The state is starting over on a high-profile testing contract.
The abrupt decision won’t immediately affect the Idaho Reading Indicator — a screening exam given to some 90,000 kindergarten through third-grade students. The state will use its current version of the IRI, and the state’s current test vendor will continue to administer the test.
But the contract hiccup comes at an important juncture for the IRI, and the state’s early reading initiative.
Gov. Brad Little and other state leaders have decried Idaho’s stagnant reading scores. And while the IRI is designed to give teachers diagnostic information they can use to help struggling readers, the test scores are often used as a metric to gauge the success of Idaho’s $72 million-a-year literacy initiative, one of Little’s top education priorities.
And on top of all of that, half of the state’s literacy funding is tied to IRI scores, in hopes of incentivizing improvements.
The process of renewing the IRI, and possibly revamping it, hit its standstill on Aug. 16.
On that date, the Idaho Department of Education told IRI bidders that it would start over, preparing a new request for proposals. The department said the first request failed to consider a section of Idaho code, requiring schools to use digital reading intervention programs from a State Board of Education-approved list.
In other words, the state wasn’t requiring would-be IRI vendors to provide a state-approved intervention program. And that might have forced schools to pay their own money to use a state-approved program.
“This is not an acceptable outcome,” chief deputy superintendent Ryan Cantrell said in a letter to school leaders Friday.
However, Cantrell also downplayed the impact of the delay. The current version of the IRI will remain in place this school year, and he said that was the department’s plan all along.
“Making sure that the state, our schools and our students get the right assessment is — above all else — our top priority,” he said.
Dallas-based Istation, the state’s IRI vendor since 2016, was one of the four finalists in the bidding process that was shut down this month. Other bidders include two vendors who sought the contract in 2016 — Curriculum Associates of North Billerica, Mass., and Renaissance of Wisconsin Rapids, Wis. — and Washington, D.C.-based Cambium.
Istation and Curriculum Associates appear on the State Board’s list of approved literacy intervention vendors.
Istation was the state’s low bidder on the 2016 IRI contract. But the cost has risen over the years. In 2017-18, Istation received $64,350 to pilot the test. In 2023-24, the cost of the exam and related services had reached $724,000.
With time and increased costs, questions have come. The state delayed the release of the spring 2023 scores by nearly four months, after receiving inaccurate data from Istation — a widespread glitch that affected students in more than 90% of districts and charter schools.
