Longtime P21 member South Dakota has chosen Learning.com’s 21st Century Skills Assessment to “test all of the state’s eighth-grade students to understand how well students grasp critical 21st century skills,” says BusinessWire.
You can read about Learning.com’s product here. Learning.com promises that the product tests “creativity and innovation; communication and collaboration; research and information fluency; critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making; digital citizenship; and technology operations and concepts.”
That skill list is taken all but verbatim from P21′s website. Which I suppose isn’t surprising since Learning.com sits on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.
Hmm. A P21 board member gets a lucrative contract with a P21 member state to develop 21st century skills assessments. Haven’t we heard this story before? Yes–the same thing happened in Massachusetts when another P21 board member, Measured Progress, landed the contract to revise MCAS.
Sounds like good old-fashioned logrolling to us.
Tags: P21
For interest, here’s an example of how “21st Century Skills” are being promoted/sold in higher education:
http://www.innovativeeducators.org/retention_p/801.htm
[...] will be very, very expensive. That’s interesting because two other P21 member states – South Dakota and Massachusetts – chose to award their lucrative 21st century skills assessment contracts to P21 [...]