ETS Wins New Jersey Standardized Testing Contract.

Business Editors/Education Writers

PRINCETON, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 14, 2003

The New Jersey Department of Education has awarded ETS a four-year, $35 million contract to oversee the development and administration of reading and math tests for more than 200,000 New Jersey third- and fourth-grade students.

"I am extremely proud that we won this contract," said Kurt Landgraf, President and CEO of ETS. "It is especially meaningful to win such a significant project from our home state. We look forward to working with Governor McGreevey and Commissioner of Education Librera to ensure our tests meet New Jersey's needs and thank them for entrusting this important task to ETS."

The New Jersey contract is the third testing program ETS will manage to help states and territories comply with their requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, after those in California and Puerto Rico. In addition, ETS is a test-development subcontractor to NCS Pearson for K-12 testing programs in Georgia and Florida. ETS also has won a high-school testing contract with Maryland.

"We've earned a lot of new business in the last two years, and every one of those contracts has been hard-won and gratifying," said John Oswald, Vice President of ETS's K-12 Assessments Division, which prepared the bid. "This project is yet another confirmation of our central place in the K-12 market, and it is another step toward our goal of becoming the leader in that market."

Under the contract, ETS will head a project group that will:

-- develop and score a customized assessment in language arts literacy and mathematics for grade three, to be administered annually starting in May;

-- propose a fourth-grade assessment in language arts literacy and math to replace the state's Elementary School Proficiency Assessment, also to be administered in May;

-- develop a fourth-grade science assessment, to be administered in the spring of 2004.

The contract also requires Spanish-language versions of the tests to accommodate approximately 2,500 limited-English-proficiency students.

In all, New Jersey will administer the third- and fourth-grade tests to approximately 105,000 third graders and an equal number of fourth graders in about 600 school districts, or approximately 1,400 district and charter schools throughout the state.

Working with two subcontractors, ETS will be responsible for overall project direction, test assembly, psychometrics, publishing and distribution, scoring, and quality control of all processes. The subcontractors are Riverside Publishing Company of Illinois, which will develop the test items aligned with state standards and provide already existing items for the first year's assessment, and The Grow Network, of New York City, which will work with ETS to develop state-of-the-art reporting for the program. The Grow Network has experience with large-scale assessments including a subcontract with ETS for reporting under the California STAR program.

The assessments represent the first phase of the New Jersey Department of Education's plans to meet the assessment requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act. Signed into law last January, the act mandates testing in literacy and math in grades three through eight and 10 through 12 by the 2005-2006 school year. Under both state and federal law, all assessments must be tied to the state's Core Curriculum Content Standards.

ABOUT ETS: With estimated consolidated revenues of $700 million for FY2002, Educational Testing Service (ETS) is the world's largest private educational testing and measurement organization and a leader in education research. The company is dedicated to serving the needs of individuals, educational institutions, and government bodies in nearly 200 countries. ETS develops and administers more than 12 million tests worldwide. For more information, access the ETS Web site at www.ets.org.

ETS also operates two subsidiaries: Chauncey Group International, www.chauncey.com, the leading provider of certification and licensing examinations for professionals, businesses, and government agencies; and ETS Technologies, www.etstechnologies.com, which identifies, develops and deploys innovative technologies in support of online learning and assessment applications.