States

Ohio Poised to Ditch PARCC Common-Core Test in Budget Sent to Gov. Kasich

By Andrew Ujifusa — June 29, 2015 1 min read
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Ohio is close to abandoning the Common Core State Standards exam it used during the past school year.

House Bill 64, the biennial 2015-17 budget that lawmakers sent to Gov. John Kasich, prohibits the state from purchasing the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) exam—see page 334 of the document at the preceding link. Kasich, a Republican, has vigorously defended the common core in the face of GOP antagonism to the standards, and the academic standards look safe in the Buckeye State. But he isn’t expected to use his line-item-veto power to eliminate the provision that defunds the PARCC test, and a June 27 Columbus Dispatch story about Kasich’s public remarks on the budget bill doesn’t mention any remarks from the governor about preserving PARCC.

The budget passed by the Ohio House of Representatives required state exams to be “nationally normed, standardized assessments,” but the final budget bill sent to Kasich does not contain that language.

The Ohio budget plan was passed just a few days after Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, declared that he won’t agree to let his state administer the PARCC exam in 2015-16.

Ohio has the seventh-largest public K-12 enrollment of all 50 states, according to recent federal statistics. But the CEO of Parcc Inc., Laura Slover, told my colleague, Catherine Gewertz, that even if the state doesn’t use PARCC next year, the group believes “current costs can be maintained” for the states that continue to use the exam. Check out my Gewertz’s blog post about Slover’s letter, which also touches on the situation in Arkansas.

A version of this news article first appeared in the State EdWatch blog.