The Tennessee Department of Education said Hamilton County's standardized tests should be printed and delivered by the end of this month, and local school officials say students across the district should be taking the first round of TNReady tests March 9-15.
TNReady, the state's new assessment replacing TCAP, was intended to be administered online this year, but significant glitches in the online testing platform earlier this month forced the state to return to paper and pencil tests.
Hamilton County Assistant Superintendent of Testing and Accountability Kirk Kelly said the school system is familiar with distributing and administering standardized tests on paper, but this year, there isn't a time cushion between the arrival of about 30,000 tests and the start of testing like previous years.
"We are used to this process, the only thing that makes it different is we are going to have to [distribute the tests to schools] twice for grades 3 through 8, and do it fast," Kelly said. "Normally, there is more time between getting the test and when we test."
In previous years, standardized testing has taken place in schools across the district over the same block of four or five sequential days, but the paper-and-pencil version of TNReady is designed to be taken in two separate sections.
Kelly said this means that by the end of April, a second shipment of tests will be delivered to Hamilton County, and the distribution process of tests will be repeated. Depending on when these tests arrive, the second block of testing is roughly scheduled for April 25-May 6, Kelly said.
Ashley Ball, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Education, said the paper and online versions of TNReady were developed simultaneously, and the amount of total testing time does not change between these versions of the test.
The paper-and-pencil test will have a similar mix of multiple choice and open answer questions, like the online version of TNReady, Ball said.
Before TNReady testing was scheduled to begin Feb. 8, more than 100 families in Hamilton County elected not to be tested in protest of the test, saying preparation for the online test robs children of valuable instructional time and is developmentally inappropriate. Around 167 parents have now said they plan to take their kids out of testing this year, Kelly said.
Principals and parents across the district have been vocal against TNReady, even after the announcement it will be taken with pencil and paper, saying all the changes that have been made this year make the test's results unreliable.
The Hamilton County Board of Education voted unanimously Thursday to send a letter to the state General Assembly and the Tennessee Board of Education asking them not to include TNReady test results this year in school, teacher or student evaluations.
Days before the school board's vote, Gov. Bill Haslam announced that teachers will have the choice to include TNReady scores in evaluations. The Tennessee Department of Education does not expect full test results from this year's testing until early fall, so TNReady results also will not be included in student's final grades.
©2016 the Chattanooga Times/Free Press (Chattanooga, Tenn.), distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
