The Tennessee Comptroller’s Office has released a performance audit of the Tennessee Department of Education detailing many of the problems that led up to the difficulties in executing the spring 2018 TN Ready tests.
The online student assessment tests were plagued with numerous issues including login delays, slow servers and software bugs.
The audit’s findings included the department’s lack of sufficient, detailed information on its work plan with Questar rendered it less effective as a monitoring tool to ensure Questar met all deadlines. Questar’s decision to make an unauthorized change to test-to-speech software contributed to the online testing disruptions. And a failure to track, document and provide status updates to districts to let them know when students’ tests would be recovered left districts unaware if their students completed the required tests.
The Comptroller’s Office presented its findings to the General Assembly’s Education, Health and General Welfare Joint Subcommittee of Government Operations in a meeting Wednesday.