TECHNOLOGY
New Standards Sway Purchasing Plans
Technology, curriculum, testing tools in the mix
By Sean Cavanagh | As first appeared in Education Week April 23, 2014. Reprinted with permission from the author.
W
hile debates over the merits of the Common
Core State Standards rage on, many states and
districts are immersed in the business at hand:
buying curricular materials, professional development,
assessment tools, and technology meant to help them
meet the demands of the new academic guidelines and the
forthcoming tests aligned to them.
As contracts worth thousands or even millions of
dollars are awarded, it’s clear that the sweeping standards
and assessments are influencing how states and districts
spend their money. What is less clear, even among those
who have attempted to study the overall costs of standards
and tests, is how much of that spending they would have
incurred anyway as part of the normal process of making
costly updates or replacing resources.
Some work preparing for the common core is being
coordinated across states—perhaps most notably, the two
main state consortia crafting aligned assessments with
$360 million in federal funding. But that collective activity
and spending, which could potentially reduce costs, appears to be the exception.
The complex relationship between the common standards and tests, on one hand, and district spending, on
the other, can be seen in systems like the 22,000-student
Toledo district, in Ohio, which over the past few years has
made major purchases for everything from assessment
18 essentials | summer 2014
systems to wireless technology.
In some cases, such as an ongoing, $4.7 million upgrade of the district’s Internet connectivity, the spending is
closely bound to the common core—specifically, to the online tests that Ohio and other states are scheduled to give
to hundreds of thousands of students in spring 2015.
With other purchases, such as the district’s acquisition
of a formative-assessment system, the decision was based
on many factors, not limited to the common core.
“We did our homework and we were trying to find
[one] assessment system that could be used for different
things, rather than having to use four or five different assessments,” explained Tim Beard, the data manager for th B