Related story: Leaders of local school districts also commented on TNReady’s Feb. 8 outages.
One day after technical failures crippled Tennessee’s long-awaited switch to online testing, Education Commissioner Candice McQueen put the blame on the test’s developer and said the state is reviewing its $108 million contract with Measurement Inc. She directed the state’s school districts to scrub the new online assessment and stick with a paper-and-pencil version for now.
“We have doubts about them going forward, and yes, we have concerns, and yes, we are reviewing that currently,” McQueen said during a news conference on Tuesday morning.
“Our expenditures to Measurement Incorporated are based on what’s actually delivered, and today we don’t have an online platform,” said McQueen, adding that the state has paid the North Carolina vendor only $1.6 million so far.
Measurement Inc. was awarded the contract in late 2014 to develop Tennessee’s new test, dubbed TNReady, to provide an online platform, and to align the assessment with the state’s current Common Core academic standards.
Tennessee opted to use a private vendor after its legislature jettisoned the PARCC test, which was created in collaboration with several other states but criticized as federally intrusive because it wasn’t Tennessee-specific.
Measurement Inc. had worked with the state previously to develop a writing test for grades 3-11. And of five vendors bidding for the bigger task, the company stood out, according to state officials.
But on Monday at 8:25 a.m. CST, only minutes after students began using the online testing platform developed by Measurement Inc., a network outage forced students to stop taking the state’s new achievement test, the result of years of development, preparation and testing.
By the end of the day, McQueen and her leadership team made to call to scrap the online transition for the school year.
“The new nature of the issue yesterday highlighted the uncertainty around this platform,” McQueen said Tuesday. “Despite the many improvements the department has helped make to the system in recent months, we are not confident in the system’s ability to actually perform consistently.”
Many states have experienced glitches in their switch to online tests. For the most part, students in states who used PARCC were able to complete their tests online, though they scored lower than peers who took the PARCC with pencil and paper.
But none of those states’ technical problems appear to have been as widespread as Tennessee’s breakdown — or as far-reaching in its fallout.
McQueen’s decision to completely abandon online testing on the first day of the state’s new assessment was jarring, and it leaves Tennessee education leaders scrambling to assure teachers, students and parents of the test’s accuracy.
Advocates for fair testing note that system failures such as Tennessee’s also occurred in Florida, with other states experiencing significant disruptions in teaching and learning due to the switch to automated assessments.
“Across the country, dozens of jurisdictions have experienced similar technical issues in attempting to introduce automated assessments,” said Bob Schaeffer, public education director, National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a nonpartisan group monitoring the use of standardized tests. “… Rather than heeding the advice of technology or education experts (or the experience of other states), politicians and ideologues have demanded artificial implementation timetables that do not allow sufficient time to develop the necessary infrastructure.”
McQueen expressed confidence that the shift to TNReady was the right thing to do. She maintained that the state’s current law factoring data from the test into teacher evaluations is fair because of the state’s agreement to temporarily lower the weight of this year’s test in evaluations.
She said the paper version of TNReady, also developed by Measurement Inc., is fully aligned to Tennessee’s standards.
McQueen expects Tennessee eventually will join the ranks of states administering online tests, meaning that local districts’ investment in time and money for technology for the new test is not in vain.
Written by Grace Tatter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, a nonprofit news organization covering educational change efforts in the communities where improvement matters most. The network has bureaus in New York,Colorado, Indiana and Tennessee. The organization’s mission is to inform the decisions and actions that lead to better outcomes for children and families by providing deep, local coverage of education policy and practice. This article is reprinted with permission.
