School testing ‘debacle’ idles thousands of students

Oklahoma City – The multimillion-dollar online state school testing site malfunctioned Monday, for the second consecutive year, affecting thousands of Oklahoma students.

“The State Department of Education paid $12 million for this testing system,” said state Rep. Jerry McPeak, a retired school teacher. “It didn’t work last year and it’s not working today. You’d think someone at the Department of Education would get the message,” the Warner Democrat said.

Shortly after 10 a.m. Monday the State Department of Education advised in an email sent to school district test coordinators and technology coordinators that the Oklahoma Online Test Delivery Client “is experiencing an outage that is affecting some sites.” A hyperlink directing queries to the CTB OK web portal reported that the outage affected “a high number of sites.”

Less than an hour later, school officials statewide were notified that, “As a result of online testing disruptions for students in grades 6-8 and end-of-instruction …State Superintendent Janet Barresi has directed testing vendor CTB/McGraw Hill to suspend online testing for today.”

One school official emailed McPeak to say, “Second Monday in a row. We can’t keep rescheduling.”

David Vinson, superintendent of Warner Public Schools, said that eighth graders there were “sitting in front of computers that will not log on or stay logged into CTB McGraw Hill’s test site… Another wonderful day of testing!”

“We only have so many days in the testing window,” added Jeremy Jackson, principal of Warner High School. “Looking down the barrel at geometry online tomorrow.”

“Once again we’re holding high-stakes tests that will have a direct effect on the futures of our students – and the State Department of Education can’t even get its testing system to work properly,” said Rep. Curtis McDaniel, a retired school teacher/administrator. “This is a debacle,” the Smithville Democrat said.

“Just last week, House Democrats, as well as public school superintendents and teachers from across the state, pointed out yet again that our students are overtested,” McPeak said. “And this testing is putting undue pressure on our children.”

McPeak also wondered how many students wasted time sitting around, waiting for the CTB testing system to be restored. “This affected not only the students who were testing, but also the students who otherwise would have been using those school computers as learning tools,” he said.

The State Department of Education “is so eager to grade the public schools of Oklahoma,” McPeak continued. “Yet today, they were able to get only 11,000 students online to test, of the 678,000 students enrolled in our schools. That’s less than 2%! If it weren’t so horrible it would be funny to watch the State Department of Education explain how that 2% is a passing grade.”

The Gayly – April 22, 2014 @ 7:45am