Tennessee has canceled the second half of its state tests because the vendor didn’t deliver the testing materials on time. Rather than extend the wasted time, the state commissioner pulled the plug. The whole state is opting out!
“Tennessee students may not have to take the second part of their year-end exams after all. Following multiple delays in receiving test materials, the state is cutting ties with testing vendor Measurement Inc. The company has been blamed for the bulk of glitches and delays in the first year of TNReady.
“Measurement Inc.’s performance is deeply disappointing,” Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said in a statement. “We will not ask districts to continue waiting on a vendor that has repeatedly failed us.”
“McQueen said the state has “exhausted every option in problem solving” to assist in getting the tests delivered.
“North Carolina-based Measurement Inc. has pinned the delays on unexpectedly having to print millions of testing packets. The rush-job followed the failure of its computer-based test in February. But Nakia Towns, an assistant commissioner in the Department of Education, says there’s no excuse.
“Right now, all of the printed materials are at Measurement Inc. The printer is not the issue,” she said at a press briefing Wednesday. “The issue is that Measurement Inc. has failed to pack and ship the materials that they have on site.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reports are saying the high school EOCs will not count as part of a student’s grade either. Also, the scores will only help teachers or they will not count so all HS students should opt out too!
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
This might be a blessing in disguise. By failing to provide the proper materials Measurement Inc. may be setting a new standard for avoiding the test all together.
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Inc. a-bink, a cartridge of ink
the tests got printed but hit a kink
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So, now can the teachers get back to meaningful teaching of their students, instead of wasting valuable educational time preparing for these tests?
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Sure. They have 3 more weeks left of the school year. Plenty of time to make up for all the wasted time.
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Not very much time, I agree. But better to spend the few precious weeks on teaching, instead of waiting for the tests, practicing for the tests, and taking the tests.
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Too bad, they didn’t cancel the high school test.
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Candice McQueen. The name rang a bell…
This blog,
[start posting]
This is an unintentionally hilarious story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also
the state’s’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.
[end posting]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/23/common-core-for-commoners-not-my-school/
Ah! Another entry into rheephorm’s Dance of the Lemons…
😎
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KTA
Never hold an epiphany against someone.
Those Common Core epiphanies seem to follow a pattern. When proponents of Common Core testing influence public school policy they can’t seem to get enough test-and-punish. If said cheerleader happens to move into the private sector, schools with very affluent, well educated parents paying serious (upwards of $40K) money, super small class sizes, and enrichment up the ying yang – wonder of wonders – the epiphany springs forth, a beam of light from on above shines down upon their evil testing twin and viola! Bye bye Common Core. Bye bye testing!
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Today I asked a teacher what she thought about the lack of a test. Her response suggested she would have preferred to have been allowed to know this long before now. That way she might have been able to stimulate the children to be interested in their subject. Then I asked a student. The student reply was almost identical.
High school students took a test. One of my geometry students reported that the topics were familiar, but the questions were asked in weird ways. That is enough for me. Another test designed by people who are not familiar with first year geometry students.
I hope Gov. Haslam enjoys Harvard. Maybe they will give him a test to see if he understands history. Didn’t Craine Brinton used to teach up there?
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Roy
As a former test writer I can assure that this was NOT “Another test designed by people who are not familiar with first year geometry students.”
The fact “the questions were asked in weird ways” is quite intentional.
It is clear-cut attempt to trick or fool students so as to maximize the failure rate. So instead of a standardized geometry test, students get tested on their ability to parse intentionally tricky word play. A test like that needs to scanned into a Sarah Palin Syntax Conversion program.
We have seen the same thing here in NY. It’s probably one of the reasons why teachers were prohibited from looking at or discussing test items. Never forget that the bogus claims of “rigor” were just a way to disguise exams written to maximize the failure rate.
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Very curious, where is your source to the vender not shipping the tests?
Thanks.
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Whoever was in charge obviously wasn’t career ready. I’d say incompetence ruled the day. Couldn’t they have hired some “minimum wage workers”, to sort, label, and ship out the booklets by digging in to some of their millions in profit? There are a lot of unemployed teachers out there looking for new careers.
No excuses. This company definitely has a “one rating”. Call their parents and have them removed – it’s suspension time (or should I say expulsion) for not meeting the State Standards.
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Who is getting fired, or “held accountable”?
Oh, wait, that’s only good enough for the peasant teachers.
Our society is becoming a joke.
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Let’s not just blame the company.
OK, so the company, Measurement Inc (MI) messes up the online tests. (My suspicion is that our state—similarly to most other states— simply doesn’t have the stable enough internet infrastructure for online tests, but let’s not think about this.)
Then TNDOE, led by men and women of action who like to pretend they are on top of things and hence they don’t waste time on thinking before acting, refuse to choose the only wise option, namely to cancel the tests. No. They order MI to prepare, deliver, collect, grade paper and pencil tests in three weeks’ time. Except MI is not equipped to do this for over a million kids in the state.
Set up for failure by TNDOE, MI predictably fails to deliver the K3-8 tests on time, and TNDOE now has no other choice but cancel the tests, blaming the failure on MI, while forgetting that the generals are responsible for the outcome of all wartime decisions. They pretend, this is not the case presumably thinking, the people will pretend the same thing with them.
Miraculously, MI does deliver the high school tests, though. So now the men and women of action in TNDOE do the following in this order:
1) They fire MI.
2) They announce that the high school tests will go ahead.
Clearly, they again didn’t think for one minute. Otherwise they would have realized the glaring issue many students immediately recognized and to which Lisa Jorgensen drew our attention to on Facebook, namely, “who is going to grade the tests now that MI is fired?”.
Of course, the grading of tests of this importance to national security cannot be trusted to common teachers. Nonono. Either a private company’s employees with unknown background can be trusted with such a sensitive task, or, if that is not available, due their hasty firing, perhaps the NSA could be mobilized.
But I vote for another possibility since I see the greatest long term benefits in it for the children, parents and teachers: I recommend that TNDOE hires Secretary King, President Obama and TN Governor Haslam to collect and grade the half a million tests.
This would allow them to experience first hand the mess they created, and it would also take them out of circulation for a few decades, giving them ample opportunity to reflect on their legacy, and also preventing them from doing further harm to our kids and teachers.
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I hope whoever grades the test has the answer key. If they are like the New York State exams, the “correct” choice is not obvious and there might be more than one acceptable answer or none at all.
In a way I’m glad there are so many glitches. It just proves our point that when you build an airplane in the air it is doomed to crash.
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