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.
Tennessee Commissioner of Education Candice McQueen rightly pulled the plug Wednesday on any more testing for elementary or middle school students and by terminating the state's contract with Measurement Inc. The state last week had pushed the outer limit for test taking to May 10, then felt it had no choice when some 2 million documents related to the tests hadn't been shipped to the state by Wednesday morning.
"The failure of this vendor has let down the teachers and families of this state," she said, adding that 100 percent of districts still were waiting on some grade 3-8 materials to arrive. "Districts have exceeded their responsibility and obligation to wait for grades 3-8 materials, and we will not ask districts to continue waiting on a vendor that has repeatedly failed us."
The initial failure occurred in trial testing last October when the system crashed. In February, when the test was designed to be taken, glitches in the online platform prevented all schools from taking the test. At that time, McQueen decided schools would return to paper and pencil testing. Then when the paper tests for part one of the test were delayed in arriving, she canceled part two of the test.
TNReady became a snowball of embarrassment rolling down hill.
The state signed the contract with Measurement Inc., which on its website claims to have performed test development and/or scoring services for more than 25 state departments of education, in 2014, before the beginning of McQueen's tenure.
The state had also used the company to score students' TCAP writing assessments from 2004 through 2008 at a cost of $6.5 million. But an audit by the U.S. Department of Education found that some graders couldn't prove they had a necessary bachelor's degree, others had expired teachers licenses and one had only a high school diploma. In summation, the audit said Measurement Inc. couldn't demonstrate graders were properly supervised during scoring and, thus, it could not be assured the test scores were reliable.
In 2005, the company was fined after scoring errors on a new Ohio graduation test affected students in 272 school districts. A state data analyst noticed the errors, the scores were corrected and company President Henry Scherich wrote a letter apologizing to students.
Why the Volunteer State turned back to the North Carolina company after the various problems is not clear, but McQueen for her part said the tests themselves were solid.
Scherich said the company takes the blame for not meeting the TNReady tests deadline it set for itself but said the volume of tests to be produced - a little under 10 million - was daunting. He said it's not the largest printing job with paper tests the company ever had to do but was unprecedented over the period of time the tests were required.
At contract termination, he said the company was only a few days away from providing all the tests needed.
McQueen said the state is committed toward achieving an online assessment but wasn't sure it would happen in the 2016-2017 school year.
"We've already improved by thinking about what next year's test looks like, making significant adjustments so it's more appropriate to the time block teachers have in their classrooms," she told a Knoxville television station. "We'll continue to make adjustments."
Students next year will see their third different assessment test in three years. That's also three years of teachers learning a different testing platform and three different methods of preparing their charges for the test.
Tennessee's students and teachers deserve better. And the state, which is looking to see if it can get any of its money back, deserves a better return on its investment.