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The recent problems with New York’s school testing for third- through eighth-graders — while wholly unsurprising to me as a teacher who has proctored, provided accommodations for, and scored the imperfect exams over many years — left me newly frustrated as a parent. Upon reading the subsequent press release from the state Department of Education, however, both of these emotions transformed to exasperated anger.

The Education Department says it holds the testing vendor, NWEA, “solely responsible for the issues.” While it’s certainly easier to have a single party to blame, this framing reduces deep-seated problems with the state's current approach to educational assessment, highlighting simply the technological issues interfering with the administration of the exam. It neglects several other factors for which the onus should be placed squarely on the state.

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