There will be a State Board of Education Meeting today. One of the items on the agenda concerns the 2020-2021 K-3 reading diagnostic tools that can be used by LEAs.

Mark Johnson will be leading that discussion.

On the list of possible vendors are the following:

The only ones that made the “approved list are iStation, i-Ready, MAP, Imagine Learning, and STAR Reading. And as the education reporter from the N&O points out, mClass is not on that list.

Of course, Johnson made sure to include an explanation as to why mClass was not approved.

It seems odd how Johnson goes out of his way to clarify this, but it begs some questions.

Who put together the criteria for this list and what was the “selection” process for the vendors. Johnson’s history with procurement on reading diagnostic programs is really not he best in the world?

Why is mClass not any longer on the list when it was one of the two “finalists” in the last procurement cycle? Did the “criteria” all of a sudden change? Who then made those changes?

And why is this on the agenda? We don’t even know how schools are going to open this coming year and if we are really going to administer standardized tests this next school year.

There are other much more important issues to take care of for the 2020-2021 school year.

But it is interesting to see how Mark Johnson and iStation keep coming up in the same conversations.