EDITORIAL: State should also shoulder blame for school testing meltdown

Nevada schools are all too familiar with bad news about testing. The poor reputation of the state’s education system is rooted in years of lousy data from standardized exams.

But Nevada’s latest testing failure is in an entirely different class. And taxpayers might never know the true, total cost of the debacle.

The Department of Education’s attempt to administer federally mandated assessments under new Common Core standards, which involved shifting all testing to computers, imploded last week when the Clark County School District halted the examinations because of constant system crashes. The online platform, administered by New Hampshire-based Measured Progress and UCLA’s Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, never worked properly for very long. Students couldn’t enter answers, saw questions placed out of order and dealt with mid-exam interruptions. By the time the Clark County School District gave up, many students couldn’t log into the testing server.

The state’s vendors simply weren’t equipped to handle so many students taking the tests at the same time. Every student in the third through eighth grades is required to complete the exams by the end of the school year, and this meltdown has brought the process to a halt. It’s beyond an embarrassment.

Nevada Superintendent Dale Erquiaga has notified Measured Progress and UCLA’s consortium that they have violated their contract to deliver a functional online testing system, a good first step toward firing them. As reported by the Review-Journal’s Neal Morton, Measured Progress stood to collect more than $7.5 million.

The company shouldn’t collect a dime because the costs to the state already are too great. If anyone bothered calculating all the administrative time dedicated to this transition, all the instruction time, all the teacher training and preparation time, and all the lost testing time, the dollar figure would be staggering. Add the cost of the lost assessments and their value in quantifying student progress, evaluating teacher effectiveness and measuring school-by-school performance, and the cost borders on unimaginable.

Businesses, taxpayers and parents want more accountability from our schools. Now we might not get that accountability because of a lack of accountability in this disaster. Clearly, much of the fault lies with Measured Progress. But the state is not without blame here. This boondoggle is straight out of a Dilbert comic strip, with a story line driven by Mordac, the Preventer of Information Services. First rule of information technology: Major system changes always go badly and create their own crises. Always. That’s why companies try to have fail-safe contingencies. Where was the state’s backup plan?

That such an implosion resulted from a federal directive isn’t the slightest bit surprising. What doesn’t Washington screw up?

But the state shouldn’t be allowed to get away with pointing the finger exclusively at private entities. Someone, or more than one person, was responsible for overseeing these contracts, for moving the assessments to computers (What could possibly go wrong?) and for being absolutely certain that preparations were in place for a smooth testing process. If the state education system won’t hold itself accountable, then how can Nevadans trust it to do the same for our struggling schools?