Two Republicans seek investigation on TCAP delay

A pair of Republican lawmakers has asked the state to investigate the Tennessee Department of Education’s late release of end-of-year test scores.

Their Democratic counterparts say they, too, have questions and have filed an open records request to find out more.

Rep. Billy Spivey, R-Lewisburg, said that he and Sen. Janice Bowling, R-Tullahoma, on Thursday requested the Tennessee Comptroller’s Office to launch a formal investigation into the education department’s delayed release of Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program scores.

In a letter to Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman a day earlier, Democratic Reps. Gloria Johnson of Knoxville and Bo Mitchell and Mike Stewart of Nashville cited the Tennessee Open Records Act in seeking emails and other documents distributed among the commissioner and other employees on last week’s TCAP decision.

All three House Democrats have been outspoken critics of Huffman and the education reforms he has advanced. Spivey is among a group of Tea Party Republicans in the Tennessee legislature who also have routinely taken aim at the commissioner.

“There’s such a level of distrust between the Department of Education and the director of schools in our respective districts, and members of the General Assembly and the Department of Education, the only way I can see us ever getting beyond all this frost that has formed is to have a third party look into it,” Spivey said.

Blake Fontenay, spokesman for the comptroller’s office, said it did not have a comment on the request.

The Democrat-penned letter seeks reasons for the delay; the date the department learned it would not be able to release scores on time; the department’s reasons for “not timely informing the public about the delay”; steps taken to ensure that raw testing information would be preserved so that it would be available for review by the public; nature of the “post-equating” process cited as an explanation for the delay; and the legal basis to waive the use of TCAP scores in generating grades.

Lawmakers from both parties, as well as the state’s two teacher organizations, have pressed Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration on the last-minute delay of TCAP scores that left local districts scrambling. Rep. Rick Womick, R-Rockvale, even called for the resignation of Huffman earlier this week.

But the governor has defended the move, arguing officials were simply being cautious. “I think the importance of getting those numbers right is critical,” he said in a speech this week. “We would hate to … send out report cards everywhere and then call them back in.”

TCAP is taken by students in grades 3-8. Because of moves this year to eliminate portions of TCAP tests not aligned with Common Core standards, state officials had said they needed 10 more days to thoroughly review the assessment to make sure it was comparable to previous exams.

Education officials released the scores last Friday instead, saying that this process known as post-equating had finished a week earlier than they had predicted. Still, it was tardy enough that many local school systems had already received waivers to not include TCAP scores in students’ final grades.

Reach Joey Garrison at 615-259-8236 and on Twitter @joeygarrison. The Associated Press contributed to this report.