STATE OF OKLAHOMA

1st Session of the 54th Legislature (2013)

HOUSE
RESOLUTION 1032	By:	McDaniel (Curtis), Cox and Hulbert

AS INTRODUCED

A Resolution directing the State Board of Education to cancel certain testing contracts and cease relations with CTB/McGraw-Hill; and directing distribution.

WHEREAS, in 2012 the State Department of Education entered into a one-year contract with CTB/McGraw-Hill to administer statewide standardized tests that judge student proficiency and overall school performance; and
WHEREAS, on April 29, 2013, thousands of Oklahoma students experienced an interruption during online high-stakes testing due to an outage of the servers for the CTB/McGraw-Hill testing company; and
WHEREAS, statewide school testing again came to a halt when the servers for CTB/McGraw-Hill underwent a subsequent Internet disruption on April 30, 2013; and
WHEREAS, the outages affected the statewide school tests for grades three to eight and end-of-instruction tests for students up to grade 12; and
WHEREAS, these interruptions to the online testing were caused by the gross inefficiencies of CTB/McGraw-Hill and caused damage to the credibility of the future use of online testing, added greatly to the anxiety of faculty and students in what is already a high-anxiety testing situation, jeopardized the graduation status of high school students across the state, wasted countless hours of valuable classroom time across the state, wasted valuable state funding, resulted in a breach of privacy when student data was made available to administrators from other districts during the log-on process and put into question the A-F school report card system which in part is based on testing scores; and
WHEREAS, the State Department of Education was negligent in entering into a contract with CTB/McGraw-Hill even after being made aware of previous problems that CTB/McGraw-Hill had experienced in delivering online testing in other states, specifically in Indiana in 2011; and 
WHEREAS, the State Department of Education was negligent in scoring the first Request for Proposal (RFP) for the online testing contract and after receiving protests the Department was forced to throw out the first RFP and issue a second RFP which resulted in delays in preparing for the administration of tests during the spring testing window and the Department was further negligent in not taking any action to correct or mitigate problems created by the delay; and  
WHEREAS, the State Department of Education was negligent in unnecessarily spending millions in additional money on the statewide testing contract with CTB/McGraw-Hill which submitted the most expensive proposal in response to the RFP of all the vendors submitting proposals.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE 1ST SESSION OF THE 54TH OKLAHOMA LEGISLATURE:
THAT the Oklahoma House of Representatives directs the State Board of Education to take action to cancel the current online testing contract with CTB/McGraw-Hill and to cease all contractual relations with CTB/McGraw-Hill relating to online testing.
THAT a copy of this resolution be distributed to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the members of the State Board of Education.

54-1-8110	KB	05/24/13