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OKLAHOMA CITY — The president of testing vendor CTB/McGraw-Hill apologized Thursday to the state Board of Education for Monday’s widespread disruptions in online student tests.
“We know how important tests are in the state, so even one child disrupted is not what we intended to happen,” Ellen Haley told board members during their monthly meeting.
This is the second consecutive year that state online testing in Oklahoma has been disrupted due to technical issues by CTB, which is in the second year of its contract with Oklahoma.
State Superintendent Janet Barresi said Monday that she would recommend that the state Board of Education not renew the testing vendor’s contract for 2014-15 after thousands of public school students were knocked offline that morning during computer-based state tests.
Barresi said she was both frustrated and outraged that 8,100 students in grades 6 to 12 experienced testing disruptions as a result of CTB/McGraw-Hill’s malfunctioning hardware.
Haley gave a slightly higher number of students disrupted in Oklahoma — 8,251.
Board members told Haley that CTB/McGraw-Hill is "giving ammunition" to people who are against standardized testing.
"We rely on you and your expertise to perform. There are a lot of people that don't want these tests, and so they thrive on what you just did," said board member Bill Shdeed. "They shove it down our throat. It's all our fault. Why would we stay with you?"
Board member Amy Anne Ford agreed, adding, "People are rising up against testing, and you're giving them ammunition."
Haley said the product the company is creating is high quality.
"I think you can count on the validity and reliability of the assessments that we're building. You have high-quality assessments, built to your standards," she said. "You have my commitment that we will do everything in our power to make sure nothing happens from here on."
Ray Lowrey, chief information officer for CTB/McGraw-Hill Education, explained to the board that a small piece of infrastructure within the company’s data center failed, leading to “intermittent issues” and causing “random effects in the classroom.”
That is why some students were able to complete testing while others were disrupted, he said.
Haley said company technicians were able to identify the problem and fix it by 11 a.m. Monday.
Lowrey said the malfunctioning hardware “caused traffic to run a little bit slower, not enough to shut the system down but enough to cause disruptions in testing. Our focus is finishing Oklahoma testing with no more disruptions.”
Board member Lee Baxter responded that “the way you described this made it seem sort of like a lightning strike. In other words, it was an act of God.”
Lowrey said what happened was unusual and something he hasn’t seen in his 20 years in the technology industry.
Barresi said that after testing disruptions last year, she and other department staffers worked with CTB staff with a focus on the stress load, and with all the work they had done, she asked how this had happened again.
Lowrey said Monday’s problems had nothing to do with capacity. In fact, he said CTB ran about 50 stress tests with more than 300,000 concurrent users and had no major issues.
Haley also noted the extra stress tests and the addition of servers and memory.“We take this issue very seriously,” she said. “This was very disappointing to us.”
Barresi asked whether CTB had any performance evaluation done by an outside firm, and Lowrey said Hewlett-Packard had analyzed its system and that he would forward that report to the state Education Department.
Barresi said the focus now is to get through the current testing window, which ends May 9. Then the department will analyze the situation and bring a recommendation to the board on whether to continue the company’s contract.
She also indicated that she would seek input from state Attorney General Scott Pruitt.
This year, Oklahoma paid $7.3 million for Oklahoma Core Curriculum Tests for students in grades 3 to 8 and $6.2 million for end-of-instruction exams, which are administered to secondary students at the end of seven core subjects.
Last year, server issues shut down testing statewide for two days. The state initially said only 3,000 students were affected but a week later acknowledged that the actual figure was more than triple that amount.
Indiana, Kentucky and Minnesota also experienced disruptions last year, and Haley appeared before Indiana lawmakers to account for the problems that affected nearly 80,000 students there.
By July, Oklahoma officials negotiated a cash settlement of $376,205 and $860,000 worth of in-kind services because of the testing problems.
Last year, Oklahoma paid CTB/McGraw-Hill $8.9 million for Oklahoma Core Curriculum Tests, plus $7.3 million for the high-stakes end-of-instruction exams, which determine whether high school students can graduate.
Barresi also mentioned Florida’s recent problems with its testing vendor, Pearson. Oklahoma had a contract with Pearson before switching to CTB/McGraw Hill after error and delay problems with that vendor.
“I wonder if we have an industry that is overpromising and underdelivering,” she said.
