Of Course Online High Stakes Tests Are Going To Be A Mess

I don't know why anyone in power in the education world would think moving to all-online high stakes standardized tests by 2014-2015 would go smoothly.

This Education Week article says education and political officials have had their confidence shaken by a recent spate of online testing failures.

That means these people were once confident all-online testing could be carried off relatively problem-free.

Clearly these boys and girls have never used NYCDOE bandwidth to check their email at High Noon when it takes ten minutes for each screen to load.

I never develop a lesson for class that relies solely on the Internet.

I learned that lesson when I couldn't get a film I needed for one class to stream for more than 15 seconds at a time before it stopped running.

It's difficult to run a lesson about the differences between a play text and a film adaptation when you have to re-enact the film version with hand puppets.

If I, a lowly classroom teacher lacking an Ivy League degree and too stupid to have already fled the classroom and gone into policy with the TFAers, have learned that an over-reliance on technology in the classroom without a non-tech back-up is a problem, how come the geniuses running the schools systems around the country haven't learned that lesson yet?

Is it because these people believe their own pro-tech propaganda rather than the reality of their own experiences with technology?

Are they blinded by their own optimism?

Or do they figure once the online testing juggernaut starts rolling, nothing - not even a rash of online failures - can stop it?

I dunno, it's hard to get into the fevered minds of the education reform/online testing pom-pom crowd and figure out what's going on in there.

But if the reformers don't figure out a way to get these tests rolled out without major difficulties, they are going to find their vaunted new reforms - the ones they worked so hard to shove down the throats of people in 45 different states - are going to go the way of the abacus.

In fact, given how bad the online testing has been, the abacus and other implements of an age long gone just may come back:

John Althardt, a spokesman for the 30,000-student Indianapolis public schools, said students in 50 buildings experienced testing disruptions, and the district was just focusing on getting through the testing cycle before thinking about how to proceed in the future.

“Some of our folks would say they’re ready to go back and use stone tablets at this point,” Mr. Althardt said. 

I wonder who has that stone tablet contract for schools these days?