LA and PARCC

Louisiana Commissioner of Administration Kristy Nichols today said she would suspend the state’s approval of a contract that the education department intended to use to purchase the PARCC Common Core exams and launch an investigation into whether it should have been put out for competitive bid.
The move adds another twist to — and intensifies the political infighting over — Gov. Bobby Jindal’s move today to pull the state out of PARCC and repeal the Common Core.
State Superintendent John White has said that the governor has no legal authority to pull out of PARCC or seek new bids on for standardized testing. He said he planned to proceed with full implementation of Common Core and the PARCC exams.
But tonight Nichols said that White appeared to have no authority to purchase and administer the PARCC tests using an old consulting contract dating to 2003. The contract, with the testing company Data Recognition Services, has been amended multiple times, most recently in 2013, to allow the firm to continue to administer each new annual iteration of the state’s tests. White planned to amend that contract again to administer the PARCC Common Core tests, Nichols said.
But she said that introducing the new type of exam, potentially with different subcontractors, was beyond the scope of the original contract. White’s plan, she said, appeared to “circumvent procurement laws.”
“If that’s the intention,” Nichols said, “… yeah, we’re going to have a problem with it.”
Nichols served as Jindal’s deputy chief of staff before taking on her current role.

Nichols said she would send the state education department a letter this evening demanding that they provide justification for using the existing contract for the new exams. Once she hears back, she said, her office will review the contract and the department’s reasoning and determine whether to allow the contract to proceed or require an entirely new process. In the meantime, she has suspended payment to the company named in the contract.