NC superintendent asks court to step in and lift stay in Read To Achieve contract
State Superintendent Mark Johnson is asking for the courts to step in and lift an order barring the awarding of a new multi-million dollar Read To Achieve testing contract.
Last week, Jonathan Shaw, the chief counsel for the state Department of Information Technology, issued an order upholding an August stay that blocks the $8.3 million, three-year contract given to Istation to test the reading skills of K-3 students
Attorneys representing DPI filed a motion Monday asking the Superior Court of Wake County to take over the case. The order also requests that the courts lift the stay while they review the validity of the contract.
The motion argues that if the stay is left in place, DPI won’t be able to enforce its duties to carry out the Read To Achieve program. DPI says the issue is time sensitive because some elementary schools are planning to use the program this month to test students to comply with Read To Achieve.
“A failure to carry out those duties puts the children of North Carolina at great risk by denying them a tool intended to assist each child in learning to read, which is a key component of each child’s constitutional right to receive a ‘sound basic education,’” DPI says in its motion.
Since the Read To Achieve program began in 2013, K-3 students have read out loud to their teachers while the teachers use Amplify Education’s mClass program to assess their skills.
But in June, Johnson announced he was awarding the new Read To Achieve testing contract to Istation. Students will now be tested on a computer program, with the results being provided to teachers.
The decision to switch programs has been controversial, with teachers across the state questioning the change.
Public records show an evaluation committee formed by Johnson had ranked mClass ahead of Istation.
Johnson has accused the evaluation committee of “employing biased procedures” that benefited Amplify and having made false statements about Istation. He also said that some committee members violated the confidentiality of the procurement process by discussing it with outsiders.
Those arguments were echoed in Monday’s court documents, where DPI said the committee had made no formal recommendation.
Johnson went on to form a new committee that recommended Istation.
Amplify appealed the decision to DIT, which granted the stay. In the meantime, Johnson worked out a deal with Istation to train teachers for free in the new program, something that Shaw declined last week to throw out.
In Shaw’s order last week, he said there’s sufficient information to believe DPI violated the law and “jeopardized the integrity and fairness of the procurement process.” Johnson responded last week with a blistering statement accusing Shaw of being incompetent and making “factual errors” in his order.
“Absent immediate action by this Court, these errors will evade proper review and will continue to harm our state’s educational system by depriving the state of a contract to provide the vital literary services required by the Read To Achieve program,” DPI says in the motion.
This story was originally published December 16, 2019 at 5:11 PM.
