Franchises for Educational Assessment?

Every once in a while there are small pleasures in life that we have the opportunity to enjoy. Mine is when you feel like a company is always abusing you, the ability to fire it and find a new product. When we lived in an apartment in Michigan, my wife and I would always complain about Ameritech cable. It rarely worked and when it did, the reception was poor. Many times I would go through the customer service rigamarole trying to get it fixed, but in the end, the product was the product. Unfortunately, Ameritech had a franchise at the time with the village and was the only provider of cable in the area. In addition, the apartment complex didn't allow satellite at the time (it was the 90's). Thus we had two choices, rabbit ears television or to take the abuse from Ameritech. It was a great pleasure to become a homeowner and to have my choice between cable and satellite television. I gladly fired the cable company and chose a satellite service. I still smile about it.

Recently, the Village of Deerfield, where I live, had been having trouble with their electric service. The village had a franchise with ComEd and ended up suing the provider for lack of reliable service. Eventually, after years of wrangling with ComEd, the village joined an electricity aggregation consortium and opened up more freedom of choice for its residents. Simply they got frustrated and had to find a way out from the lack of competition creating monopoly-like service.

One critical question in education is why are we allowing assessment providers to have franchise rights for large scale assessment. Why is Illinois a PARCC state and California a Smarter Balanced state? Why can't they and the ACT corporation, the College Board, the Northwest Evaluation Association, Pearson Education, and anyone else who wants in on the assessment business go through an approval process and compete district by district for providing assessments. People trust SAT and ACT scores because we have known them for years and they are less impacted by legislative influence. They are seen as valid, reliable, and constant. Many adults still know the SAT and ACT scores. They remember taking the tests and what it meant for their future. State assessments aren't viewed in the same way. They are not viewed as reliable, and with the state frequently changing the assessments and the cut scores, they are not constants. Many districts, including my own, want outside evaluation mechanisms of our choice. Why not give it to us? What should states franchise their assessment mechanisms? These corporations and certainly our state and federal education leaders are capable of running correlation studies between the assessments to determine achievement and growth profiles. Why is it that schools need to become more competitive but the assessment providers don't? If open market reforms are so good for education, then lets try it with measurement devices also.

The simple fact of the matter is that there is a lot of money involved here. For many states assessment costs for PARCC and Smarter Balanced will significantly increase. Furthermore, the amount of student and teacher time will significantly increase in many states. There are vested interests in having guaranteed revenue streams for these assessment providers. However are those interests the same as parents, students, school districts, and school communities. We don't need to reinvent the cable franchise. For the most part, these are for-profit companies, let them compete for our business. It will help increase their customer service and create a greater level of quality for all of us. 

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