TNReady doesn’t count. Now what with testing?
Here’s what you can still learn about your school
The failures of TNReady testing this year infuriated parents, teachers and students who spent months preparing for the high-stakes exam.
Lawmakers were equally furious, and passed legislation to make sure no one would be negatively affected by the results.
But test results in Tennessee are used for a variety of purposes beyond students’ grades and teacher evaluations. Without that data, the Tennessee Department of Education, school leaders and parents have to look elsewhere to judge how a school is performing.
Luckily, the state was already planning to release a plethora of other data about schools this year, with additional context about what it all means.
As a result, state officials say they are not taking a year off from holding schools accountable.
The state will still tell schools and the public how students performed on tests. And under the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, the state is required to collect and report a smorgasbord of other data about how schools are doing.
That means parents will still have access to information to understand how their child’s school performed last year, and it will include context for how that data compares around the state.
“I think it’s still very useful information for families to have a sense of how their student’s school did overall,” state spokeswoman Sara Gast said.
The state will also release a new Priority List, designating which schools are performing in the bottom 5 percent academically. That list has implications, including the mandatory implementation of a plan to improve. In some cases, it can mean a takeover by the state’s Achievement School District.
TNReady, the state’s standardized test for math and language arts, encountered numerous issues this year, including problems logging into the online system and submitting results.
Before the testing failures, the state had spent about a year crafting a system to evaluate schools and hold accountable the ones that aren’t serving students well.
The legislature’s actions in response to this year’s snafus changed things.
The state can no longer assign each school an overall letter grade to reflect its performance, as was the plan. Under the state’s original proposal to comply with ESSA, each school would be evaluated with a grade of A through F.
Factoring into that grade were test scores, how much a school improved year over year, how many students are chronically absent and the performance of English language learners on a test specific to them.
High schools would also be graded on graduation rates and the percentage of students who earn a 21 on the ACT, a data point designed to reflect the number of students ready for college.
Along with an overall grade, schools were supposed to receive an A through F grade on each of those individual measures. That was designed to provide context, so a parent could understand better if, for example, an 85 percent graduation rate was above or below average.
All six of those data points will still be reported when the state releases information about schools this fall, said Evan Kramer, the state’s executive director of data governance and accountability policy. But that data will no longer be put into a calculation to come up with an overall letter grade.
With the legislature dictating that A through F grades can’t be given this year, the state got creative. For each metric, schools will earn a number on a scale of zero through four, with four being the best.
Collierville Schools Superintendent John Aitken said he’s never been a fan of the idea of giving a school an overall letter grade.
“It’s hard to show everything that goes on in a school by one grade,” he said.
A grade for each metric, however, is a good idea, he said, and the data from last year will still be useful despite issues with TNReady. Whether that’s done with a zero through four system or A through F doesn’t matter, he said, as long as everyone can understand what those designations mean.
“Show us where we need to improve,” Aitken said. “Show us our strengths and let’s figure out how to get there.”
A priority list is still coming
This fall, the state will release its Priority List of schools performing in the bottom 5 percent. Schools that end up on that list are required to develop a plan for improvement.
This will especially impact schools in Shelby and Davidson counties that have languished on the Priority List for years.
The list is usually compiled using three years’ worth of testing data. However, given difficulties with the test both last year and three years ago for elementary and middle schools, it will have modified criteria this round.
However, if a school did well on the 2017-18 TNReady tests, that can count toward helping that school stay off the Priority List.
David Mansouri, president of educational advocacy group SCORE, said there’s enough “sufficient, fair, reliable data” to make decisions about school interventions next year, despite the problems with TNReady.
Poor test scores won’t be used against anyone, he said, and if they help a school stay away from state intervention, that’s a positive.
The organization, Mansouri said, is confident in how schools will be evaluated in the short term, but is looking forward to returning to the original system.
“The most important thing I think we can do in Tennessee to advance student achievement over the next year is implement our test well,” he said.