FILE – In this Sept. 18, 2014 file photo, Candice McQueen, of Lipscomb University, makes a presentation at Tennessee’s Education Summit in Nashville, Tenn. McQueen, now Tennessee’s education commissioner, recently launched a statewide effort to visit with 10,000 teachers by the end of the 2015-16 school year. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File) 
Kirk Kelly, director of testing and accountability for Hamilton County SchoolsTennessee students who have been preparing to take this year’s standardized assessment online will return to using paper and pencil.
Schools across the state, including many in Hamilton County, attempted to log on to the testing site Monday morning only to find it not working.
“I had fourth-graders at my school halfway through writing their essays when they started getting locked out of the test,” said Jill Levine, principal at Normal Park Museum Magnet School. “It was chaos.”
Because of the statewide technical glitches, Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen sent an email to school district leaders Monday around 5:30 p.m., saying the problems were with the testing platform created by Measurement Inc., the company that developed TNReady.
“Despite the many improvements the department has helped to make to the system in recent months, and based on the events of [Monday] morning, we are not confident in the system’s ability to perform consistently,” McQueen said in the email. “In the best interest of our students and to protect instructional time, we cannot continue with Measurement Inc.’s online testing platform in its current state.”