Last year we successfully got the Utah State Board of Education to get us out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (a hollow victory). The SBAC is one of 2 federally funded assessment consortia meant to test Common Core students, and through its grant application push states onto Common Core. Utah signed onto SBAC in our Race to the Top application and became one of 17 governing member states. When the state board voted to exit SBAC last year, the state office of education was quite upset. From inside the USOE, we received a tip that they were writing a new Request for Proposal (RFP) for an assessment partner in such a way that only an SBAC partner entity could be chosen for our new assessment partner. We