? Schools, parents and the public will not receive any data this year about how students performed on the 2014 state reading and math tests, meaning there will be no way to judge whether students are measuring up to the new “college and career ready standards” for those subjects.

The Kansas State Board of Education agreed Tuesday not to gather any results from those tests, largely because cyber attacks against the online testing system developed by Kansas University made the results of those tests unreliable.

But Marianne Perie, director of KU’s Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation, which developed both the test and the online system students use to take the tests, admitted that the cyber attacks were not the only problem, and she assured the board that the 2015 tests will go smoother.

“We recognize at CETE that KITE (the Kansas Interactive Testing Engine) was not where it needed to be when we started testing this year,” Perie said. “We had mistakes that are totally on us. We take responsibility for them. We are making improvements and we intend to be ready to go next spring, hopefully with no issues.”

But the main problem, she said, was the KITE system being hit by two “distributed denial of service,” or DDoS attacks early during the testing window. Those are attacks that flood web servers with massive amounts of data, as if several million people were trying to log in at once.

The attacks effectively crippled the servers that contain the test information, resulting in students either being kicked off the system after they had begun the tests or not being able to download all of the testing items.

Perie said about two-thirds of the English language arts tests and about one third of the math tests were taken before CETE was able to install software that shielded the servers from those attacks. Even today, she said, technicians can tell the system is still being targeted, although the attacks are unable to penetrate the shields.

The board voted 9-0, with member Ken Willard of Hutchinson absent, to accept a staff recommendation not to gather any results this year at either the individual, building, district or statewide level.

Officials noted that 2014 was being considered a “transitional” year anyway because the state was shifting to the new curriculum standards as well as new tests aligned to those standards. As a result, the scores would not have been used for identifying schools or districts that were failing to meet state expectations.

Still, some board members expressed frustration at how the tests were handled this year.

Board member John Bacon, R-Olathe, said that if CETE could not produce valid and reliable scores from this year’s tests, then the board should consider revisiting its contract, which officials said called for paying CETE about $4.6 million this year.

“It’s too expensive. We just cannot be funding a research project for CETE,” Bacon said. “You need to produce what you said that you would in the contract that we’re paying you for. … This is big stakes. I have expectations, and I think the taxpayers do as well.”

The state board voted in December to contract with CETE to write and administer the new tests. Before that, Kansas had been part of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, a multistate group that had received a federal grant to develop tests aligned to the new Common Core standards.

But some board members said at the time that Smarter Balanced had become politically toxic amid a push-back by some conservative legislators against the Common Core standards.

Other board members were more forgiving about the problems, including chairwoman Jana Shaver, R-Independence, who said she doubted that any private testing company would publish scores from what was essentially a field test of a new assessment.