Administration’s Update on TNReady

(Excerpt from recent DOE email)

TNReady will be administered via paper and pencil this year. The department has worked with our test vendor, Measurement Incorporated, to ship nearly 1 million tests across the state in the last two weeks. So far, 120 districts have already received their materials and about 60 districts have already started and finished testing.

Closely following the transition to paper testing on Feb. 8, we notified districts that test materials would be shipped on a rolling basis, and we shared when districts could expect their shipments.

While the vast majority of districts were shipped on the original timeline, you may have recently heard about a shipment delay of tests to certain school districts. There were, in fact, 13 of our 142 districts that did not receive their shipments last week as initially planned. We reached out to each of the districts individually on Friday to discuss the situation, the revised timeline and address any concerns. We also offered to ship tests directly to schools if that was helpful to the district. In the majority of cases, the delay did not impact the district's actual testing schedule, and one district (Dickson County) has since received its tests.

We are both grateful for the patience of Tennessee educators, schools, and families and share the frustrations recent test changes have caused. We take responsibility for the situation at hand and, with Governor Haslam, have proposed policy changes to address the concerns of our educators. However, we know that regardless of the testing medium, TNReady will assess true student understanding and problem-solving abilities that the real world requires. The alignment of this assessment to the high standards already being taught in our classrooms every day will provide our students with an opportunity to show what they truly know.