CANCELLED!

While school boards in Tennessee discuss not delivering TNReady Phase II and the state’s Department of Education says doing so would cost districts their BEP money, the Commissioner of Education in Alaska has scrapped new computer-based tests this year.

The Washington Post reports:

Alaska officials have canceled the state’s computer-based standardized testing for the year, citing repeated technical problems that were interrupting students’ exams, throwing schools into chaos and threatening the validity of results.

“I don’t believe under the circumstances that the assessment we were administering was a valid assessment,” Susan McCauley, interim commissioner of the state education department, said in an interview Tuesday. “Validity relies on a standardized assessment condition, and things were anything but standardized in Alaska last week.”

If this sounds familiar, it should. Tennessee’s new tests got off to a rocky start in February and the backup plan, pencil and paper testing, faced a bumpy rollout as well.

Instead of cancelling this year’s tests or at least moving forward without administering Phase II, Tennessee is plowing ahead. And, despite serious questions regarding data validity, the results could still count for some teacher evaluations and for school and district accountability.

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