Next Up: Zombie PARCC

If you aren't a regular reader of Campbell Brown's The 74 website, that's probably just as well. But this week there are two pieces there worth seeing.

One is this piece by Robert Pondiscio, one of the best yet in the genre of "we will now go ahead and agree with what public school defenders have been saying all along" writings that have become all the rage. It is an excellent argument against the Big Standardized Test, and it comes from reform-ville. Go ahead and read it.

But even as Pondiscio is joining the chorus of test deniers, the 74 is also running a piece by Brendan Lowe entitled "Primed for Amazon-Style Question Shopping, New Meridian Opens Fresh Chapter for Maligned Common Core Test."

Uh-oh.

First the good news. PARCC is just about down to two members. But if you thought it was just going to quietly take a deserved spot on the trash heap of history, well, meet Arthur VanderVeen. VanderVeen has been around. In the late nineties he founded a company to develop digital curriculum, but it failed. He was an executive director of College Board and sold the SAT as a way to meet federal high school assessment requirements under NCLB. He worked in NYC schools, starting under Joel Klein overseeing assessment, then bumped up to Chief of Innovation, where he founded the NYC iZone program focused on ed tech and personalized [sic] learning. Then he was the vice-president of business strategy and development for Compass Learning (which was eaten up by Edgenuity a few months after he left). He's exactly the kind of guy whose LinkedIn profile sounds like this:

Highly effective leader who integrates strategy, talent management, and disciplined execution to create successful, sustainable, and profitable enterprises. 20 years of leadership experience in business development, strategic partnerships, and product management in K-12 education. Expert in assessment management and personalized learning technologies. Has focused his career on fostering strategic public-private partnerships that deliver innovative products and services to K-12 schools.

After leaving Compass, VanderVeen became president and CEO at New Meridian, a company that hypes its ability to "to produce highly flexible assessments that accurately measure the skills that matter most." They look to collaborate with districts or states, or help states and districts that want to collaborate with each other. Their executive team includes three former Pearson execs and two College Board vets. The Gates and Hewlett foundations are among the financial backers.

That sounds like a lot of test items. If only there were a way to find a whole mountain of items that was lying around unused because the parent company that created it was tanking.

VanderVeen is the founding CEO of New Meridian, a nonprofit he created with other assessment industry veterans to make a run at acquiring the rights to PARCC’s question bank. VanderVeen’s team prevailed in April 2017, and now New Meridian is moving to adapt PARCC to an environment where multi-state consortia are going the way of the dinosaurs.

VanderVeen's vision is an Amazon of testing items, a giant catalog through which zombie-PARCC can be chopped up and sold off-- repeatedly-- for parts. This strikes me as a challenging for a couple of reasons. One is that PARCC's test bank has never exactly won rave reviews; there's a reason that many states dropped the thing and it's not just because it was expensive and Common Core became a toxic brand. The other is that creating a test isn't just a matter of writing the items-- the mix of items is also critical. In zombie terms, you can't build an effective zombie out of six heads and no legs.

Still, some states that have gone it alone have been a mess. Tennessee's attempt was a technical nightmare. And Florida (state motto: there's nothing about education we can't screw up) had its own series of do-it-yourself disasters. Why will this be better? Because VanderVeen is a more gifted salesman. As he explains it:

They never had to operate in the discipline of being customer-centric and really deliver value and ask questions. Is a 14-hour test too long? Might states balk at that? Is the cost too high? Are the constraints of working with a single vendor just not going to be acceptable to states? They didn’t have to think about that until they did. In an open market, states, or customers, have choices, and states made choices, and they walked away.

In other words, they spent too much time thinking about the educational implications of the test instead of managing a product for the marketplace.

Will this be a hard sell? Apparently not, because so far eight states, DC, and two other "entities" have signed up for this ( IL, MD, NJ, NM, MA, RI, LA, CO).

But wait, you say. The PARCC was launched with a big pile of taxpayer money. If it folds, don't taxpayers deserve a refund? Read carefully and you'll see that New Meridian won the right to be "the exclusive agent authorized to license test content owned by CCSSO and jointly developed by the former PARCC states." So PARCC is a true zombie-- not actually dead, but with its corpse animated by some force other than its own life.

Of course, the zombie solution may be great for people looking for an easy escape from PARCC, but it will require an elevated level of attentiveness from PARCC opponents. As Lowe reports, Phil Murphy won the New Jersey governor's seat in part by promising to get rid of PARCC, but as his Department of Education looked to replace PARCC, they hired-- you guessed it-- New Meridian to do the job. So New Jersey will replace PARCC with zombie PARCC.

So there it is. Even as folks on the reformy team speak out against the BS Tests, the fact remains that they are just too much of an asset to go away quietly. If you leave a pile of millions of dollars lying around, even if it is soaked in pig urine, somebody will be unable to resist the urge to pick it up.