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 Nor, apparently, has our schools' too-scant and often-outdated computer hardware.
It's not the first time a state computer contractor has deserved a big fat F. Remember the $35.7 million TennCare computer system, called the "Tennessee Eligibility Determination System," or "TEDS" that was years overdue?
Truth be told, in this particular circumstance, the state may actually deserve an "A" for effort in its long-overdue attempt to bring our testing up to par and bring our teaching methods out of the 1970s.
Yet if you just listen to Hamilton County educators, what you hear instead are mumbles that the big, bad state is meddling in the way we've always done it and trying to find a back-door way to spy on how we teach.
"Although we need to know when kids aren't being served or kids aren't doing well, the pressure that we've now attached to [this assessment] has increased the intensity for everyone and we're robbing children of the joy of learning," Levine said.
Make no mistake. A contractor's computer testing platform is completely different from the content and introduction of these new tests, and the criticism of the tests began long before students in the middle of writing essays and answering questions were knocked offline.
That's in part about educators' resistance to using student performance on tests to evaluate teachers themselves. And nothing - not school safety, not education funding, nothing - has caused so much uproar among educators as the notion of tying student performance to their evaluations. Teachers and their unions have fought it tooth and nail. Tenure, if you recall, was long based solely on longevity and whether you could play well with others.
These tests, on the other hand, measure much more. If Johnny learns well for three years then doesn't learn well for two years, he didn't just suddenly become dumb. Something was off. If only Johnny's performance flagged, maybe his home life went haywire or he developed a medical problem. But if most or all of Johnny's classmates also fell off, perhaps education administrators should look at the textbooks, curriculum or teacher to make improvements for Johnny's little sister Sally.
Test whining began in earnest last August when Superintendent Rick Smith used testing time for the new TNReady tests (the new and improved replacement for TCAPs) as a way of diverting the Board of Education's attention away from Hamilton County's systemwide TCAP scores:
" Really good teachers are going to look at this and say, "I've lost 30 or 40 percent of my instructional time," he said of the six or seven weeks school administrators were setting aside as a new testing time frame.
Reality check: TNReady's testing time, across all grades, adds one hour to the 36 hours that the old TCAPs required. The maximum testing time for third- to fifth-grades was about 8.7 hours with TCAP and will be about 11.2 hours with TNReady. For middle-schoolers, the old 9.1 hours of TCAPs will stretch to 11.7 hours. And high schoolers' maximum testing time will actually decrease - from about 18 hours under TCAPs to 14.8 hours for TNReady.
So it seems we need to ask our school officials two questions:
1) A child in any given grade should already be reading, writing and doing math or science on that grade level, so if you have promoted them, why are you having to "prep" them - i.e., teach to this test?
2) Since there are computers in schools already (according to what educators tell the newspaper) and many youngsters even use tablets in their classrooms, why are you having to spend so much prep time teaching students to use computers?
Some educators seem clearly afraid that they, like the contractor, will earn an F.
To quote Tennessee Commissioner of Education Candice McQueen: "The best test prep is great teaching every day and great student learning. If you want to help a student be prepared for TNReady, you need to be teaching them very well every day, it's not 'kill and drill.'"