Glitches cited as Wichita school officials put off state tests ‘until further notice’

Wichita school officials postponed state reading and math tests “until further notice” Tuesday, citing continued glitches with the statewide system administering the new tests.

“You can hear the frustration more and more, and we understand that,” said Lisa Lutz, executive director of innovation and evaluation for the Wichita district.

“The bottom line is, it’s not smooth testing and students aren’t able to really take an assessment in the quality environment that they should be able to.”

School districts across the state have been reporting technical problems with the rollout of new state assessment tests, which began earlier this month.

Fifteen Wichita schools tried to administer reading, math or science tests Tuesday. As more schools went online and tried to access the state’s server, many reported problems logging on, staying connected or seeing certain test questions or responses, Lutz said.

Some problems were related to “technology-enhanced” items that are new to the tests this year, such as questions that feature pictures in addition to text or ones that require students to drag and drop items into correct categories.

In some cases, “some of the pictures weren’t showing up so the students couldn’t really respond because not all of the question was there,” Lutz said. Other schools reported service delays or students being logged out of the system without warning and not being able to log back in to complete a test.

Shortly after noon Tuesday, the testing center reported that its online testing interface – the Kansas Interactive Testing Engine, or KITE – crashed. It was back up and running about 30 minutes later, but by then most Wichita schools had given up on testing for the day, Lutz said.

“There’s so much activity on there the portal itself got overloaded,” said Brad Neuenswander, deputy education commissioner for the Kansas Department of Education.

“It’s one of those things that you can’t replicate and pilot until you allow people to actually log into the system and test it. And that’s what this year is all about. It’s a test run.”

This year’s state assessments, designed by the University of Kansas’ Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation, are a new type of test that reflects Common Core state standards. State officials have emphasized that this year’s test is a trial run – the basic “skeleton” of a fully Common Core-aligned test that will go into effect to meet a federal requirement in 2015.

Delays have raised concerns that some schools may not be able to complete the tests within the allotted time period, which state officials shortened by two weeks this year to give the testing center more time to ready the system. The reading and math tests are administered to every student in third through eight grades and once in high school.

“It might be impossible for some of our schools to complete their testing,” Lutz said Tuesday. “Others (across the state) were voicing the same concern, that if things weren’t up and running well this week, that’s going to be an issue for them as well.”

Neuenswander said the KU testing center is “running patches daily,” responding to reports from educators in the field. State officials informed districts Tuesday that “they really need the weekend to take care of the capacity issue,” he said.

If some schools are unable to complete tests this year, that won’t be a problem, he added. Because of glitches in the testing system, the State Board of Education decided earlier this month that all public schools in Kansas will remain accredited next year, regardless of how they perform on reading and math assessments.

“We’re going to try to give them back as much meaningful information as we can about how kids did,” Neuenswander said. “But we’re not holding them accountable.”

Wichita schools are having better luck administering the science assessment, which is a standard multiple-choice test like those of previous years. Students in fourth, seventh and 11th grade will proceed with those tests this week, Lutz said.

“We are suspending testing in math and reading until further notice and recommending testing in science only,” Lutz said in an e-mail to district test coordinators Tuesday. “We’ll continue to monitor and see if we will actually proceed tomorrow.”

This story was originally published March 25, 2014 at 8:27 PM with the headline "Glitches cited as Wichita school officials put off state tests ‘until further notice’."