THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 12, 1996 TAG: 9610120273
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 63 lines
The Virginia Board of Education has chosen a San Antonio testing company to come up with new standardized tests for the state's 1.1 million students, a company that had a problem with some Oklahoma tests earlier this year.
The board announced the choice of Harcourt Brace Educational Measurement on Thursday evening after meeting in closed session.
The company is a division of The Psychological Corp., a subsidiary of Harcourt Brace & Co., well-known for publishing textbooks. HBEM is to develop and administer tests specifically to measure student achievement on the state's new ``Standards of Learning'' in history and social science, English, mathematics and science. The company also is to come up with a second general achievement test comparing Virginia students to their peers across the country, to replace the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills.
In February, HBEM sent the wrong writing tests for some 80,000 Oklahoma children, mixing up tests for grades eight, nine and 11, according to Oklahoma news accounts. The students had to re-take the tests; the company bore all costs. Company officials said a mechanical sorting error caused the mixup and has been corrected, said the reports and Molly K. Zebrowski, manager of proposal development and preparer of the Virginia bid.
She declined further comment on the contract, which will be finalized in about 10 days, after a notification period required by law.
Virginia education officials also declined to talk about the new contract Friday. The bid request, however, called for a six-year commitment, and the General Assembly budgeted $12 million for the first two years of the deal.
State officials have called the new tests crucial to their mission to upgrade public-school education.
``This step today is very important if schools and students are to be accountable for teaching and learning the new academic standards,'' the board's president, Michelle Easton of Reston, said Friday in a news release.
``This testing program will give school administrators, citizens and parents very important information on the educational progress of their students and their schools.''
Both new tests will be given to Virginia schoolchildren in grades three, five, eight and 11 beginning in the spring. Results of the national-comparison test will be recorded and made public immediately. Scores from the first-year's test of the state academic requirements won't be recorded, but will be used to fine-tune the test; the results will become official beginning in 1998.
Harcourt Brace Educational Measurement employs more than 400 people, Zebrowski said. It has annual revenues of about $47.2 million, according to the March 4 edition of Educational Marketer. The company publishes aptitude and achievement tests for elementary and secondary schools, including the Stanford and Metropolitan achievement tests, as well as psychological and speech-language tests for schools and businesses, according to the publication. It handles the standardized testing for 16 other states, Zebrowski said.
HBEM this year contracted with a Washington group to print, distribute and score tests for the National Center on Education and the Economy and the Learning Research and Development Center of the University of Pittsburgh. These problem-solving, essay-question tests will be used to compare the performance of U.S. students with those from other countries, according to Educational Marketer. MEMO: Contributing to this report was news researcher Diana Diehl.
KEYWORDS: EDUCATION STANDARDIZED TESTS by CNB