two ways: by pooling their resources, states could get more for the money they spend on assessment, and interstate collaboration is likely to facilitate deeper cognitive analysis of standards and objectives for student performance than is possible with separate standards.

The question of how much states could save by collaborating on assessment begins with the question of how much they are currently spending. Savings would be likely to be limited to test development, since many perstudent costs for administration, scoring, and reporting, would not be affected. Wise discussed an informal survey he had done of development costs (Wise, 2009), which included 15 state testing programs and a few test developers and included only total contract costs, not internal staff costs: the results are shown in Table 6-1.

Perhaps most notable in the data is the wide range in what states are spending, as shown in the minimum and maximum columns. Wise also noted that on average the states surveyed were spending well over $1million annually to develop assessments that require human scoring and $26 per student to score them.

A total of $350 million will be awarded to states through the Race to the Top initiative. That money, plus savings that winning states or consortia could achieve by pooling their resources, together with potential savings from such