When ready, TNReady will be valuable tool
No excuses, kids. If there is a valid reason public school students should be given a pass on the new TNReady tests, we haven’t heard it yet.
Yes, the rollout was rocky, to say the least. It provided another reminder of what can happen when a big new online program is introduced to a large body of users.
Its glitch-filled introduction this week was somewhat reminiscent of the calamity that ensued when confused Americans tried to sign up for the Affordable Care Act when it first went online in the fall of 2013.
The software torpedo that exposed TNReady as UNReady, however, was quickly followed by a plan to distribute old-fashioned paper test sheets to schools, which will allow the testing to resume in a timely manner.
TNReady, which assesses math and English skills for grades 3-11, has replaced the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, popularly known as the TCAPs.
Whether the tests are administered online or on paper, they can be useful tools in measuring student progress, revealing weaknesses to be addressed in the classroom as soon as it is practical to do so and finding out how many students are likely to be ready for college or a career by graduation.
As we have argued previously in this space, it is unfair to immediately begin using student scores on the brand-new tests in the formula that determines how teachers are evaluated.
Although the legislature has passed a compromise that allows testing in the first year of TNReady implementation to count for as little as 10 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, scores could nevertheless affect a teacher’s livelihood.
The proposal by some Democratic lawmakers to delay online administration of the TNReady tests for three years, an idea put forward by state Rep. Antonio Parkinson, D-Memphis, seems excessive. Surely administrators can resolve the technical difficulties more quickly than that.
Schools districts have invested millions of dollars into technology that will be necessary to prepare students for the demands of the 21st century workplace as well as the current means of measuring what they have learned in the classroom.
But the suggestion by Rep. Craig Fitzhugh, D-Ripley, the House Democratic leader, to exclude TNReady test scores from teacher evaluations this year makes a lot of sense.
TNReady is significantly different from TCAP. Teachers have not been given enough time to adjust to its changing demands. Standardized test scores as a whole depend on a lot of factors in addition to teacher performance, including the effectiveness of principals, team teaching, tutoring and the like.
And there is still a serious question about how large a role testing should play in evaluations, particularly for teachers in the most challenging classroom situations. Without a definitive answer, grading teachers on the test scores they produce remains a work in progress.