Testing Company Botches Another Batch of Tests

From the Pine Bluff Commercial Online:

LITTLE ROCK - A mistake made by a school testing company means Arkansas school officials spent hours analyzing inaccurate data and will have to redo their work.

Jodi Goldman, a spokeswoman for Riverside Publishing Co., the group that markets and distributes the standardized tests, said scorers failed to include results of a math computation section when figuring each school's overall math scores.

She said Riverside will issue corrected reports by early next week at its own expense. She attributed the mistake to a miscommunication.

"It was human error, a misunderstanding from Riverside regarding the customer's preferred format for test score reporting," she said. "We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused."

Countess Hodges, who oversees elementary education in the Bentonville School District, said administrators spent days analyzing the original data, which can fill more than 20 boxes in larger school districts.

"It's very frustrating that we have to go back and redo it," Hodges said. "A lot of time was wasted." . . . .

What a great chapter heading for the future history of education reform during the first decade of the 21st Century:

A Lot of Time Was Wasted