Everyone appears to be getting a mulligan this year on Tennessee’s failed standardized student assessment test platform.
Student scores, it was announced earlier, won’t be counted because of the earlier problems with the TNReady test. Legislators voted to hold teachers “harmless” on the evaluation measures. And the Achievement School District, which runs low-performing schools for the state when the schools fail to achieve significant improvement, said it won’t take over any schools during the 2017-2018 school year.
Even Measurement Inc., the North Carolina vendor of the tests, gets to walk away with $1.6 million of the state’s $108 million, five-year contract with the company.
More’s the pity, especially for Hamilton County Schools, which would have been desperate to show improvement over last year’s scores on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) tests.
The test scores also would have been vital to the momentum for both public support of the Chattanooga 2.0 movement to improve schools and motivation for what is hoped will be a nationwide search for a new superintendent for its school district.