It would be easy to give Tennessee an “F” for its work to move teachers and schools into the 21st century with its revised achievement test now known as the TNready electronic testing system aimed at assessing student learning and teacher performance.
Testing, which began Monday, abruptly had to be taken offline after the testing site locked up. Students now will continue the tests with pencil and paper.
If you read the pile-on comments of Hamilton County parents, teachers and even star Principal Jill Levine who turned around the scores and culture of Normal Park Museum Magnet School a few years ago, you would believe we should summarily fail the Tennessee Department of Education.
But we shouldn’t be so hasty.
In fact, while the work of the contractors who designed the online structure of the testing program most definitely did fail, the TNready tests themselves have not. Nor, apparently, has our schools’ too-scant and often-outdated computer hardware.