The company that North Carolina K-3 schools used for reading assessments has filed a formal protest over the Read To Achieve contract it lost.
The company, Amplify Education Inc., says when the state awarded the contract to IStation, it got a product that doesn’t meet North Carolina reading assessment requirements.
In a press release, the company says, “IStation’s product plainly fails to meet key requirements established by North Carolina law, including in demonstrating accuracy in assessment outcomes, and in identifying students with dyslexia.”
Amplify argues that Istation’s product doesn’t adequately predict students at risk of reading difficulty, doesn’t screen well for dyslexia, is developmentally inappropriate for K-3 students, doesn’t measure expressive oral language and doesn’t effectively measure a student’s progress.
The contract was awarded to Istation in June when State School Superintendent Mark Johnson announced that he signed a contract with the company to use their web-based reading assessment over the one-on-one in person assessments teachers have been doing through Amplify’s mClass program since 2013.