JB
Love, Parkinson, and Harris at the press conference on TNReady’s failure
Three local public figures concerned with public education appeared together at a press conference in Raleigh on Thursday to deal with the fallout from the cancellation of the state’s contract with Measurement, Inc., the North Carolina firm that proved unable to deliver this year on its educational testing regimen — meant to assist the new TNReady program for judging the performance of both public-school students and their teachers.
State Rep. Antonio Parkinson, who led the discussion, called for extending to three years the current moratorium on expansion of the state’s Achievement School District and for a “hold harmless” process of thoroughly revamping TNReady school-testing procedures during the same period.
He was backed up by state Senator Lee Harris, who slammed the failure of the state’s vetting process to uncover a record of past performance deficiencies on Measurement, Inc.’s part, and by Shelby County Schools board member Stephanie Love, who called on parents to have their children boycott further testing this year.
Harris also professed to be aghast at the amount of time devoted to testing in state schools, as much as “six whole weeks.” He said the process clearly could be streamlined and recommended other methods for evaluating teachers, like the kind of peer review process employed at the University of Memphis Law School, where he is a faculty member.
Parkinson made a point of exempting new Department of Education Commissioner Candice McQueen from responsibility for the Measurement, Inc. debacle, but he said the DOE was faced with a need for “restoring trust at the top.”
The state’s contract cancellation earlier this week came about because of the vendor’s failure to deliver the promised testing materials for grades 3 through 8. The Measurement, Inc. firm had succeeded in delivering materials to test high school students, but, as Parkinson noted, with the contract cancelled, there was nobody to grade the results.
TNReady, the state’s home-grown effort to supplant the unpopular Common Core evaluation regimen, “has never been ready,” Love said. She said her own 10th-grade child would not be taking the Measurement Inc. test this spring and advised other parents to follow suit.
Parkinson made an effort to locate the Measurement Inc. failure within a pattern of other DOE miscues, including forced closures of schools, a too-rapid acceleration of school takeovers, interference with local school-improvement efforts like SCS’s IZone curriculum, and turnovers in the administration of both the Department and the ASD program.
Another issue underscored by both Parkinson and Memphis Education Association executive director Keith Williams, who attended the press conference, was the need to determine how much taxpayer money had gone down the drain in the relationship with Measurement, Inc., and how much might be recoverable.
Parkinson, who has requested the assistance of state Comptroller Justin Wilson’s office in making such determinations, estimated that the state had so far expended some $46 million against the original $108 million contract.
He expressed a general sympathy, too, with Williams’ lament that the state had chosen to our-source the testing process rather than to use the educational experts available in such state institutions as Vanderbilt University, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Memphis.
