TNReady not quite ready for online tests

System to fall back on paper and pencil for rest of year

After months of preparation for online state testing, students in Tennessee will take the first year of TNReady tests the oldfashioned way.

The Tennessee Department of Education said Monday afternoon it will revert to a pencil-and-paper system for the remainder of this year’s testing as a result of a system outage that started just before 8:30 a.m. Monday. Some students across the state were able to complete sections of the test, but most had trouble connecting to the system at all.

The first phase of testing was supposed to start Monday and give districts a monthlong window to finish. The department will delay and extend the testing window.

State education officials said the problems arose from the testing platform of the state’s vendor, Measurement Inc.

“Despite the many improvements the department has helped to make to the system in recent months and based on the events of this morning, we are not confident in the system’s ability to perform consistently,” state education commissioner Candice McQueen said in a statement late Monday. “In the best interest of our students and to protect instructional time, we cannot continue with Measurement Incorporated’s online testing platform in its current state.”

The vendor is in the process of printing and shipping enough paper tests, McQueen said, and will update districts by Thursday when they can resume testing.

McQueen said the online test- ing, which required districts to make significant financial investments in technology infrastructure, is part of a commitment to a 21st-century education.

“We know this is what the real world requires,” McQueen’s statement said.

Schools had discretion on when to administer tests, so not all schools across the state were testing students Monday.

In a social media post to fami-

lies, Shelby County Schools said the district was notified of the outages early enough to revert to a normal school day.

Collierville High School was not scheduled to start until Wednesday, but other schools in the municipal districts were affected by the outages. Collierville’s two middle schools both had connectivity problems. The elementary schools had not opened when the issues were noticed early Monday in Nashville.

Germantown, Dogwood and Farmington elementaries had minor issues but were able to proceed with the testing. Houston High had no connectivity problems. But at Houston Middle and Riverdale Elementary, testing was halted and students were sent to their normal class schedule.

Kate Crowder, district spokeswoman, said teachers know the systems are “temperamental, especially on the first time this has been attempted around the state.”

Lakeland and Bartlett also suspended testing.

“Fortunately, our technology specialist heard about the statewide system failure before we had actually started testing the students who were scheduled for today,” Lakeland Superintendent Ted Horrell said.

TNReady is replacing the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, and was supposed to be administered entirely online. Districts were able to request paper tests on a caseby-case basis if their technology infrastructure was not ready for the transition.

Tennessee Education Association president Barbara Gray issued a statement Monday afternoon calling the outages “unacceptable” and cited the problems as further proof TNReady scores should not factor into teacher evaluations this year.

The state has said it has already compromised on the issue, making the test scores a much smaller portion of a teacher’s evaluation unless the test results help that teacher significantly.