Gehrke: This is how Utah schools ended up with miserable testing software and how we can prevent repeating it

Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune The Salt Lake Tribune staff portraits. Robert Gehrke.Q: Maria has hired a company to administer tests to a million students. The company performed fine and even made her an extra $15 million. What should Maria do?

The Utah State Office of Education was faced with basically that very question back in 2017. It chose B, signing a contract with a company called Questar Assessments, Inc. Maybe the state can blame it on computer glitches, because Questar has certainly had its share of those.

But, as my colleague Courtney Tanner reported, the state knew that going in. During the bidding process, the company had reported a string of problems administering…