How Will Georgia Assess the Common Core?

The consortium is called the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC. Georgia Department of Education spokesperson Matt Cardoza says officials have been talking with other states that have withdrawn from PARCC about developing a regional test.

“I think everybody is interested in some kind of multi-state approach,” Cardoza says. “So there’s some comparability, so there’s economies of scale. But, the specifics of that are yet to be determined because of the RFP that’s out right now.”

The state has asked for RFPs, or Requests for Proposals, from vendors. Cardoza declined to say which states Georgia has talked with. Regionally, Alabama and Florida have also withdrawn from PARCC.

Michael J. Petrilli is the executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. At an Atlanta education forum last week, Petrilli said coming up with a test to replace PARCC won’t be easy.

“The most important thing is whether or not Georgia is going to have an assessment that is pitched at a high enough level,” Petrilli said. “And those assessments are difficult to design, they tend to take a lot of time for students to take, and they tend to be expensive.”

The state’s contract with its current test vendor ends this school year. Cardoza says the state has been working on developing new assessments even before it withdrew from PARCC. He says officials plan to have a new test in place by the next school year, which starts in August.

“We’ve been doing some of the field testing, we’ve been doing some of the other things required to have that test operational and right now, we’re to where I think we can meet that time frame,” he says.

Officials won’t know a per-student cost until the General Assembly approves next year’s budget. The legislature is back in session in January.