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Three Firms Bid for Pricey Pact to Administer MCAS

A multimillion dollar contract to administer the MCAS exam for the state is up for grabs.

A panel of education experts will meet behind closed doors today to hear from the three testing companies that have submitted bids, a source familiar with the process said. The state Department of Education hopes to ink a new contract by the first of the year, spokeswoman Heidi B. Perlman said.

Perlman refused to say how much the bids were for, but the current five-year contract was signed with Harcourt Educational Measurement in 2000 for $71 million.

That agreement expires at the end of 2004. Harcourt is one of the companies being considered. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Harcourt's bid is the highest.

The other two contractors are Pearson Educational Management, the same company developing Massachusetts' test for English language learners; and Measured Progress, a modern version of Advanced Systems, the company that served as the previous MCAS contractor. If a new contractor is selected, no changes would be made to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test, Perlman said.

The current contract with Harcourt includes a provision allowing for penalties of up to $2 million for delays or inaccuracies with the test.

That clause has been invoked, Perlman said, but she could not say for how much. She did not know if a similar provision was called for in the new contract.

Any mistake in the high-stakes MCAS exam, which 10th-graders must pass in order to graduate, is often a high-profile one. Just this month the DOE agreed that there were two correct answers to an eighth-grade science test, forcing them to change the scores of 1,367 students.




— Kevin Rothstein
Three firms bid for pricey pact to administer MCAS
Boston Herald
2003-12-15
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/localRegional.bg?articleid=545

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