TN Ready Not Ready as Testing Begins

Tennessee began giving students a new high-stakes standardized “accountability” test called “TNReady” on Monday — but it turned out the test wasn’t ready due to a technology failure from a state vendor Measurement, Inc.
As a result, school districts including DeKalb County will now take the paper version for Part I and Part II of TN Ready. The school systems were made aware of the problem in an email Monday from Candice McQueen, the Tennessee Commissioner of Education.
TNReady was designed to replace the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program and be administered to students entirely online.
“We were ready. Our technology department had us ready to go. Our kids had been practicing. Our teachers had been working hard preparing our students to do this test on the computers. We have done practice tests and things of that nature and we were ready to go but it (problem) was on the vendor side. The state side is where the failure occurred. It has nothing to do with our technology here. We had the bandwidth and the schedule worked out and were prepared for our students to take this test online,” Director of Schools Patrick Cripps told WJLE Tuesday.
School districts had a four week window to conduct the testing. DeKalb Middle School was set to start this week followed next week by DeKalb West, Northside Elementary School, and DCHS. The testing window for the first part of the exam started Monday across the state and was to run through March 4. The second part of the exam is to be administered in April and May. Because of the delay, the state is expected to extend the testing window.
Although four weeks were set aside for the testing, students would only spend a few days at a time actually taking the tests. “It really comes down to how many devices you can serve your students with. In the past students had a week or so to do the TCAP testing once they started. Now there is a window because counties cannot test all students at one time because of the limited devices they have,” said Director Cripps.
Students are to be tested in Math, English/Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science. Students in the lower grades in elementary school take the Stanford Achievement Test SAT-10 tests in April and May. Those tests are done by paper and pencil.
The state department will share the revised testing window with school systems by Thursday.