News

"The Court Orders that until further order, decree, or judgment of the Court, Defendants, and each of them, and all those in active concert or participation with them are enjoined and restrained from making any payments in the form of membership fees to the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium, the University of California, or the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing, whether directly or indirectly, including but not limited to disbursements pursuant to "Invoice #1″ issued to the State by "Smarter Balanced at UCLA" and dated September 29, 2014. Unless otherwise provided by this Court, this temporary restraining order will expire fifteen days from the date on which it it entered."

The activists in Missouri admit that this a great step forward, but that there is much work that still need to be done:

This ruling is a sign that the court sees some merit in the case, that SBAC may be an illegal interstate compact and thus the state's membership in it should be null and void...

...Neither the TRO nor the suit itself would bar the state from purchasing the SBAC test outright. However, if other states were to withdraw their membership based on the same grounds, this would require a significant reorganization of the test supplier into a commercial venture as opposed to a testing consortia of states.  As such it would weaken the federal government's requirement that states use the consortia tests in order to comply with federal regulation or waivers, because then the federal government would be granting a monopoly to a particular private company.

We will be following this case closely. Stay tuned!