Chalkbeat Tennessee has an excellent report on Tennessee’s testing fiasco. State officials knew that the testing company was in deep trouble before the testing began, yet they plunged ahead, wasting millions of dollars.
Grace Tatter describes Tennessee’s “worst case scenario”:
Tennessee education officials allowed students and teachers to go ahead with a new online testing system that had failed repeatedly in classrooms across the state, according to emails obtained by Chalkbeat.
After local districts spent millions of dollars on new computers, iPads, and upgraded internet service, teachers and students practiced for months taking the tests using MIST, an online testing system run by North Carolina-based test maker Measurement Inc.
They encountered myriad problems: Sometimes, the test questions took three minutes each to load, or wouldn’t load at all. At other times, the test wouldn’t work on iPads. And in some cases, the system even saved the wrong answers.
When students in McMinnville, a town southeast of Nashville, logged on to take their practice tests, they found some questions already filled in — incorrectly — and that they couldn’t change the answers. The unsettling implication: Even if students could take the exam, the scores would not reflect their skills.
“That is a HUGE issue to me,” Warren County High School assistant principal Penny Shockley wrote to Measurement Inc.
Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen speaks with reporters in February about technical problems with the state’s new online assessment.
Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen speaks with reporters in February about technical problems with the state’s new online assessment.
The emails contain numerous alarming reports about practice tests gone awry. They also show that miscommunication between officials with the Tennessee Department of Education and Measurement Inc. made it difficult to fix problems in time for launch.
And they suggest that even as problems continued to emerge as the test date neared, state officials either failed to understand or downplayed the widespread nature of the problems to schools. As a result, district leaders who could have chosen to have students take the test on paper instead moved forward with the online system.
The messages span from October until Feb. 10, two days after the online test’s debut and cancellation hours later. Together, they offer a peek into how Tennessee wound up with a worst-case scenario: countless hours wasted by teachers and students preparing for tests that could not be taken.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What disaster?
The company got its money.
The politicians got their kickback in advance.
Everyone who matters got what they were angling for.
The only disaster is that the public is finding out about it.
Jessica Foggarty recently posted about an expenditure of 10 million bucks to a company to develop,a test for K-2. It just gets worse.
Why do we need to develop a test that will show nothing? So someone’s business contact can make some money at the public trough? Why develop a test that will never be graded correctly? Why do we keep electing people who cannot properly manage government?
To answer your last question:
Obviously because the public schools have failed this nation!
They want to build distrust of government and democracy, all the while making huge profits from the public’s money. We are ripe for fascism.
Nah, we’re not “ripe” for fascism. We’re already there!
One of the major players with Candice McQueen in this TNDoEdfiasco is Broadie Nakia Townes.
“After local districts spent millions of dollars on new computers, iPads, and upgraded internet service, teachers and students practiced for months taking the tests using MIST, an online testing system run by North Carolina-based test maker Measurement Inc.”
I had to laugh at this one: “Mist” is the German word for “manure”. How apropos!