with high quality standards. Our job is to make that a reality, and we have done that."
