The AP’s Andrew DeMillo reports that Gov. Asa Hutchinson said today he’s willing to consider other standardized tests besides the ACT Aspire for the coming school year. The statement comes after the governor told the Arkansas Department of Education on Monday to ditch its contract with PARCC, which provided the assessment used in Arkansas schools in the academic year that just concluded.

Just as importantly, the governor also mentioned that he plans to fill the three soon-to-be-vacant seats on the State Board of Education in the next couple of weeks. Those positions sometimes sit empty for a time, but apparently Hutchinson plans to make a move sooner rather than later.

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 The AP: 

“(Board members) have a legitimate point that we need to have perhaps an open bidding process on that, so that’s the kind of discussion we’re having,” Hutchinson told reporters after speaking at the Little Rock Rotary Club.

Hutchinson said Monday that the 2010 memorandum of understanding with PARCC gave him authority to withdraw from the testing consortium but that it will be up to the board to decide which test to use as a replacement. The board voted against Hutchinson’s proposal by 7-1, but the Republican governor will have three new appointments to the board for two members whose terms expire at the end of the month and another who is resigning.

Hutchinson said he hoped to make those appointments by the board’s next meeting on July 9. He said his choice for the new board members won’t depend on whether they support his decision to drop the PARCC test.

“I don’t believe in litmus tests,” Hutchinson said. “I want somebody whose heart is for education and for the children and will commit themselves to that.”

This is in part an acknowledgment that — as I mentioned earlier — the authority to pick a new contract ultimately rests with the State Board of Education. When it comes to a new testing contract, the governor can destroy but not create.

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The statement today is an encouraging sign the governor isn’t as inflexible on this issue than his statement yesterday first seemed to suggest. The obvious question now is this: What other vendors might the state choose from?

Strangely, that’s not at all clear. In addition to PARCC and ACT Aspire, there’s also the Common Core-aligned test used by another multi-state consortium with the margarine-evoking name of Smarter Balanced. And, some states now are using their own assessments aligned to Common Core. Tennessee, for example, similarly broke away from PARCC last year and instead is debuting a test called TNReady, which is being developed by a North Carolina-based company called Measurement, Inc. 

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Arkansas could contract with a testing provider to develop its own assessment for the coming year aligned to Common Core standards. Of course, that would mean easy cross-state comparisons of data — which was always supposed to be one of the selling points of Common Core — wouldn’t be possible. The reason why there’s such uncertainty about what testing options are even out there is that this dilemma isn’t unique to Arkansas. Between mistrust (and outright paranoia) surrounding Common Core, fatigue with the absurdist testing regime that’s evolved in public education and political jostling around both those issues, the American testing landscape is in chaos.

Note, by the way, that the state board’s June 11 vote of 7-1 to reject the ACT Aspire contract wouldn’t have changed much even if three Hutchinson loyalists replaced the outgoing members. Alice Mahony was the lone dissent, and then-Chairman Sam Ledbetter didn’t vote. If Kim Davis (who is soon resigning from the board) had been replaced with a member more sympathetic to ACT Aspire, the vote on the issue still would have stood at 6-2.

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