An “F” for TNReady

The Johnson City Press offers a grade to the state for TNReady testing this year and it’s not a good one.

Here’s some of what they had to say:

Tennessee deserves a resounding “F” for TNReady. Schools should be able to test their pupils without hampering instruction and limiting the scope of education, and both parents and teachers should be able to have confidence in the scores. Surely, other states have a model Tennessee can apply.

The writers note that this is not the first year of testing trouble:

For more than a quarter century, Tennesseans have watched the state’s Department of Education fumble around with standardized testing and school accountability measurements. The last four years have been especially comical, leaving teachers and parents without a consistent understanding of achievement while squandering valuable learning time for students.

TNReady Irony?

So the state leapt into the ironically named TNReady, a new set of tests replacing the TCAP, in 2015. TNReady has been a disaster from the word go. The first year, the state canceled the online tests altogether for grades 3-8 and fired the original vendor, which failed to integrate the test online.

Last fall, the problems mounted as the Department of Education announced a new vendor had incorrectly scored about 9,400 TNReady assessments, affecting 70 schools in 33 districts. This year, that same vendor was the victim of what state officials described as a deliberate cyberattack, and connectivity issues slowed the whole system, thrusting everything into question yet again.

While the legislature took some action this year to address the immediate crisis, the state’s next Governor and the 2019 General Assembly should carefully examine our state’s testing culture. In the meantime, local school boards should be more aggressive in pushing back against a Commissioner of Education who has exhibited indifference to the chaos caused by years of bad testing management.

 

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